This is a really interesting historical and technical background to the unique and sexy sound of Morphine, one of my dear departed favorite 90’s bands. I knew Mark Sandman played a heavily modified bass with two strings, but didn’t know he played everything with a slide—and the action on his strings so high. I also like how the host goes into the interplay between Sandman and Dana Colley’s baritone sax and how the latter complimented both the bass and vocal melodies in such a unique way.…

There are 5 tracks here from Canadian Serena Pasion aka Peach. Music inspired by trips to, and incorporating field recordings from, the Philippines and Vietnam, plus a “Soak” in a Tokyo sento. The latter providing the EP with its title. In line with that relaxing session in a city public bath, everything is pretty chilled. “Bathtime Bliss” is ethereal ambient built from ripples of new age-y textures. An otherworldly synergy of gentle circuitry and computerised woodwind sighs. The soundscape…

Returning to ECM’s formative years can feel like entering a chamber where the future has been stored in mineral form. The label’s early catalog still radiates that paradoxical condition of sounding both newly born and long remembered, and in the context of this rare Japanese compilation series, the effect deepens into something almost ceremonial. Following its 1973 predecessor, ECM Special II gathers fragments from separate iterations of the same dream, arranging them not as a set of nested…

The Action is off-balance sheet

A fantastic debut. View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize A special album for several reasons. It’s Lacy’s first album as a leader. It’s a quartet and the soprano is the only horn. Can’t think of any other album in my collection when that’s the case. A special one for me personally as well, as it’s an album from the 50’s, and I haven’t bought one from that decade in…

Oh no, a cheap clickbait listacle! Fear not, however, I come with good intentions. Staying abreast of new material in 2026 feels like navigating a tiny dinghy through a great storm of biblical scale. All you can do is cling on and stay the course through the sensory overload. The annual AOTY roundup functioning more like a fond farewell to releases we mildly enjoyed before they are consigned to the dustbin of history more than an actual review of the year. Since starting this blog in 2017, I’ve…

My music-fan cup runneth over lately, in the best way. An abundance of good-to-great-to-unbelievable shows over the past month that have left me wondering what I did in a past life (or maybe this one) to deserve all this. My post-pandemic “never say no” philosophy is paying serious dividends. And there’s a lot more ahead. […]

TECH-NO Philip from It's all in your mind - sorry chaps, keep getting the title of your blog wrong - with the latest on the 'technique' discussion .....Philip is absolutely right about Indie, I reckon. It has shunned experimentalism without mastering musicianship, so it remains mired in some mediocre nowheresville. Drabness : forget postpunk, even at its most brown-rice earnest, it glistened with psychedelic intensity by comparison with Turin Brakes and Doves. What confuses me about Indie is…

Those who pay attention may note that I technically shared this song last Fall on its release, along with its companion B-side “Glow”, but that was a month before the official video for the song was released and considering how little quality video content there is from the band – I’ve been talking up the […] The post The Neverminds – “Afterglow” appeared first on Space Echo.

Scribed by Sandre the Giant Released: 14th May 1996 Finnish death metallers Amorphis had begun their considerable career a few years before this, with the incredible ‘The Karelian Isthmus’ and of course their iconic ‘Tales from the Thousand Lakes’, but in 1996 the winds of change were blowing through the death metal scene. Not all was to be well, and almost seeing the writing on the wall early, Amorphis began the metamorphosis into the progressive metal monster we know today. ‘Elegy’ was their…

SML-XL - Big Ears, The Old Greyhound Station, Knoxville, Tennessee, March 28, 2026As I think I’ve mentioned, Aquarium Drunkard is celebrating its 21st anniversary this year. If there’s a music/culture website that deserves to legally buy a drink, it’s AD. At this late date, it’s hard to remember what the internet landscape was really like back in 2005 when founder Justin Gage hit “post” for the first time — those were different times! But while most other similarly styled online destinations…

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others. Ru Marshall’s American Trickster is an exhaustively researched and fascinating biography of Carlos Castaneda. Booklist wrote of the book: “Marshall reveals in this detailed, well-documented, and…

A NEW ONE-VOLUME history of punk, researched and written by Czech authors Vítek Formánek and Eva Csölleová, includes memories and recollections by musicians from across the punk spectrum, including the anarcho-punk scene. “There are, among others, long interviews with Steve Ignorant, Rubella Ballet, Subhumans, Paranoid Visions, Anti System, Active MInds and Oi Polloi,” co-authors Formánek and Csölleová explain. Sastrugi Press announces the release of History Of Punk Rock Around The World by…

An edited excerpt of conversations I had with a friend in 2019 about music theory

Ja, was hab ich denn heute für euch? Ich würde sagen, eine meiner Alltime-favourite Crews. Nämlich die Roots mit dem Track „Respond/React“ aus dem frühen Album „Illadelph Halflife„. Der Song ist vielleicht nicht ganz so bekannt, wie einige andere der Roots, aber deswegen auf keinen Fall schlechter! Zieht euch das mal rein! Bei Klick wird dieses Video von den YouTube Servern geladen. Details siehe Datenschutzerklärung.

"Eminence Front" by The Who Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What's a song with lyrics you didn't fully understand until you were older? - Eminence Front by The Who One of my favorite misheard song lyrics - I thought this was a song called "Living in a Funk" View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

The mysterious Harumi recorded his sole, eponymous LP in New York with producer Tom Wilson, whose CV included Bob Dylan, The Mothers Of Invention, The Velvet Underground and Simon & Garfunkel. Sometime around 1967 / 68, together, they cut 13 tracks for Verve. All of the songs fly their freak flag high, at full mast. Filled with swirling Ray Manzarek / The Doors-esque psyche organ, kaleidoscopic drum hits, acidic axe riffs and big bright mariachi brass – a la Arthur Lee & Love. Colourful action…

Review by Sandre the Giant Released: 3rd April 2026 Glasgow’s Void of Light have just released their debut full length record, ‘Asymmetries’, through Ripcord Records and have been building themselves quite a reputation for their wall of sound live performances since the release of their previous EP, ‘Enshroud’. The band are bringing post metal back to the fore, taking influences from the greats of the genre like Cult of Luna or Isis but forging their own particular journey. The delicate tones…

The Field “Another Day” “Another Day” is an anomaly in The Field’s catalog: A track with a fully intelligible vocal part; the closest thing to a proper pop song in Axel Willner’s body of work. But it’s not Willner’s voice, and it’s not quite a guest either. The vocal is sourced from Tracklib, a subscription service that provides legally cleared samples. It’s more or less anonymous, and it’s just sort of lucky that he found this vocal part that suited his composition so perfectly. And it seems…

Punk songs tend to be very, very short and fast. But, one day, the NOFX guys said "fuck that" and decided to make something a bit longer, and here we are, with an 18-minute punk song written in '99. To be honest, it feels more like multiple songs glued together than a "whole" song with changing theme/style. I never listened that much to NOFX or bands like them, they were not "culturally relevant" for me growing up, but they (and bands like that) did influence some of my musical tastes (I also…

For a while there, many people thought vitamin D was magical—that it could improve bones, the heart, infections, cancer, heart disease, longevity, even mental health. But among people I respect, opinion is now overwhelmingly that taking vitamin D does nothing unless you’re severely deficient. The central argument is that while vitamin D levels are correlated with ~all positive health outcomes, when you actually test vitamin D supplements against placebo in randomized trials, nothing ever…

The Best Record of 1989: Day 21-Janet Jackson vs. King’s X

[1975]Cult glammy power pop tune from forgotten or perhaps never remembered 70s Long Island group. The twerps from Milk'n'Cookies recorded some of the most astonishingly poxy vocals ever committed to vinyl. These scuzzy wimps of late-bubblegum had a way with a hook though and they're themes of adolescent lust are a whole lotta fun. You gotta love that they did a whole LP which was one of Island Records most unsuccessful records ever. This record still winds people up which adds to the aura.

Bob Dylan - Yaamava’ Theater, Highland, California, June 18, 2026I woke up last Friday morning feeling like the whole thing had been a dream. Had I really flown over the Rockies from Denver to LAX? Had I really battled hellacious Los Angeles traffic to get out to my friend Ryan’s place in Eagle Rock? Had we then battled even more hellacious Los Angeles traffic on the way out to Highland, CA? Had we wandered through the Yaamava’ Casino, feeling alone and forsaken amidst the nightmarish…

Ellsworth Kelly, Seaweed, 1949, oil on canvas, 72.4 x 99.7 cm, : @albemuth at the Phila. Museum I forget what a delight it is to read Ellsworth Kelly’s catalogue raisonné, especially the first volume, which covers Kelly’s years in Paris. As Yve-Alain Bois, who’s writing the CR, has noted frequently, Kelly was exploring and discovering and inventing so many things that would become the focus of his decades-long career. Between this generative importance and Kelly’s own exhaustive archiving, Bois…

"The Road Goes On Forever" by Robert Earl Keen Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Describe the perfect song for a road trip and why it works. - The Road Goes on Forever by Robert Earl Keen The song is basically Texas outlaw mythology compressed into four minutes. Sonny and Sherry are not heroes in any moral sense, but Keen writes them with enough speed, grit, and sympathy that I just lean into it. It is kin to “Pancho and Lefty,” “Me and Bobby McGee,” and old…

This section of a great interview with Magic Tuber Stringband in the June 2026 copy of The Wire really struck me. It relates to the influence band member Courtney Werner’s field recording work on a former nuclear weapons production site in South Carolina had on the band’s Heavy Water album. “Werner’s field recordings appear on every Magic Tuber Stringband recording, sometimes as a textural element added after the music was played. But on Heavy Water, found sounds are used in a more interactive…

Release date: June 26thRecord label: Bar NoneGenre: Experimental folk, folk punk, folk rock, singer-songwriterFormats: Vinyl, CD, digital Chad Matheny is one of the most unique and exciting songwriters of his era, and for the fast few years he’s been acting like it–self-releasing albums, hiding some of his best material on high-concept digital-only releases, appearing in opening slots for tours by bands much bigger (and less interesting) than his Emperor X project who nonetheless recognize the…

We used to compose in solitude, without industry or recordings. https://strolling.rosano.ca/0267/ 09h00 from Berlin / Germany