This is soooo cool. The studio where Pink Floyd used to record has been converted. Architects worked with former Pink Floyd studio manager and her musician husband to transform the iconic Britannia Row Studios into two stunning industrial style flats. Clearly, I need one.

The existing studio space was comprised of a two story recording studio with live rooms, vocal booths, drum rooms and production suites. The new London property, which has been divided in two by a concrete staircase, has exposed brick walls throughout and is designed to remain true to its rock and roll history.

Some of the biggest names in music history recorded at the studios from Björk, James Blunt, Kate Bush and Pete Doherty to Joy Division, Manic Street Preachers, Kylie, New Order, Pulp, Snowpatrol, Westlife, Supergrass and original founders Pink Floyd themselves.

The renovation entailed stripping out the 1ft. thick sound-proofed interior walls back to the bare brick. Exposed pipes and concrete floors were restored and retained as part of the industrial look.

Some elements, like sliding glass doors were reclaimed.

Lovely view of the cozy living room from the kitchen.

In the pass-thru to the bedroom, there’s storage and a pocket door to close it off from the rest of the apt.

White architectural features break up the brick walls and add interest.

A sliding barn door opens to the bath.

There’s a built-in armoire for clothing and a nice place beside it, perfect for a desk.

https://homeworlddesign.com/historic-pink-floyd-recording-studios-transformed-into-two-london-flats/

THE FORTY-FIVE: ST. VINCENT

Sleazy, gritty, grimy – these are the words used to describe the latest iteration of St. Vincent, Annie Clark’s alter ego. As she teases the release of her upcoming new album, ‘Daddy’s Home’, Eve Barlow finds out who’s wearing the trousers now.

Photos: Zackery Michael

Yellow may be the colour of gold, the hue of a perfect blonde or the shade of the sun, but when it’s too garish, yellow denotes the stain of sickness and the luridness of sleaze. On ‘Pay Your Way In Pain’ – the first single from St. Vincent’s forthcoming sixth album ‘Daddy’s Home’ – Annie Clark basks in the palette of cheap 1970s yellows; a dirty, salacious yellow that even the most prudish of individuals find difficult to avert their gaze from. It’s a yellow that recalls the smell of cigarettes on fingers, the tape across tomorrow’s crime scene or the dull ache of bad penetration.

The video for the single, which dropped last Thursday, features Clark in a blonde wig and suit, channeling a John Cassavetes anti-heroine (think Gena Rowlands in Gloria) and ‘Fame’-era Bowie. She twists in front of too-bright disco lights. She roughs up her voice. She sings about the price we pay for searching for acceptance while being outcast from society. “So I went to the park just to watch the little children/ The mothers saw my heels and they said I wasn’t welcome,” she coos, and you immediately recognise the scene of a free woman threatening the post-nuclear families aspiring to innocence. Clark is here to pervert them.

She laughs. “That’s how I feel!” From her studio in Los Angeles, she begins quoting lyrics from Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Red House’. “It’s a blues song for 2021.” LA is a city Clark reluctantly only half calls home, and one that is opposed to her vastly preferred New York. “I don’t feel any romantic attachment to Los Angeles,” she says of the place she coined the song ‘Los Ageless’ about on 2017’s ‘Masseduction’ (“The Los Ageless hang out by the bar/ Burn the pages of unwritten memoirs”).“The best that could be said of LA is, ‘Yeah it’s nice.’ And it is! LA is easy and pleasant. But if you were a person the last thing you’d want someone to say about you is: ‘She’s nice!’”

On ‘Daddy’s Home’, Clark writes about a past derelict New York; a place Los Angeles would suffocate in. “The idea of New York, the art that came out of it, and my living there,” she says. “I’ve not given up my card. I don’t feel in any way ready to renounce my New York citizenship. I bought an apartment so I didn’t have to.” Her down-and-out New York is one a true masochist would love, and it’s sleazy in excess. Sleaze is usually the thing men flaunt at a woman’s expense. In 2021, the proverbial Daddy in the title is Clark. But there’s also a literal Daddy. He came home in the winter of 2019.

On the title track, Clark sings about “inmate 502”: her father. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison for his involvement in a $43m stock fraud scheme. He went away in May 2010. Clark reacted by writing her third breakthrough album ‘Strange Mercy’ in 2011; inspired not just by her father’s imprisonment but the effects it had on her life.“I mean it was rough stuff,” she says. “It was a fuck show. Absolutely terrible. Gut-wrenching. Like so many times in life, music saved me from all kinds of personal peril. I was angry. I was devastated. There’s a sort of dullness to incarceration where you don’t have any control. It’s like a thud at the basement of your being. So I wrote all about it,” she says.

Back then, she was aloof about meaning. In an interview we did that year, she called from a hotel rooftop in Phoenix and was fried from analytical questions. She excused her lack of desire to talk about ‘Strange Mercy’ as a means of protecting fans who could interpret it at will. Really she was protecting an audience closer to home. It’s clear now that the title track is about her father’s imprisonment (“Our father in exile/ For God only knows how many years”). Clark’s parents divorced when she was a child, and they have eight children in their mixed family, some of whom were very young when ‘Strange Mercy’ came out. She explains this discretion now as her method of sheltering them.

“I am protective of my family,” she says. “It didn’t feel safe to me. I disliked the fact that it was taken as malicious obfuscations. No.” Clark wanted to deal with the family drama in art but not in press. She managed to remain tight-lipped until she became the subject of a different intrusion. As St. Vincent’s star continued to rocket, Clark found herself in a relationship with British model Cara Delevingne from 2014 to 2016, and attracted celebrity tabloid attention. Details of her family’s past were exposed. The Daily Mail came knocking on her sister’s door in Texas, where Clark is from.

“Luckily I’m super tight with my family and the Daily Mail didn’t find anybody who was gonna sell me out,” she says. “They were looking for it. Clark girls are a fucking impenetrable force. We will cut a bitch.”

Four years later, Clark gets to own the narrative herself in the medium that’s most apt: music. “The story has evolved. I’ve evolved. People have grown up. I would rather be the one to tell my story,” she says, ruminating on the misfortune that this was robbed from her: a story that writes itself. “My father’s release from prison is a great starting point, right?” Between tours and whenever she could manage, Clark would go and visit him in prison and would be signing autographs in the visitation room for the inmates, who all followed her success with every album release, press clipping and late night TV spot. She joked to her sisters that she’d become the belle of the ball there. “I don’t have to make that up,” she says.

There’s an ease to Clark’s interview manner that hasn’t existed before. She seems ready not just to discuss her father’s story, but to own certain elements of herself. “Hell where can you run when the outlaw’s inside you,” she sings on the title track, alluding to her common traits with her father. “I’ve always had a relationship with my dad and a good one. We’re very similar,” she says. “The movies we like, the books, he liked fashion. He’s really funny, he’s a good time.” Her father’s release gave Clark and her brothers and sisters permission to joke. “The title, ‘Daddy’s Home’ makes me laugh. It sounds fucking pervy as hell. But it’s about a real father ten years later. I’m Daddy now!”

The question of who’s fathering who is a serious one, but it’s also not serious. Clark wears the idea of Daddy as a costume. She likes to play. She joins today’s Zoom in a pair of sunglasses wider than her face and a silk scarf framing her head. The sunglasses come off, and the scarf is a tool for distraction. She ties it above her forehead, attempts a neckerchief, eventually tosses it aside. Clark can only be earnest for so long before she seeks some mischief. She doesn’t like to stay in reality for extensive periods. “I like to create a world and then I get to live in it and be somebody new every two or three years,” she says. “Who wants to be themselves all the time?”

‘Daddy’s Home‘ began in New York at Electric Lady studios before COVID hit and was finished in her studio in LA. She worked on it with “my friend Jack” [Jack Antonoff, producer for Lana Del Rey, Lorde, Taylor Swift]. Antonoff and Clark worked on ‘Masseduction’ and found a winning formula, pushing Clark’s guitar-orientated electronic universe to its poppiest maximum, without compromising her idiosyncrasies. “We’re simpatico. He’s a dream,” she says. “He played the hell outta instruments on this record. He’s crushing it on drums, crushing it on Wurlitzer.” The pair let loose. They began with ‘The Holiday Party’, one of the warmest tracks Clark’s ever written. It’s as inviting as a winter fireplace, stoked by soulful horns, acoustic guitar and backing singers. “Every time they sang something I’d say, ‘Yeah but can you do it sleazier? Make your voice sound like you’ve been up for three days.” Clark speaks of an unspoken understanding with Antonoff as regards the vibe: “Familiar sounds. The opposite of my hands coming out of the speaker to choke you till you like it. This is not submission. Just inviting. I can tell a story in a different way.”

The entire record is familiar, giving the listener the satisfaction that they’ve heard the songs before but can’t quite place them. It’s a satisfying accompaniment to a pandemic that encouraged nostalgic listening. Clark was nostalgic too. She reverted to records she enjoyed with her father: Stevie Wonder’s catalogue from the 1970s (‘Songs In The Key Of Life’, ‘Innervisions’, ‘Talking Book’) and Steely Dan. “Not to be the dude at the record store but it’s specifically post-flower child idealism of the ’60s,” she explains. “It’s when it flipped into nihilism, which I much prefer. Pre disco, pre punk. That music is in me in a deep way. It’s in my ears.”

On ‘The Melting Of The Sun’ she has a delicious time creating a psychedelic Pink Floyd odyssey while exploring the path tread by her heroes Marilyn Monroe, Joni Mitchell, Joan Didion and Nina Simone. It’s a series of beautiful vignettes of brilliant women who were met with a hostile environment. Clark considers what they did to overcome that. “I’m thanking all these women for making it easier for me to do it. I hope I didn’t totally let them down.” Clark is often the only woman sharing a stage with rock luminaries such as Dave Grohl, Damon Albarn and David Byrne, and has appeared to have shattered a male-centric glass ceiling. She’s unsure she’s doing enough to redress the imbalance. “There are little things I can do and control,” she says of hiring women on her team. “God! Now I feel like I should do more. What should I do? It’s a big question. You know what I have seen a lot more from when I started to now? Girls playing guitar.”

If one woman reinvented the guitar in the past decade, it’s Clark. Behind her is a rack of them. The pandemic has taken her out of the wild in which she’s accustomed to tantalising audiences at night with her displays of riffing and heel-balancing. Instead, she’s chained to her desk. Her obsession with heels in the lyrics of ‘Daddy’s Home’ she reckons may be a reflection of her nights performing ‘Masseduction’ in thigh highs. “I made sure that nothing I wore was comfortable,” she recalls. “Everything was about stricture and structure and latex. I had to train all the time to make sure I could handle it.” Is she taking the heels off when live shows return? “Absofuckinglutely not.”

Clark is interested in the new generation. She’s recently tweeted about Arlo Parks and has become a big fan of Russian singer-songwriter Kate NV. “I’m obsessed with Russia,” she says. In a recent LA Times profile, she professed to a pandemic intellectual fixation on Stalin. “Yeah! I mean right now my computer is propped up on stuff. You are sitting on The Gulag Archipelago, The Best Short Stories Of Dostoyevsky andThe Plays Of Chekhov. I’m kinda in it.” The pop world interests Clark, too. She was credited with a co-write on Swift’s 2019 album ‘Lover’. At last year’s Grammys she performed a duet with Dua Lipa. It was one of the queerest performances the Grammys has ever aired. Clark interrupts.

“What about it seemed queer?!”

You know�� The lip bite, for one!

“Wait. Did she bite her lip?”

No, you bit your lip.

“I did?!”

Everyone was talking about it. Come on, Annie.

“Serious? I…”

You both waltzed around each other with matching hairdos, making eyes…

“I have no memory of it.”

Frustrating as it may be in a world of too much information, Clark’s lack of willingness to overanalyse every creative decision she makes or participates in is something to treasure. “I want to be a writer who can write great songs,” she says. “I’m so glad I can play guitar and fuck around in the studio to my heart’s desire but it’s about what you can say. What’s a great song? What lyric is gonna rip your guts open. Just make great shit! That’s where I was with this record. That’s all I wanna do with my life.”

More than a decade into St. Vincent, Clark doesn’t reflect. She looks strictly forward. “I’m like a horse with blinders,” she says. She did make an exception to take stock lately when the phone rang. “I saw a +44 and that gets me excited,” she says. “Who could this be?” Well, who was it? “Paul McCartney,” she says, in disbelief. “Anything I’ve done, any mistake I’ve made, somehow it’s forgiven, assuaged. I did something right in my life if a fucking Beatle called me.”

Now there’s a get out of jail free card if ever she needed one.

Daddy’s Home by St. Vincent is out May 14, 2021.

THE DESERTFEST DIARIES: Destination Antwerp ‘19

~By Willem Verhappen~

Photographs by Stefanie Dörnbrack and Willem Verhappen

Day 1

The good beer, tasteful food and beautiful inner city, together with the fact that even though I live close to it, it makes me feel like I’m on vacation, make that Antwerp ranks high on my list of favorite cities. Every once in awhile my girlfriend and I like to spontaneously cross our southern border to go shopping (seriously, check out Chelsea Records if you're ever there) or watch a movie in their massive cinema complex. There is however one weekend when nothing can stop me from going to Antwerp and that's the weekend of Desertfest. For three days, Antwerp turns into the Mecca of all the music I -- and since you're reading this, probably you, too -- hold dear. So on the 18th of October I made my fourth pilgrimage to this epicenter of riffs.

My timing could hardly have been better, since my friends with whom I was going to share a hotel room for the next three nights showed up at pretty much the same time. After dropping our stuff at the hotel, we went downtown to meet up with some more friends and have a pizza and some beers.

With some proper groundwork laid, as we say in Dutch, it was time to head to the Trix, as the venue's called. There was some discussion as to whether it was faster to go by tram or subway, so we decided to turn it into a race. In the end, we still all ended up going by subway, since there didn't appear to be a tram going that way. I was told, however, that the subway was way quicker than the tram the guys took in previous years. That still counts as a victory in my eyes.

When we arrived at the venue, we were greeted by the sign shown at the top of this article. What a way to get your crowd hyped up for all the goodness that was to come.

The first band we got to see, was Monomyth. The band, featuring former Gorefest guitar player Boudewijn Bonebakker, plays an addictive mix of styles ranging from kraut- and space rock to more progressive and psychedelic exploits. The Dutch instrumental rockers might be reminiscent of acts like My Sleeping Karma, but with five people, there's never a boring moment.

After that first headbanging session, it was time for some more partying with desert rockers Nebula, where the title of their new album 'Holy Shit' sums up the experience quite well. This was followed by my first Duvel beer of the day and the Dutch '60s heavy psych inspired wolf pack named Temple Fang, both at the cafe. For a band that hasn't even released a single yet, they've got quite the following. Taking into account that two members used to be in the cult band Death Alley, gives some understanding as to why. Witnessing them live makes you a believer yourself.

As a music collector and lover of artwork, I decided to pay a visit to the merch area. I was very happy to see that my personal artwork favorites Branca Studio decided to take the car to bring some of their t-shirts to Desertfest. Now I finally have my very own "Doom life" shirt. Could my day get any better?

Of course it can! With some more cds and some less money in my pockets it was time to go to the main all for Truckfighters. When we walked through the door, one of my friends asked when the show had started. This was more than five minutes before the show actually started, but the hall was already crowded. This was the first time we had difficulties getting in before a band started playing, but it turned out to be only the first of multiple shows where this phenomenon occurred.

As you might know, Truckfighters was on a hiatus for a couple of years. Lucky for us, the Swedes have returned. I'm happy to say that the show hasn't really changed. You still get your high energy rock show lead by Ozo. Dango still runs through the crowd shirtless. There's still a different drummer than the last time you saw them. And of course, every place turns into absolute mayhem once they play Desert Cruiser. Honestly, the only thing that changed is Dango's beard. That's fine, but other than that, a Truckfighters show is perfect as it is.

Sadly, there wasn't much time to catch my breath, for after witnessing a bit of Beglian band 30,000 Monkies, Yatra was about to take the upstairs stage. I wasn't familiar with the Maryland doom crew, but someone (sorry, I don't remember who) recommended them to me. I cannot thank that person enough, for Yatra is by far my favorite discovery this Desertfest. It was the first doom band of the eveningThis trio spices up their low 'n' slow doom with a whiff of black metal dirt, just the way I like it.

Since I've never been much of a Zeal & Ardor fan, I decided to socialize and go looking for stories instead. That's when I ran into the Yatra gang, who were talking with Dango from Truckfighters. The latter mentioned to me that we can expect a solo record from his hand somewhere in the near future. Needless to say, this encounter needed to be documented, as shown in the picture above. Afterwards I decided to check out some Z&A, only to arrive when they started Devil is Fine. It was a good reminder of why I'm not a fan.

The first day ended with a banging show from Polish psych doomers Sunnata and a fun after party. I had to promise not to write about the after parties, even though I could write an entire article on just that. Let's just say that lots of fun and beer was had by all, up to the point where we were kicked out of the venue.

Day 2

Saturday started, not entirely unexpectedly, with a hangover. Usually I get over them pretty quick, but this one kept lingering on for quite some time. Not even the great sandwich I had, seemed to have any effect. The thing that eventually cured the hangover, was Bismut. The Desertfest website describes them as "instrumental psych desert metal", which is an apt description for these young Dutch hounds. We're treated to some heavy spaced out jams, mixed with some colorful shredding. Day two is a go!

The Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell put up one of my favorite shows this weekend. This is their second year in a row and third in total of playing here and if you've seen them live, you know why that is. The band are like the demented love child between Motörhead and Hawkwind (like that would ever happen), blasting some dirty biker rock, but with some stoner groove in there. It's also the first band I witnessed on the Canyon stage that made full use of the video screen.

Not every band can be a winner and if there's a loser this weekend, it's Fireball Ministry. Personally, I really enjoyed their distinct brand of desert rock, featuring vocals from both guitarists James A. Rota II and Emily Burton. The only point of critique is that Emily should stick to background vocals.

Even though the band gave their everything, they we're playing to a half filled hall at most, with many people leaving after a song or two with some just taking a couple of pictures. These pictures were of course from former Kyuss bass player Scott Reeder. This behaviour made the band look more like a freak show than anything else, which is too bad, since Fireball Ministry deserves better.

The Desert stage is far more crowded for Church of Misery. I can't say I'm surprised, since the Japanese quartet knows how to deliver a solid slab of old school doom metal. For 50 minutes, the band proved to know exactly how to keep heads banging in unison.

Following Church of Misery, I decided it was time to give the muscles in my neck some rest. And what better place to do that than in the food and relax area. This is like the school yard where all the cool kids hang out, drink beer and smoke, but mixed with a food truck festival. I'm usually not big on festival food, but the food here is certainly an exception. From homemade fries and vegan burgers to Mexican and tribal food, there's something here for everyone. It's a great place to just sit down, eat and talk to random people.

This moment of peace was very much needed ahead of Bongripper. This was one of the most crowded shows of the festival. The band created a most impressive wall of sound, or should I say wall of noise, during their show. Although the show was very impressive, I'm still surprised by how insanely crowded it was.

After the intense show from the Chicago doom crew, desert rockers Steak are a welcome change of scenery. They might be from London, but these guys sound like they came straight from the California desert, although with some Pink Floyd thrown into the mix. I was very charmed by their sound, since it sounds familiar, but with a British twist. Highly enjoyable.

At the Desert stage, we remain in the instrumental musical spectrum with Pelican. This was one of the shows I looked forward to the most. The post-metal from these Americans manages to find that sweet spot between heavy dark riffs and a touch of light. The hour of playtime was over way too soon.

The other band I was really looking forward to, was Dopelord. I'm not sure what's happening in Poland that's causing the rise of so many good old school doom bands, as proven by Dopelord's recent excellent 4-way split with Weedpecker, Major Kong and Spaceslug, but it's clear these guys are leading the revolution. This show had everything I love: great songs, heavy riffs, exploitation cinema on the background and rowdy crowd. There even was a new song, called 'Hail Satan' and some moshing during the epic 'Reptile Sun'.

On my way to Ty Segall & The Freedom Band, I heard some music coming from the Vulture stage that caught my attention. Crowhurst was supposed to be performing here, but they had to cancel last minute. Their replacement were the Antwerp locals Your Highness.

Earlier that day, I was told they were a doom band and that I would like them. That turned out to be very true. The band plays traditional doom metal, but with a hardcore ferocity. I clearly wasn't the only one who enjoyed their show, judging by some of the most intense mosh pits I'd seen all weekend. I was so entertained that, for the first time in four years, I missed a Desertfest headliner. Not that I mind, these guys are worth it.

There's no rest for the wicked and Inter Arma made sure of that. The death/black.sludge doom band pretty much set the Canyon stage ablaze. It was past midnight but that was no excuse to take it slow. Vocalist Mike Paparo was running the stage like a ravenous beast. The band was a great warm-up for yet another night of mad partying.

Day 3

Usually the last day of a festival is somewhat of a cooling down. Festival days are long days and involve lots of walking and a lot of things to take in, resulting in you being exhausted, both physically and mentally. For this Desertfest, being tired was not an option, since the lineup is nothing but spectacular. Luckily for me, I woke up relatively fresh. I still don't know how I pulled that off, but I'm not complaining.

Since not everyone was as awake as I was, the first band we got to see was Wolvennest. I've seen the band perform many times in the past four years or so and I've yet to grow tired of their music. Their excellent mix of black metal, doom, psychedelic and krautrock still entrances me every show. And every show, they seem to get better. At least it helped me clear my mind in preparation for the rest of the day.

Wolvennest may have brought me to a higher plain, but after that it's a slap back to reality, courtesy of The Progerians. Their sludge mimics their hometown of Brussels. It's dark and nasty, but with just enough melody to make it appeal to the masses. This makes it a good warming up for the impressive set from Lord Dying, although they look towards more progressive and psychedelic horizons.

Monkey3 is one of those bands that always manage to deliver. Their instrumental space rock usually attracts quite the crowd and that was no different here. Sadly, nature called, resulting in me not being able to get back to the Desert stage. On the other hand, I did get to see High Reeper. These guys manage to play an energetic, balanced mix of stoner rock and Sabbath-y doom metal. A perfect blend of old school and new school.

The NOLA sludge kickers of Eyehategod are on a roll today. The band is clearly in a good mood and frontman Mike IX Williams is playing the crowd like a fiddle. The crowd, on their turn, is eating the slow, nasty blues raw. This was without a doubt my favorite show of the day.

After EHG I'm in doubt, stay where I am and be assured of a good spot for tonight's headliner, or go and see Un. I decide on the latter, even though many people seem to be saving their spots. I don't regret it though, since the Seattle band delivers some beautiful, heavy funeral doom. Especially fellow Seattle natives Bell Witch come to mind while riding Un's emotional roller coaster.

When I got back to the Desert stage, some 20 minutes before showtime, I was happy to see that it wasn't as crowded as I'd expected. I managed to get a nice spot in the center of the hall before the countdown started for the band all of Desertfest was clearly waiting for.

At a quarter to 11, the famous audio recording leading up to the moon landing started playing. What happened next felt like a ritual. Joints were lit across the audience, with some also being passed along through the crowd. People moved towards the stage like Muslims to the Ka'aba.

At 11, the almighty Sleep took the stage. Even though it was my fourth time seeing them in 15 months, the band still manages to impress me. All through the weekend, bands have been projecting everything from band logos to movies on the backdrop, but not Sleep.

Sleep doesn't need a backdrop. Nor a dynamic light show, for that matter. Sleep is all about the music. And the music is all that matters. Witnessing a Sleep show is like witnessing a voodoo ritual. The band's goal is to get you in a trance, to get you to follow the smoke to the riff filled land. For 75 minutes the music is all that matters.

Black Pyramid holds the thankless honour to close off the festival after Sleep. Their psychedelic brand of metal sounds good, but honestly, Sleep is still stuck in my head. Judging from the size of the crowd, many people have decided to head home early, but not us. We stayed until the bitter end.

On monday morning, to my great joy, the headache remained absent and I was feeling relatively fresh. I was looking forward to my own shower and couch, not necessarily in that order, so I was packed and ready to go in no time. My friends had some more difficulties to get their motor running, so we ended up getting brunch at one of the countless Panos sandwich bars in the city. Of course, we ran into some familiar faces there. Going over the weekend, we could all agree it was a festival with many highlights and next to no low points. Another one for the books. Why can't all festivals be like Desertfest? I'm not being melancholic, I'm seriously asking.

Interview with Jon Coco

We had the pleasure of interviewing Jon Coco over Zoom video! Music that leaves a lasting impression requires a wandering soul to tame it. That’s an apt description of the moments film composer JON COCO elicits with his melodic and lyrical craftsmanship. Enduring hopefulness tempered by the unavoidable obstacles that life brings is at the core of Coco’s emotive perspective. His songs remind us that heartache and love are not to be mastered, but to be lived in and learned through. Perhaps Coco’s music resonates with those of so many walks of life because his own path has taken so many turns. As a boy growing up in Boston, Coco immersed himself in the music of timeless bands like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, and Pink Floyd. Tapping into the music of the ‘70s with an impressive vinyl record collection, he started writing original music and dove into performances in the late ‘80s Boston music scene. Invited by an A&M recording studio head engineer to record songs for A&M, Coco gave in to the eventual lure of Los Angeles and the larger opportunities it promised. An early lesson would come when A&M Records closed their doors while his band was still recording their debut record. After two years as a staple on the Hollywood live club scene, Coco seized the opportunity to try his hand at creating music for a film trailer. This pivot provided many years of work and included his compositions in the marketing campaigns for Oscar-nominated and award-winning films such as The Departed, Batman Begins, No Country for Old Men, Room, and numerous others. Endlessly pursuing his own true north and identity, Coco relocated to Nashville in 2016 to trade the companionship of traffic and airplanes for a mini ranch with horses, donkeys, and chickens. This slower and more relaxed pace, exacerbated by the Covid lockdown, has cultivated an even more intense maturation of Coco’s signature style. “I came across a video of an Elliot Smith performance at Largo in Hollywood as a guest of Jon Brion’s show. It inspired me so much that two hours later I had ‘Living In LA’ written and completed! The floodgates were open. The next day, ‘Boxley Valley,’ which is a song about my home in Tennessee, came out of me just as quickly. Five days later, I had five songs done.” There is a common element to his music that is as relatable for listeners of a major metropolitan area as for those in rural surroundings because their source is a man who finds the essential humanity in both. Those with an affinity for Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, and the Eagles rebuke a “regional” definition to their taste and relate to Jon Coco’s music similarly. In an America that seems so often divided, his music is a reminder to focus on the day-to-day of our own immediate experiences. Recorded with a group of talented friends hailing from Nashville and Los Angeles, Jon Coco is exhibiting with each song that music literally brings us all together. We want to hear from you! Please email [email protected]. www.BringinitBackwards.com #podcast #interview #bringinbackpod #JonCoco #NewMusic #zoom Listen & Subscribe to BiB https://www.bringinitbackwards.com/follow/ Follow our podcast on Instagram and Twitter! https://www.facebook.com/groups/bringinbackpod source https://www.spreaker.com/user/14706194/interview-with-jon-coco

Spitfire Audio Release ABBEY ROAD ONE: SPARKLING WOODWINDS and ABBEY ROAD ONE: LEGENDARY LOW STRINGS

Spitfire Audio Release ABBEY ROAD ONE: SPARKLING WOODWINDS and ABBEY ROAD ONE: LEGENDARY LOW STRINGS

Spitfire Audio with world-famous Abbey Road Studios late last year as ABBEY ROAD ONE: ORCHESTRAL FOUNDATIONS inaugurated its ABBEY ROAD ONE: FILM SCORING SELECTIONS series showcasing the foundational film scoring sound of Studio One by carefully capturing a full, symphony-sized (90-plus- piece) orchestra inside the world’s largest purpose-built recording studio, Spitfire Audio is proud to announce availability of its attractively-priced ABBEY ROAD ONE: SPARKLING WOODWINDS and ABBEY ROAD ONE: LEGENDARY LOW STRINGS siblings — smaller libraries captured in that same iconic studio, this time inspired by classic films and offering pre- orchestrated themes to focus on accomplishing certain performance elements as a perfect fit for seamlessly working with(in) ABBEY ROAD ONE: ORCHESTRAL FOUNDATIONS or equally well on their own, as well as working with any other orchestral library 

Abbey Road Studios is indisputably the most famous recording studio in the world and a global music icon. As the world’s first purpose-built recording studio, opening on November 12, 1931, almost anyone who’s musically anyone has walked up the eminent entrance steps to 3 Abbey Road in London’s St John’s Wood. While embracing classical recordings and big bands to the first British rock ’n’ roll records, and defining the sound of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and beyond, Abbey Road Studios has been home to the artists who have shaped music history and popular culture — from The Beatles, Pink Floyd, U2, and Oasis to Florence + The Machine, Kanye West, Adele, and Frank Ocean. Outside of the pop and rock arena, Abbey Road Studios has also become one of the world’s premier destinations for film scoring, adding the emotion, mood, and magic to the greatest cinematic storytelling of the last 40 years, which was a key connection for the considerably younger sound-specialising British music technology company with whom it has successfully struck up a creative partnership. After all, according to Spitfire Audio co-founder and composer Christian Henson, “For us film composers, it is synonymous with the sound of cinema.” Clearly, then, the critically-acclaimed collaborative ABBEY ROAD ONE: ORCHESTRAL FOUNDATIONS with which Spitfire Audio and Abbey Road Studios successfully cemented their creative partnership to create the supremely sampled core of an easy-to-use expandable virtual instrument library like no other — carefully capturing a full, symphony-sized (90-plus-piece) orchestra inside the world’s largest purpose-built recording studio, working with world-class first-call musicians recorded by four-time GRAMMY® Award-winning engineer Simon Rhodes using Abbey Road Studios’ stunning selection of microphones — allowed any composer to effectively access at any time the foundational film scoring sound of Studio One from the comfort of their computer as an AAX-, AU-, VST2-, and VST3-compatible, NKS-ready plug-in that loads directly into a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). Indeed, it was the first title in the ABBEY ROAD ONE: FILM SCORING SELECTIONS series announced at the time of its October 2020 release, readily revealing at the time that the next titles in this symphonic series would be smaller libraries inspired by classic films offering pre-orchestrated themes focused on accomplishing certain performance elements... enter two such series additions in the finely-honed form of ABBEY ROAD ONE: SPARKLING WOODWINDS and ABBEY ROAD ONE: LEGENDARY LOW STRINGS. As alluded to by name, ABBEY ROAD ONE: SPARKLING WOODWINDS is based around a stunningly-orchestrated woodwind section performed by first-call London session players — as heard on countless blockbuster recordings — recorded in Studio One, and allows users to create everything from engaging elegiac passages to super-fast sparkling runs and flurries using Spitfire Audio’s new legato patches, positively bursting into musical life with energy and intrigue. Indeed, users can quickly lose themselves in a magical world of woodwind accompanied by the glockenspiel that is a classic movie pairing — perhaps even a musical match made in heaven. However, there are also a selection of blockbuster flourishes with which they can decorate their latest production, be it destined for the big screen or otherwise. An apt appellation if ever there was one, the Studio One-captured cellos and bass sections of London’s first-call players provide ABBEY ROAD ONE: LEGENDARY LOW STRINGS with a set of distinctly detailed and beautifully orchestrated performances that are deep and powerful — sometimes even threatening. These versatile patches take their inspiration from both the standard orchestral repertoire as well as classic legend and fantasy films. From the marauding short notes and powerful longs to Spitfire Audio’s new, easy-to-use legatos, dive deep into the legendary low strings residing within this latest addition to the ABBEY ROAD ONE: FILM SCORING SELECTIONS series! Both beautifully orchestrated and incredibly detailed-sounding, both ABBEY ROAD ONE: SPARKLING WOODWINDS and ABBEY ROAD ONE: LEGENDARY LOW STRINGS are duly designed for a specific performance purpose. Put it this way: with a variety of patches incorporating legato transitions created with Spitfire Audio’s newly-developed recording techniques they allow for wonderfully-realistic performances and also include other articulations so users can create a customised palette which will seamlessly work with(in) ABBEY ROAD ONE: ORCHESTRAL FOUNDATIONS (forming the core of the ABBEY ROAD ONE: FILM SCORING SELECTIONS series) or equally well on their own, as well as working with any other orchestral library — including Spitfire Audio’s entry-level LABS series of free sample-based virtual instruments, ongoing ORIGINALS series of instant library tools with the same outstanding recording quality as the ‘full-blown’ blue-chip libraries with which the sound-specialising British music technology company has built its reputation, or the encyclopaedic compendium of symphonic strings sampling that is SPITFIRE SYMPHONIC STRINGS. But best of all, ABBEY ROAD ONE: SPARKLING WOODWINDS and ABBEY ROAD ONE: LEGENDARY LOW STRINGS offer any composer carefully captured, perfectly-performed pieces of the iconic sound of Abbey Road Studios’ Studio One at an attractive price point. Putting it this way, Mirek Stiles, Head of Audio Products at Abbey Road Studios, says, “I love the concept of ABBEY ROAD ONE: FILM SCORING SELECTIONS expanding the palette of sampled textures recorded within the beautiful acoustics of Studio One. Each ...SELECTIONS release will bring a unique and inspiring orchestral dynamic to the Spitfire Audio world.” Which sits well with these considered closing words from Spitfire Audio co-founder and composer Paul Thomson: “This is the whole point of these ...SELECTIONS — things that happen in film scoring that we really love the sound of, so we’ve developed some new techniques to record these patches so that when you play them they really accomplish that specific job beautifully well.”

ABBEY ROAD ONE: SPARKLING WOODWINDS is available as an AAX-, AU-, VST2-, and VST3-compatible, NKS-ready plug-in that loads directly into a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) at an attractive MSRP (Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price) of £49.00 GBP (inc. VAT)/ $49.00 USD/€49.00 EUR (inc. VAT) from here: https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/a-z/abbey-road-one-sparkling-woodwinds/

ABBEY ROAD ONE: LEGENDARY LOW STRINGS is available as an AAX-, AU-, VST2-, and VST3-compatible, NKS-ready plug-in that loads directly into a DAW at an attractive MSRP of £49.00 GBP (inc. VAT)/$49.00 USD/€49.00 EUR (inc. VAT) from here: https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/a-z/abbey-road-one-legendary-low-strings/ ABBEY ROAD ONE: ORCHESTRAL FOUNDATIONS itself is available as an AAX-, AU-, VST2-, and VST3-compatible, NKS-ready plug-in that loads directly into a DAW for a time-limited promo price of £299.00 GBP (inc. VAT)/$349.00 USD/€349.00 EUR (inc. VAT) until March 11, 2021 — returning thereafter to its MSRP of £399.00 GBP (inc. VAT)/$449.00 USD/€449.00 EUR (inc. VAT) — from here: https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/a-z/abbey-road-one-orchestral-foundations/

ABBEY ROAD ONE: ORCHESTRAL FOUNDATIONS pre-ordering customers will receive either ABBEY ROAD ONE: SPARKLING WOODWINDS or ABBEY ROAD ONE: LEGENDARY LOW STRINGS for free, receiving an e-mail reminder from Spitfire Audio that this exclusive offer needs to be redeemed by March 31, 2021.

Spitfire Audio’s namesake Spitfire Audio application allows anyone to buy now and download anytime, and is available for free from here: http://www.spitfireaudio.com/info/library-manager/

For more in-depth info, including some superb-sounding audio demos, please visit the dedicated ABBEY ROAD ONE: SPARKLING WOODWINDS webpage here: https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/a-z/abbey-road-one-sparkling-woodwinds/

For more in-depth info, including some superb-sounding audio demos, please visit the dedicated ABBEY ROAD ONE: LEGENDARY LOW STRINGS webpage here: https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/a-z/abbey-road-one-legendary-low-strings/

Watch Spitfire Audio co-founders Christian Henson and Paul Thomson take a first look at ABBEY ROAD ONE: SPARKLING WOODWINDS and ABBEY ROAD ONE: LEGENDARY LOW STRINGS during its premiere here: https://youtu.be/a0jdhuPEU30

Watch Paul Thomson’s ‘traditional’ walkthrough of ABBEY ROAD ONE: SPARKLING WOODWINDS here: https://youtu.be/f53yNzGmTw8

Watch Paul Thomson’s ‘traditional’ walkthrough of ABBEY ROAD ONE: LEGENDARY LOW STRINGS here: https://youtu.be/2tRe6wA55M8 

https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/a-z/abbey-road-one-legendary-low-strings/

https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/a-z/abbey-road-one-sparkling-woodwinds/

Jeannette Byrne - Exclusive GIGsoup Interview

Jeannette Byrne’s ‘Women Of The One World’ concept album brings covers from inspirational women of the 60’s to a generation of new and nostalgic listeners. Interview Irish music artist Jeannette Byrne has just released her fourth album ‘Women Of The One World’. Women Of The One World is a concept album that hosts a collection of covers from influential female artists of the 1960s and 1970s, many of whom continue their great work today. With songs from Buffy Sainte Marie, Joan Baez, Sandy Denny, Judy Collins and Laura Nyro, Jeannette Byrne draws inspiration from women who put themselves at the forefront of progressive movements.  An established performer of the French chanson on sold-out stages across Europe, Jeannette has also performed widely across Irish national television and radio. In 1998, Jeannette Byrne’s first EP ‘Une Femme’ was voted one of the top 5 records of the year by The Irish Times. 1999 saw the release of Jeannette’s critically acclaimed first studio album ‘Elegy’ followed by her 2005 album ‘Cafe Diva’. Inspired by the centenary marking 100 years of women having the right to vote, Jeannette Byrne began to think about the female singers who had championed humanitarian causes throughout her life. The album cleverly links tracks from these female artists together in a compelling way, a breath of fresh air in the vacuous singles market we know today.  At a time with resurgent global unrest, Jeannette Byrne hopes these songs will find their way to inspire a new generation of listeners. Timeless American songs like Buffy St Marie’s Oscar-winning ‘Up Where We Belong’ and Joan Baez’s ‘Love Song To A Stranger’ are at home on the same record as the UK’s Sandy Denny and her classic ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’. Jeannette Byrne captures their universal language of music with fresh takes and twists all round. GIGsoup caught up with Jeannette to talk about her latest album. Hi Jeannette. Tell us everything about your new album 'Women Of The One World'. My album  “Women of the One World” features the music of amazing female singer-songwriters that emerged from the 1960s.  Women whom I admire and who inspired me as a young girl. The 5 featured women are Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Sandy Denny, Buffy Sainte Marie and Laura Nyro. Beautiful songs, wonderful rich lyrics. Songs I have wanted to record for many years. I felt now that the time was right for this project. When did you start singing? I can always remember singing:  The first official event was in the school play aged 5 when I was given the solo to sing. Could you briefly describe the music-making process for your tracks? The music-making process was a big ask for this album; Firstly Cian Boylan and I sat down and worked out how we would approach the songs: I wanted it to be an orchestral project and he is the man for the job. We shortlisted the songs and over a few months we worked out the shape of the songs: Cian arranged the songs and wrote the scores for all the instrumentation: We started recording with the rhythm section with me doing guide vocals.  This gave us the skeleton of each song. It also gave us time to examine if the arrangement worked etc. We then recorded the different sections of the orchestra..strings, woodwind, brass, etc over a few months as we had to work around schedules. Once we had all of the instruments recorded I recorded my final vocals.  I liked this approach because it gave me a lot of time with each song to finalise the interpretation vocally. Then came the mixing which was very complex and we took a lot of time getting it right.  I stepped out of it here as it is hard to listen to yourself :  When we all agreed with the mixes we mastered it ready for release (the design was something I had been working on with a local designer). I really liked the video for 'All Our Days'. It's like a short movie. Share with us the concept behind it. Thank you: “All Our Days” is a very special song. From the folk tradition, it is about the cycle of life....the world, nature and the elements. It is about the seasons. Whatever happens, the seasons still change. There is a constant in the change. Being over 5 minutes long, it is not a song that I reckoned would get much airplay so we decided to make it the theme track for a video. It's like a mini film. It is filmed where I live outside Dublin and is partially my tribute to nature and also to show the beauty of the area.  Like many places this day, it is under threat to overdevelopment. I chose a team of young local filmmakers, Conor and Ben of Rubberduck: They immediately got what the song was about and what I needed.  It is not a glamour video of me.  We filmed on a mad windswept day, the elements were in control.   When we made it in early March, the world was beginning to come to see the effects of the Covid 19 virus. We had been planning it for weeks and just managed to film it before the restrictions started to come in.  It is now so apt. People have been telling me the song and the video gives them comfort. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXdjjKEHAjE Which animal would best suit your personality? Which animal..lol....I love horses and have been around them for years..... but I also love dogs. I have an Irish Wheaten Terrier ( he is in the video)  and he’s totally suited to me: He loves walks around the coast and then loves his comforts and cuddles.  Who are your musical icons? My Musical Icons are Edith Piaf, Ella Fitzgerald, Barbra Streisand, Joan Baez, Renee Fleming. I also love Adel.... What was the first album you purchased? My first album bought with my own money was David Bowie “Hunky Dory” ..still one of my favourite albums.  Which artists are you listening to right now? As we are in Lockdown I am listening to everything:  Re-visiting old favourites ....in fact currently we are listening to Fleetwood Mac “Rumours”. Lots of Pink Floyd  ( my husband’s choice)....also catching up with opera ...I love Wagner’s  “Tristan & Isolde” How would you describe your fashion style? Fashion style...I am very boring now.  Like many mums I lived in leggings and tops, anything easy to throw on for school runs.  Now that I no longer have to do this, I am still into comfort dressing: Black and more Black....on stage I dress according to the show I am doing....but always black... General style, black trousers, boots/chunky trainers and long black/ white tunic or shirts...very easy and comfy:  ( I have the odd dress for special events). Smart relaxed.....No heels. Tell us about your next show and why we should be there. My Next Show... Well, all is currently in a state of flux: We were to launch the album in London in March in Soho at a Press/Media launch event plus a small audience.....this was to lead to a larger show later in the year with full band and orchestra. Currently we will be in London for the small show in September for a Re-launch or Post-launch event. I would hope to know then when the larger concert is going to happen.  It is harder to organise when one is a small Independent artist:  I usually work with local agents. Everything is now put back but we are working on it. When it does happen it will be a full on show with an orchestra with the songs from the album plus some from a previous album that fit with the concept of “Women of the One World”.  As in my past shows, there will be stories about the songs and the writers..... I have great plans. What does the rest of 2020 hold for you? 2020 has presented the World with huge challenges. Primarily my aims are simple, for my family and friends to be well and for us all to get through this. Creatively I’m happy to know from the thousands of views and streaming etc that my music has struck a chord with people. As an artist that is all we can ask.  If I manage to do some shows later in the year then that will be the icing on the cake. It is a different world to 3 months ago when we started to launch the album. (planned since September 2019) Money will be tight for so many people now, but musicians need work and I hope that we do get out and perform. I will keep making plans and practicing the songs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXmM9bD7aDc Read the full article

My Top 10 Albums of 2017

This awkward limbo period between Christmas and New Year seems an apt moment to reflect on the past year. As such, I’ve made a habit of returning to this neglected blog each December in order to run through the music that has soundtracked my year.

With albums from the likes of Thundercat, Alvvays, Father John Misty, Wolf Alice, Everything Everything, and the National - as well as the remarkable collaboration between Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett - all missing out on the top ten, there’s certainly not been a lack of quality this year. Without further ado, let’s get to the top ten...

10. Perfume Genius - No Shape

Perfume Genius is one of the more idiosyncratic artists around at the moment. His unique style is part art-pop, part synthesised chamber orchestra. If that sounds bonkers, it’s because it pretty much is. The drama and swagger starts right from the word go, with opener ‘Otherside’ teasing the listener with its piano intro, only to explode into life in a haze of glitter and percussion. It’s at times too wacky for its own good. But it’s unwaveringly creative, and fascinating as a result.

Highlights: ‘Slip Away’, ‘Just Like Love’, ‘Wreath’.

9. Kendrick Lamar - Damn

I’ve seen this album atop many end-of-year lists recently. It’s no doubt an excellent album, though it’s incredibly difficult to follow a masterpiece like To Pimp a Butterfly. What Kendrick has done so expertly is to take the components of what made TPAB so special, and repurpose them for Damn. It’s a comedown, of sorts, although nonetheless enjoyable. Race, religion, and relationships are analysed on a nationwide scale, but also on a very personal one. It’s perhaps craving the melodies and the genre-spanning nature of TPAB - and that’s probably the only thing that keeps it outside my top five.

Highlights: ‘YAH’, ‘LOYALTY’, ‘PRIDE’.

8. SZA - Ctrl

R&B is a genre that is, sadly, increasingly veering into the world of manufactured pop music. I therefore have a real soft spot for anyone within the genre who endeavours to bring some of the old R&B into the 21st century. SZA’s music doesn’t just rely on her clearly outstanding vocals; these tracks feature shimmering guitars, jazzy drum fills and melodies that are more subtle than most of her peers. The lyrics, too, are charming. “Somebody get the tacos, somebody spark the blunt. Let's start the Narcos off at episode one” she sings on ‘Drew Barrymore’, with all the rhythm of a rapper and all the cheek of a rocker. This is a debut that hints at a long and successful career.

Highlights: ‘Normal Girl’. ‘Drew Barrymore’, ‘The Weekend’.

7. Stormzy - Gang Signs & Prayer

When I started writing these lists five years ago, I never expected to be including grime albums. But this is not your average grime album. “Man thought that Stormzy couldn’t sing”, he mumbles playfully at the end of ‘Velvet’. You’re right, Stormzy, we did. We also didn’t think you were capable of making an album that infuses grime with elements of gospel, soul, and R&B. The old Stormzy favourites remain (’Shut Up’, ‘Big For Your Boots’) but the tracks around them see Stormzy really show off his burgeoning talent. The lyrics cover topics such as crime, religion, and mental illness - a watershed not only in grime, but popular music in general. And he’s only 23...

Highlights: ‘Velvet’, ‘Cigarettes & Cush’, ‘Blinded By Your Grace, Pt. 2′.

6. Phoebe Bridgers - Stranger in the Alps

Sometimes there are albums like Stormzy’s that feel like cultural phenomenons, and sometimes there are albums that just sound goddamn beautiful. Phoebe Bridgers’ debut is the latter. The songwriting is prodigious: from the heartbreaking and admirably open ‘Funeral’; to the swaying, Fleetwood Mac-esque folk-pop of ‘Motion Sickness’; to the beautiful back and forth on ‘Would You Rather’. But what really makes this album shine is Bridgers’ voice - an angelic, to-die-for whisper that is produced and double-tracked expertly to make these songs almost meditative.

Highlights: ‘Funeral’, ‘Motion Sickness’, ‘Scott Street’.

5. Fleet Foxes - Crack-Up

I had indescribable trouble placing this record. On first listen, I thought it was poor; after 10 listens, I thought it was possibly a masterpiece; finally, I’ve settled somewhere between the two: it’s a very good album with some frustrating flaws. It has been six years since 2011′s Helplessness Blues, but the extra time in the studio has allowed Robin Pecknold and co. to construct an album that is almost Pink Floyd-esque in its scope and production quality. Songs flow into each other, with beautiful string arrangements providing the backing track. There are moments where Pecknold’s desire to innovate makes for challenging listening. But it’s nothing if not admirable.

Highlights: ‘If You Need To, Keep Time On Me’, ‘Fool’s Errand’, ‘I Should See Memphis’.

4. The War On Drugs - A Deeper Understanding

The War On Drugs topped my 2014 list with the brilliant Lost in the Dream. As I’ve described already with Kendrick Lamar, it’s a tough task following such a record. A Deeper Understanding doesn’t break down any boundaries laid out by LITD, instead it repeats the formula with minor tweaks. The Springsteen-inspired sound remains, but there’s a touch more synth and electronic instrumentation here. Above all, the production is sublime - Adam Granduciel has a remarkable talent for turning a good song into a great one simply through exceptional production. Oh, and in ‘Thinking of a Place’, he’s also written the finest song of the year.

Highlights: ‘Thinking of a Place’, ‘Holding On’, ‘Pain’.

3. LCD Soundsystem - American Dream

Boy, it’s good to have James Murphy back. Seven years since 2010′s This Is Happening and, much like Fleet Foxes, LCD appear to have used their time off wisely. This is still the same band, but Murphy has tapped into his skill as a writer of melancholic music better than ever before. Opener ‘Oh Baby’ sets the tone, with a retro, distorted bass line later accompanied by glistening synths. Other tracks, like the unashamedly rocky ‘Emotional Haircut’, nod to LCD’s more live-friendly back catalogue. Murphy must have wondered whether the band could live up to their extraordinary pre-hiatus success rate. He need not have worried.

Highlights: ‘Oh Baby’, ‘Tonite’. ‘Emotional Haircut’.

2. Sampha - Process

In many ways, Sampha’s story is rather similar to that of the aforementioned SZA. He, too, was a regular feature on the hits of Pop and R&B’s biggest names. He, too, has cut an identity of his own by crafting his own sound on a debut album that could make him a star. Process is an album soaked in grief and insecurity. Whether he’s singing about the death of his mother, his own potential illness, or unrequited love, he balances dark subject matter with upbeat arrangements - and vice versa. And, while the War on Drugs’ ‘Thinking of a Place’ is my song of the year, Sampha’s ‘(No One Knows Me) Like The Piano’ sure runs it close.

Highlights: ‘Blood On Me’, ‘Incomplete Kisses’, ‘(No One Knows Me) Like The Piano’.

1. Moses Sumney - Aromanticism

Moses Sumney is an absolute star in the making. He’s the total package: a stunning, falsetto voice; a fine guitarist and pianist; superb songwriting talent; and an extraordinary ability to transform his complex recordings into a jaw-dropping live show. Aromanticism, too, is a complete album. 

Sumney balances songs like the wondrous ‘Lonely World’ - an odyssey of finger-picked guitar and ethereal falsetto howl - with simpler, beautiful ballads like ‘Plastic’ and ‘Indulge Me’. ‘Doomed’ ditches the usual instruments altogether, with Sumney’s incredible vocals accompanied only by an ever-growing, groaning synth. There are not-so-subtle nods to Stevie Wonder on the meandering ‘Quarrel’, and these lengthier tracks are expertly tempered by the album’s interludes.

As with Lost in the Dream in 2014, and To Pimp a Butterly in 2015, this year’s number one was simply a class above the rest.

Highlights: ‘Lonely World’, ‘Quarrel’, ‘Indulge Me’.

new arrivals 8-31-17

lots of great new used vinyl - runaways, thin lizzy. stryper, judas priest, ac/dc, alice cooper, link wray, my bloody valentine, sigur ros, pink floyd, public image limited and so much more!! new items in on THURSDAY aug 31st PATRICK AND THE BARITONE SAXOPHONE RETINUE, PATSound Advice (2017 Repress) LP  $24.992017 repress of Art Yard's 2015 reissue. Originally released in 1977 by Sun Ra's El Saturn label. Includes printed inner sleeve. As composer, bandleader, and full-time member of the Sun Ra Arkestra, Pat Patrick was a visionary musician whose singular contribution to the jazz tradition has not yet been fully recognized. As well as holding down the baritone spot in the Arkestra for 35 years, Patrick played flute and alto, composed in both jazz and popular idioms, and was a widely respected musician, playing with Duke Ellington, Eric Dolphy, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane, with whom he appeared on Africa/Brass (1961). But he is best known for his crucial contributions to key Sun Ra recordings including Angels and Demons at Play (1967), Jazz in Silhouette (1959), and The Nubians of Plutonia (1967), among dozens of others. But as a bandleader, Patrick only released one LP -- the almost mythical Sound Advice, recorded with his Baritone Saxophone Retinue, a unique gathering of baritone saxophone masters including Charles Davis and René McLean. Sound Advice is a deep-hued exploration of this special instrument, a lost masterpiece of Arkestrally-minded Ellingtonia on which higher adepts of the lower cosmic tones are heard in rare conference. Unissued since original release, this unique jazz masterpiece now returns to the limelight. Released in collaboration with the Pat Patrick estate. Remastered and restored sound. Liner notes by scholar and musician Bill Banfield. TUSQUES, FRANCOISFree Jazz LP  $32.99Cacophonic present a first time vinyl reissue of a pioneering album of French free jazz, François Tusques's Free Jazz, originally released in 1965. Comprising some of the earliest, uninhibited performances from musicians behind groundbreaking European records and films, Free Jazz captures the birth of an exciting movement that would soon earn its Parisian birthplace as the go-to European spiritual home of improvised and avant-garde music. Spearheaded by pianist and composer François Tusques, this 1965 French album laid the foundations -- alongside Jef Gilson's 1963 album Enfin! (OI 020LP) -- for a unique satellite brand of jazz that would later provide visiting Afro American avant-garde players with a vibrant Parisian platform. With Free Jazz, you not only hear the unique differences within the Gallic approach to the art form (combining masterful somber cinematic changes with aerated free-form percussion and erratic reed and brass), but you also witness the early, lesser savored secret ingredients that would carry France's mainstream pop culture into truly uncharted and unrivalled territories. Best known as the soundtrack composer to the horror-tica films of Jean Rollin, Tusques is joined here by sax and flute player Francois Jeanneau, who later led Triangle, France's leading French language prog-jazz-rock act. Featuring three players from Enfin!, Free Jazz combines the skills of Jeanneau, with clarinet player Michel Portal, and trumpeter Bernard Vitet. In addition to this, Free Jazz also boasts the inclusion of double bass master Bernard "Beb" Guérin, a contributor to Sonny Sharrock's Monkey-Pockie-Boo (1970). It is by no coincidence that this carefully selected ensemble would be enlisted as the backing group for politically driven singer-songwriter Colette Magny (arguably influencing Brigitte Fontaine to adopt The Art Ensemble Of Chicago as her backing band). This album also captures a rare glimpse of percussionist Charles Saudrais in free-form mode after his departure from the Barney Wilen Quartet, resulting in the follow-up record 1970's Le Nouveau Jazz (CACK 014LP) for actor Marcel Mouloudji's privately funded label. This glimpse into a seldom documented underground of a domestic, revolutionary, uncompromised spiritual art-form reveals the other-side of abstracted French music which, alongside musique concrète, protest pop, symphonic rock, and Zeuhl-skool electronic prog, created a homegrown, self-contained music industry that influenced a universe of Gallic magnetic inspiration. Taken from Tusques's master-tape archive. Features two rare original outtakes which did not appear on the original album; Includes a facsimile of the original Tusques-penned booklet. TamikrestChatma LP  Restocked. Gatefold LP version with CD. "Tamikrest" means "crossing" in the language of the Kel Tamashek, a traditionally nomadic Saharan people that are commonly referred to as the Tuaregs. It is an apt name for a band that so successfully merges the values of their timeless culture with the sounds and visions they have encountered on a headlong journey to the concert stages and iPods of the world. Since the band emerged onto the international scene with their debut album Adagh, they have been in constant motion, moving between the Sahara and Europe as though these places were next-door neighbors. All the while, during this same time period, their homeland has suffered increasingly profound and catastrophic events. Originally hailing from Kidal, in the northeast of Mali, as the result of ongoing war, persecution and political collapse, most of the band now lives in exile in Algeria. These last years have been intensely vivid for Tamikrest, defined as they have been by both tragic sadness (families and friends turned refugees, the brutal imposition of Sharia law in their hometown) and collective growth (their musical dreams building one upon another). Their album Chatma, their third, deftly navigates these experiences and fashions them into a fully persuasive and poetic musical document. The album is filled with sober reflection, moral indignation, musical experimentation, cultural celebration and the kick of rock and roll. Chatma is also Tamikrest's first album to be wholly written around a defined theme. In Tamashek, "chatma" means "sisters," and the band has dedicated the album in their own words to: "the courage of the Tuareg women, who have ensured both their children's survival and the morals of their fathers and brothers." Chatma also delivers Tamikrest's most wide-screen and wide-ranging sonic statement to-date. The infectious, sing-along rock stylings of "Imanin bas zihoun," the acoustic seduction of "Adounia tabarat," the Pink Floyd-influenced montage "Assikal" and the lush, melancholy ambiance of the album's finale, "Timtar," all add up to a sustained audio adventure. Echoes of dub, blues, psychedelia, funk and even art-rock are seamlessly woven by Tamikrest into their increasingly individual take on the Tuareg musical tradition. And on an album where the title translates as "sisters," it makes perfect sense that this time around we hear the full emergence of the haunting voice of female vocalist Wonou Walet Sidati in tandem with lead vocalist Ousmane Ag Mossa. A new guitarist, Paul Salvagnac has also joined the band, bringing with him fresh textures and possibilities. Contemporary Tuareg music has produced several unforgettable albums in recent years and Chatma certainly deserves to be ranked with these. But one also gets the sense, when listening to Chatma that there is something uniquely innovative and exploratory about Tamikrest's musical quest and that at last they have stepped into a wide-open space of their own. VALiving Is Hard: West African Music in Britain, 1927-1929  $18.992017 repress; Honest Jon's has prepared a series drawing on some of the earliest recordings in the EMI Hayes Archive -- recovered from more than 150,000 78s -- staggering music from Iraq, Turkey, Caucasia, Lebanon, Iran (including sides made in Old Street, London, in 1909), Egypt and the Belgian Congo. This series opener presents the music of the West African underground of 1920s Britain, recorded at Hayes and released on the Zonophone label (which exported nearly all the records to West Africa). You can hear Caribbean influences here, the promise of highlife there, but Living Is Hard mostly disavows fusion and assimilation. And by contrast with antecedents in the history of black music in Britain -- minstrelsy and spirituals, for example, ragtime and jazz -- these recordings are unhitched from the protocols of a white listenership. These are startling, trenchant, elemental roots -- carrying troubled news home, along with signs of the new African nationalism -- and an enthralling glimpse of other lives, other times. Artists include: Oni Johnson, Isaac Jackson, Ben Simmons, Harry E. Quashie, Douglas Papafio, Prince Zulamkah, The West African Instrumental Quintet, The Ga Quartet, Domingo Justus, James Tucker, John Mugat, Kumasi Trio, James Thomas, Nicholas De Heer, George Williams Aingo and James Brown. PUPILLO/ALEXANDRE BABEL/CASPAR BROTZMANN, MASSIMOLive At Candy Bomber Studios, Vol.1 LP  $22.99Curtains up for a new power trio: bass player Massimo Pupillo (Zu, Laniakea), drummer Alexandre Babel (Sudden Infant) and Caspar Brötzmann on guitar. As the title Live At The Candy Bomber Studios, Vol.1 indicates, this album is the first cut from an inspired recording meeting. Raw energy with full focus; three instrumentalists, at the peak of their skills, blend noise rock, drone, and improvisation into two relentless, epic pieces. The line-up consists of Massimo Pupillo, bass player in Zu, Laniakea, and countless other constellations and drummer Alexandre Babel who is a prolific player in the experimental/contemporary field (artistic director of Swiss percussion group Eklekto, member of Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, and soloist who has performed with Otomo Yoshihide and Keiji Haino) and a steady member of the noise band Sudden Infant. And last but not least there's Caspar Brötzmann on guitar who has gained high reputation as one of the most radical guitarists around, admired by acclaimed artists like Thurston Moore ("probably one of the best guitarists I've ever met!") and Stephen O'Malley. A powerful unit, recorded live in the studio by Ingo Krauss who had already worked with Brötzmann on the Caspar Brötzmann Massaker albums Der Abend Der Schwarzen Folklore (1992) and Koksofen (1993). 180 gram vinyl; Includes download code; Edition of 500. TAYLOR, HOLLISAbsolute Bird 2CD  $44.99"This is an extraordinary and important work, breathtaking in its apparent simplicity but raised on a lifetime of study, thought and contrariness. All 41 tracks are, in one way or another, built around transcriptions or recordings of the Australian pied butcherbird -- mining every possible variation. Each composition pairs a bird, or other environmental sounds, with one or several instruments: standard, soprano, bass and contrabass recorders, violin, vibraphone, bassoon, viola, flute, cello, bass clarinet, vocal ensemble, bass or string quartet -- all seamlessly linked together. As with Berio's cadenzas, virtuosic and extended techniques are standard, and long stretches of each CD side are programmed for continuous and highly contrasted listening. The featured soloists are all recognized virtuosi. This is an important release because although it's clearly music, and clearly composed, it's also birdsong -- and we're not sure, culturally, whether we think that's music or not. Then there are the categorically non-musical sounds that play a central and continuous role. It's a CD that will attract attention in experimental and contemporary circles precisely because it puts these elements together in a new and provocative way. There's a story here. The recording quality is excellent, the performers, human and otherwise, virtuosic (without making a fuss about it) and the sweep quietly vast. Both CDs come in the inner covers of a very strong and substantial hard-cover book containing 48 full-colour pages of notes, reflections, explanations and photographs." Sky Music A Tribute V2 LP+CD $27.99A vinyl-only release of two epic outtakes that didn't make the main album, Sky Music: A Tribute To Terje Rypdal (RCD 2194CD/RLP 3194LP), due to lack of space. Guitarist and composer Terje Rypdal (1947) is probably as close as one gets to a living legend in Norwegian music. Sky Music is a heartfelt celebration of an inspirational artist and truly unique guitarist who hasn't fully received the due credit and recognition he deserves for over 50 years of music making. Initiated by the experimental US guitarist and lifelong Rypdal fan Henry Kaiser, Rune Grammofon put together an all-star band including keyboardist and long-time Rypdal side-kick Ståle Storløkken (Elephant9, Supersilent), bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (Scorch Trio, The Thing), drummer Gard Nilssen (Bushman's Revenge), guitarists Even H. Hermansen (Bushman´s Revenge) and Hedvig Mollestad, Finnish guitarist Raoul Björkenheim (Scorch Trio), and Swedish guitarist Reine Fiske (Dungen). Kaiser also played and produced. The Sky Music project also includes additional contributions from Hans Magnus Ryan (Motorpsycho), Jim O'Rourke, Bill Frisell, Nels Cline, David Torn, and Erik Friedlander. Includes CD. SKY MUSICSky Music: A Tribute To Terje Rypdal 2LP  $33.99Double LP version. Guitarist and composer Terje Rypdal (1947) is probably as close as one gets to a living legend in Norwegian music. He has received a number of awards, including three Norwegian Grammies (Spellemannpris), the last being the honorary award in 2005. Sky Music is a heartfelt celebration of an inspirational artist and truly unique guitarist who hasn't fully received the due credit and recognition he deserves for over 50 years of music making. Initiated by the experimental US guitarist and lifelong Rypdal fan Henry Kaiser, Rune Grammofon put together an all-star band including keyboardist and long-time Rypdal side-kick Ståle Storløkken (Elephant9, Supersilent), bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (Scorch Trio, The Thing), drummer Gard Nilssen (Bushman's Revenge), guitarists Even H. Hermansen (Bushman´s Revenge) and Hedvig Mollestad, Finnish guitarist Raoul Björkenheim (Scorch Trio), and Swedish guitarist Reine Fiske (Dungen). Kaiser also played and produced while Hans Magnus Ryan (Motorpsycho) added bits and pieces and Jim O'Rourke beamed in his exquisite contributions to "Sunrise" from Tokyo. Bill Frisell, Nels Cline, and David Torn delivered their solo interpretations, Cline with the aid of cellist Erik Friedlander. SPOERRI, BRUNOVoice Of Taurus LP  $27.99We Release Whatever The Fuck We Want Records present a reissue of the highly sought-after electronic/sci-fi disco/proto-techno/ambient masterpiece Voice Of Taurus by Swiss music pioneer and synth super wizard Bruno Spoerri, available on vinyl for the first time since its original release in 1978. Surrounded with a formidable family of legendary synthesizers, primitive modulators, and audio gear -- transformed and customized à la Spoerri --, armed with an extraordinary talent for improvisation, and deeply inspired by the likes of Wendy Carlos, Pierre Schaeffer, and the then freshly released Close Encounter of the Third Kind (1977), Bruno Spoerri envisioned Voice Of Taurus as "electronic pop conceived using an experimental and jazz approach". The result is an out-of-this-world sonic adventure where early techno sounds blend with synth-based sci-fi soundtrack vibes, krautrock explorations, and retro-futuristic disco madness. It's unique, catchy, cosmic, and meditative -- it's a must have for all record collectors of the galaxy... welcome to Planet Spoerri. Still very active recording, touring, and collaborating (with Julian Sartorius, Franz Treichler of Young Gods, Marco Repetto of Grauzone, Roger Girod, to name a few), Bruno Spoerri is a multiple award-winning Swiss music icon, whose career started in the 1950s. His works spans jazz, electronic music, film, and TV work, and everything in between. Improvisational maestro and synthesizer mega-connoisseur, Mr. Spoerri has influenced an entire generation of producers and musicians -- even Jay-Z sampled him. Housed in a 350 gram jacket; Includes new liner notes. SAIZ, SUSORainworks 2LP  $29.99Following 2016's compilation of archival recordings by Suso Saiz titled Odisea (MFM 009CD/LP), Music From Memory mark their 20th release with an album of new works by the Spanish electronic music pioneer. Recorded in Madrid between January and February 2016, this is Suso Saiz's first release of new music in nearly ten years. Titled Rainworks, this double LP release was originally part of a commission from a Canary Islands water company. The first ideas for the compositions developed from a documentary that Suso had seen suggesting the possibility of water molecules having their own memory. As Suso himself explains, he became fascinated with the possibility of an eternal being, changing its cyclical condition from solid to gaseous state, travelling through and between the Earth and the Sky, as a witness and keeper of the true history of Earth and Mankind. Suso, his son Emil Saiz, and pianist Raph Killhertz set out to explore this metaphysical process of cyclical movement through music in Rainworks. Developing from the original commissioned tracks into a much more elaborate project, the album's process became something of a mystical journey, drawing on aspects of minimalism and modernism. The music is also embedded in textured natural soundscapes and spoken word passages which were recorded and processed by Suso himself. Despite having the immediacy of an improvised piece, Rainworks was in entirely composed by Suso. Whilst on one hand it appears very much as an electronic album there are in fact many acoustic elements to the recording. A resonant piano (a grand piano re-amplified using its resonant box and harp to generate effects) as well as guitars (with simple effects) are played in Suso's inimitable hypnotic way, slowly drawing the listener into a transportive state or lucid dream. KHALILThe Water We Drink LP  $21.99The Water We Drink is the debut album from Khalil, a close confidante of Posh Isolation, and, naturally, a project close to the label's heart. With an iridescent shower of auto-tuned vocals and encrypted synthetic forms, Khalil presents a luminous route into a future of cadences pitched to a crushing intensity. As the new project of Nikolaj Vonsild, best known for his pop endeavors in the synth quartet When Saints Go Machine, as well as his acoustic duo Cancer, Khalil is his strongest vision to date. The collaborative platform for Vonsild's searing angelic and alien vocals is produced with Simon Formann, better known as Yen Towers and formerly of Lower, along with Villas Klint. With water, people feel differently. Indifferently of course, it approaches a sense of touch quite unlike any other matter or form. It slips and caresses, appealing to a sensuality so intuitive it barely registers beyond its immediacy. It's an urgency that always arrives. The ocean tells this through the shore; a perennial pleasure, a forgivable obsession. That the coast, its container, the edge of where people safely stand and where water waits, is a form just as much as it is a dissolving place, then considering a design such as that of an Evian natural spring water bottle amounts to staring at the stars. Thematically, Khalil draws constellations and cites emotive signals with this kind of deep union between form and touch. Finding perhaps a place undiscovered. Across The Water We Drink, the impulses of the romantic lyricism are diverted through artificial mechanisms and unnatural vocal terrains. Set against a melodic chorus of fractured pop, there is a certain sense in which the aching wane of Khalil feels like an ensemble of identities grasping for a form, as water may grasp for land. If there's reason to feel that bottled water is a portable piece of something greater than everything, then Khalil distributes high definition pop tropes with that same logic. The radio is an ocean, and Khalil's longing a hydrating force.

BETTER DAYS ARE A TOENAIL AWAY

The double album.

It’s a daunting endeavor. There has to be a reason beyond “well, we had a shitload of songs, so uh...” But you also don’t want to get too highfalutin about it. Say what you will, but I’ve never listened to The Wall from front to back. I have, however, listened to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness from start to finish on hundreds of occasions. Billy Corgan had told the music press that his album would be “The Wall for Generation X.”

Jim DeRogatis, music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, took exception to Corgan’s confidence. Having always had a bit of a grudge against Billy, referring to him sarcastically as “The Great Pumpkin,” he made the following gripe in Rolling Stone when he reviewed the Pumpkin’s magnum opus:

“We don't need no education/We don't need no thought control" seems deeper, more universal and more entertaining — heck, a lot more inspiring — than "Living makes me sick/So sick I wish I'd die."

DeRogatis has a point, but it’s not a very fair one. The Pink Floyd lyric he cites is a major recurring line from that song. It’s very deliberately anthemic, and Roger Waters knew this, and hired a children’s choir to sing it with him in the studio. (Well, maybe he didn’t hire the kids, but he probably paid their parents. This was the 1970s, back when people actually paid for music, and Pink Floyd had sold millions and millions of albums. Somebody got paid for those kids to sing on that damn song, or we’d have heard of a class action lawsuit filed by said children, now older adults, long before now.)

My point is that DeRogatis picked a very memorable Pink Floyd lyric taken from a highly visible single, but cherrypicked an obscure line from a non-single from Mellon Collie, despite the fact that the album had seven singles and anthemic lines galore. 

Here’s a thought. I’m going to do the same thing right now, just google “The Wall” lyrics, and scroll down until I find something silly. Be right back.

Okay, here we are. A couplet from Pink Floyd, ladies and gentlemen, in all their brilliant brilliance:

Ooooo I need a dirty woman. Ooooo I need a dirty girl.

So yeah. That��s not very good. And mildly pedophilic. Just goes to show you that when you cherrypick random lines from a band’s lyric sheets, you’re apt to stumble across some silly doggerel. This is rock n’ roll, after all, not Shakespeare. And although Billy Corgan has written some truly wonderful lyrics in his day, “Tonight Tonight” being a personal favourite of mine, which I borrowed from a little bit when writing the words to “The Fog,” lifting the second half of the following couplet: “and the embers never fade in a city by the lake/the place where you were born.”

This is all to say that it’s hard to write good lyrics, and even harder to write good lyrics for a double album. 

We have a line from our newest effort, Almost Awake, which I think is pretty damn poetic:

bitter but beautiful terror will move her and say goodbye to the blank white beaches of memory

That’s not bad, that whole “blank white beaches of memory” thing. Sometimes, when the moon is bright blue, I can manage not to make an ass of myself and those who surround me, such as bandmates, my City Night bretheren.

We were going to call the double album Keep It Beautiful, but I’m not crazy about that idea anymore. First of all, we already have a reference to Ontario with Carry Me Ontario. Second of all, while it might be better than Yours to Discover, it’s simply not a very interesting phrase. The last few albums titles have been phrases that attempted to describe either the music therein or the feeling the music was supposed to give you. This time I want to go with a line from one of the songs that sums up the idea, the theme of the record. Since this one is about, once again, friendship, nostalgia, denial, hope, and the pursuit of happiness, we’re going to call it Better Days Are A Toenail Away.

We have a ton of instrumentals finished already, well over 25, and the album looks like it’s going to have 30 to 35 songs on it, well over our current high water mark of 26 on Complete Lung Champions.

There will be a few repeats, naturally. I’d love to do a full band version of “White Pines On The Plain” with the guys, or maybe “Make It Mine.” There will be two versions of “Ocean City,” one with James on drums and one with a drum machine that sounds like it would fit on Deep Space Bistro 2: Into the Bistro, our long-delayed but upcoming sequel. There will also be two versions of “Basement Nights” bookending the record. The first take will have vocals, the second take and last song on the album will be instrumental because I fucking love how the instruments sound and the vocals take away from them a little bit. The reverb tails on those verse guitar leads are just so fucking delicious. And that lower guitar with the crunchy distortion...I just love it.

You can hear the instrumental version of “Basement Nights” by clicking on the link: https://soundcloud.com/the-big-city-nights/going-like-leaving

It’s unmastered but that’s the version that will close our upcoming double album.

So yeah, keep an eye out eh? If the three of us ever have the same day off work again, we will try to get together and make some damn music. If this should ever happen, you’ll be the first to know. My hope is to have the record out before summer, since it’s such a summertime album, especially breezy tunes like “If It Kills You” and “Expert Advice.” Admittedly, “Faces & Interfaces” has an autumn vibe to it, ditto for “Fighting Ways,” but ultimately the album is emerald green and warm and sunny. Better Days Are A Toenail Away. Can you dig it? Just wait til you see the front cover. Just wait til you hear the music.