One of the great slide guitarists of our time, Michael is well known in the UK and not so well known elsewhere. Very well played with great tone; if you like slide guitar / the blues, this is a fine contemporary release a bit comparable to Jimmy Agren but straighter.

“There's something fun and catchy about Michael Messer's eclectic album, King Guitar. Although the guitar featured on the cover is a vintage acoustic model, the music runs the gauntlet between down-and-dirty electric blues and....

“The concert was recorded for radio in Tokyo in 1985, where the band asserts its worldwide success. It is one of the only jazz bands that were able to fill stadiums in the 80s! Of course, since the 1970s, the music of Metheny and Mays has evolved quite a bit, with synthesizers, influences from + to + Latin (Pedro Aznar with percussion). But it remains of a fairly exceptional level and has not aged poorly.
Titles like Are you going with me? remain decades after real masterpieces. This CD is properly...

Our second release by Italian soundtrack / post minimalist composer Piero Milesi, released over 30 years ago, La Camera Astratta (The Abstract Room) is a soundtrack to a ‘video opera’ from 1987, made in collaboration with composer Daniel Bacalov.
LONG out of print, we found a very few lightly marked copies in the lost warehouse!

“La Camera Astratta is the result of the amazing collaboration between Piero Milesi & Daniel Bacalov with the experimental theatre-performance of the Studio Azzurro..

"Look is a concentrated soundscape experience inspired by Japanese synth guitars from the 1970's. An exciting excursion from his previous singer-songwriter material, this release fits in line with similarly groundbreaking records such as Brian Eno's "Music for Airports".”

“Blake Mills earned a reputation as producer and guitarist who prized authenticity in his work, which is what makes this 2018 album Look so startling. Consisting of five tracks of wordless, formless ambient music, Look is...

One of the legendary fiascos of modern music, which deserves a second look and reconsideration.
The concert was originally conceived as a "live workshop" of newly composed music which would be recorded for release by United Artists (this was also a way to save money) but rescheduling, lack of rehearsal time, poor sound and interruptions led to the event and subsequent album, which featured only about half the material recorded, being considered a disaster, it features the leader performing...

“Was there ever a more paradoxical band than the Minutemen? Comprising Dennes D. Boon, Mike Watt and drummer George Hurley, all natives of working class seaport San Pedro.
Forever jocular and unpretentious to a fault, the Minutemen were alt-rock's blue-collar, union heavies of the 80s underground while also profoundly avant-garde. This was the age of Reagan, ripe for tearing apart and kicking the crap out of, but rather than get lost in a verbal revolt and a street riot, the Minutemen made their own...

This 1976 release is one of Joni’s very greatest of great works. She’s in her full exploratory period here, using jazz influences and crazy tunings and a relatively small number of musicians, all of whom turn in stunning, restrained performances which are perfectly subservient to the needs of the songs. Even Jaco Pastorious, one of the most tragically talented musicians ever, and who never met a performance need that he couldn’t over-play on, is simply perfect on here.

“Joni Mitchell's Hejira is...

“Shadows and Light is one of my favourite albums of all time so I was a bit nervous about this. The sound quality is not great, despite what the CD promises is remastered wonderfulness. I tried this on state of the art hi fi equipment which was not a good idea. I then put it on a cheap tatty CD player which lives in the kitchen and it is fine. It just sounds like a concert on the radio.
The performances are excellent and Pat's solo on Amelia is actually better than on S+D although it stops abruptly...

The good: This presents Monk and his post Coltrane quartet of Charlie Rouse, Ahmed Abdul-Malik and Roy Haynes in a performance from the Five Spot in 1958, several years before he was so well documented. Additionally, you get to hear Baroness Nica's voice introducing him.

The bad: These recordings were made with a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder, utilizing a single microphone. There is background noise and table chatter. It's all audible, but hardly 'hi-fi'.

Live, professional (radio?) recordings by Monk and his long-standing group (Charlie Rouse, Butch Warren, Ben Riley), recorded in Paris in 1964.

Thelonious Monk-piano
Ray Copeland-trumpet
Clark Terry-trumpet
Jimmy Cleveland-trombone
Phil Woods-alto sax
Charlie Rouse-tenor sax
Johnny Griffin-tenor sax
Larry Gales-bass
Ben Riley-drums

This excellent recording of a show from 11/3/67 has been released a zillion ways, but it’s a very rare chance to hear Monk with a larger group in front of an audience.

“Pianist/composer Thelonious Monk led a quartet throughout the 1960s but on a European tour in

“Thelonious Monk (piano/arranger) began his illustrious relationship with Riverside Records on the pair of July 21 and 27, 1955, dates needed to complete the eight sides for Plays Duke Ellington (1955).
Monk commands a trio that also presents the talents of Oscar Pettiford (bass) and Kenny Clarke (drums) on all the tracks sans "Solitude," which appropriately enough features an unaccompanied piano. The delicacy and inherently intricate melodies that Duke Ellington is best known for are perfectly....

This is the demo tape from late 1965 that got them their Polydor contract and led to their early 1966 album, as well as including their 1964 pre-Monks single.
It’s a little less primal and unhinged, but it’s also six months earlier! It’s still shocking to believe that anything even remotely like this existed in 1965
The Monks were a crazy, pre-punk reductionist rock band made up of five US soldiers stationed in Germany, who stayed in Germany after their discharge from the service and who...

“Due to interpersonal strife, the Moody Blues called it quits between 1972's Seventh Sojourn and 1978's Octave. Presumably attempting to satiate hungry Moodies fans, Threshold released this vintage concert recording from a 1969 Royal Albert Hall show. The band was young and at the peak of its popularity, and they sound full of promise and ambition. Most of the songs come from their classic concept album Days of Future Passed and its two successors. Having not yet settled into a more comfortable ballad...

“Oddly enough, this was the group's poorest-selling album of their psychedelic era, taking a lot longer to go gold -- for all of their presumed connection to their audience, the band was perhaps stretching that link a little thinner than usual here. The material dwells mostly on time and what its passage means, and there is a peculiar feeling of loneliness and isolation to many of the songs. This was also the last of the group's big "studio" sound productions, built up in layer upon layer of overdubbed...

Moondog was a mostly self-taught blind composer who was a fixture on streetcorners in Manhattan from the 1940's through the early 1970's, playing his compositions for whatever passersby would give him and also selling printed music. He befriended Charlie Parker and Benny Goodman among others, and my wife remembers cutting out of high school, hitch-hiking to NYC and seeing him on the street corner.
He belongs to that rare and wonderful American maverick composer school that produced Charles Ives and...

Released in 1984, this was the final recording the made as "A. More / Anthony More" (and his last solo album), this was his last 'indie rock' release of the late 70s/early 80s.
Moore was a classical composer, doing very avant garde/minimal music ala John Cage, etc in the very early 1970s, and then somehow he fell into the sphere of Faust and Peter Blegvad and Dagmar Krause, and formed Slapp Happy with Krause and Blegvad and collaborated with all of them. Then onto Henry Cow, then onto a solo career...

Take a bunch of old, traditional English ballads, a young man who loves them but also loves electronica and this is what you get. Not for traditionalists, but then again, neither was Fairport Convention...until one day it was! Conditionally recommended!

"This is just folk music from the point of view of someone that has heard hip-hop and The Smiths and Radiohead and S-Club"-Jim Moray

"This the lowdown on Moray: the man is only 21 and has un undying love for old, traditional English folk...

"A mistaken but widely-held view of Japanese music is that it consists of two completely separate and non-communicating areas: on one hand the disposable J-pop music scene based on Western models, on the other the traditional classical music world with...

“With the brilliant 'Tupelo Honey' due for release the following month, Van Morrison performed this remarkable set in San Francisco on September 5th 1971 for broadcast on KSAN-FM. Featuring a crack band, it finds him playing a variety of gems, including material from 'Astral Weeks', 'Moondance' and 'His Band & The Street Choir' as well as classic covers. A stunning overview of his solo career to date, this remastered concert is presented here in a six panel digipak together with 8 page booklet containing...

“A laid back mix of spoken word poetry from Gilli Smyth and jazzy, classic Gong textures, vignettes and humor. A lot of sax, chilled out synth and glissando guitar on this one. Overall a relaxing and artistic effort that will soothe and inspire if you approach it with an open mind. A work of art and one of the best post-70s Gong-affiliated releases I've heard.”–rym

Mountain was a New York trio of hard rockers who formed during the first generation of proto-metal and featured a dense, blues-based sound performed by Leslie West (guitar & vocals), Felix Pappalardi (bass & vocals - who, although he was a musician first, had made his name as the producer of Cream) and Corky Laing (drums). This was their first album.

"Often billed as a junior-league version of Cream, Climbing!, Mountain's debut, had a lot of things going for it as well. Indeed, West was a...

One of a number of early/mid 70s albums featuring the great and still undervalued guitarist Ray Russell in a progressive/hard rock vein. The music is definitely of its time, but Ray's talents were and still are timeless.

"Mouse had their one and only album release during 1973 and its rareness has guaranteed it a place in the Record Collector Rare Record Price guide at £80 per copy! Now released on CD for the first time with 4 bonus tracks. The remastering and artwork has been overseen by Ray...

Two pretty hot performances from two stages of Muddy’s career. The previously unreleased Boston show is good quality if a bit ‘oversaturated, sounding like a radio broadcast or soundboard, while the Newport show was his first live album and has him with truly a classic lineup of his band.

“Muddy Waters shows all new comers how to play the blues live in Boston back in 1976. Smoking hot renditions of all his best songs: Caledonia, Hoochie Coochie Man, Mannish Boy.
Muddy's back up band is...

"Na Margon is a Bauta label release, written by Ronnie Ehrs with the intention "to capture the uttermost evil and the uttermost good put to music". Ehrs says, "I do not know if I did succeed, however I would like to think that certain parts of the musi...