To commemorate the 25th anniversary of Mark’s debut solo release Golden Heart in 1996, a new box set, Mark Knopfler - The Studio Albums 1996-2007, will be released on 1st October Worldwide, and 10th December in the US.
Gathering his first five post-Dire Straits solo albums (not counting film scores), and a bonus disc of B-sides titled The Gravy Train, this collection is as sleepy and nonchalant as an old friend’s affable shrug. Knopfler does what he does, blending folk, blues, country and rock into a tension-free take on Americana that’s faintly personal but more about delivering a carpet atmosphere of reflective rumination.
The audio of each album has been newly remastered by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios in London.

If you're familiar with Alessandrini and his sparkling period instrument ensemble you expect interpretations featuring rhythmic drive, colorful playing, and original insights. Those characteristics are what help make this version of Bach's perennial and oft-recorded Brandenburg Concertos so compelling. Tempos are generally on the fast side, but never overly swift, while slow movements have just the right touch of soulfulness. Virtually without exception, the solo bits are done with imaginative, fluent expertise, and Gabriele Cassone's rendition of the famous trumpet part of the Second Brandenburg provides musical thrills, as well as virtuoso ones. Alessandrini himself takes us on a wild ride through the Fifth Concerto's brilliant harpsichord cadenza.

"Ukrainian blackened death/doom metal offensive 1914 continue to reflect the gruesome tales of World War I, its soldiers’ fate, their death, fear and feats to be never forgotten, and unleash their new opus, Where Fear and Weapons Meet, on October 22nd, via Napalm Records. Its eleven tracks of pure historic harshness follow up to the band’s sophomore full-length, The Blind Leading the Blilnd (2018), and debut, Eschatology of War (2015), both highly acclaimed amongst critics, and create a sophisticated variety of massively brutal blackened death metal accented by dramatic and realistic audio soundscapes and disquieting melodies spiced with the approach of sludge and doom!

British extreme metallers CRADLE OF FILTH will release their 13th studio album, "Existence Is Futile", on October 22. Pieced together in isolation, at Grindstone Studios in Suffolk with studio guru Scott Atkins (DEVILMENT, BENEDICTION, VADER), the band's latest chef-d'oeuvre is a pitch-black, perverse and at times absurdly brutal and extreme masterpiece following a truly nihilistic concept: "The album is about existentialism, existential dread and fear of the unknown," frontman Dani Filth explains. "The concept wasn't created by the pandemic. We'd written it long before that began, but the pandemic is the tip of the cotton-bud as far as the way the world is headed, you know? I guess the title, 'Existence Is Futile', does sound a little morbid. But again, it's more about recognizing that truth and saying that everything is permitted because nothing really matters, which mimics the occultist Aleister Crowley's maxim. We all know we're going to die, so we might as well indulge life while we possess it. The final track on the album — 'Us, Dark, Invincible' — really drives that point home. Also, the artwork for this record was created by the Latvian visionary Arthur Berzinsh, who also dressed the last two albums, and that reeks of the exceedingly beautiful yet apocalyptic too."

Glass Hammer return with ‘Skallagrim – Into The Breach’, Part Two of last year’s ‘Dreaming City’ which found lyricist, bassist and co-producer, Steve Babb, drawing inspiration from sword & sorcery novels of the seventies. Now the album has inspired an actual four-hundred page novel, “Skallagrim – In The Vales Of Pagarna”, which Babb plans to release in early 2022.

Handel and Scarlatti together? Long ago, in Rome (for a musical joust before the most eminent cardinals), in Venice (at a masked ball where Scarlatti recognised the faceless harpsichordist: “It could be no one but the famous Saxon, or the devil”), in London (where an opera by Scarlatti was staged). Together again under the pen of Charles Burney, who celebrated them as the two supreme masters of the harpsichord, the ‘heavenly twins’. And together once more in the little church in Haarlem to which Pierre Hantaï returns like a pilgrim.

“Recording the complete Preludes is like painting notes with an unlimited palette of sound!” writes pianist Fanny Azzuro in the notes to her debut album for Rubicon. “Playing this music is exhilarating. The danger is that you lose control of your emotions and yield to the temptation to pile on the pathos in music that is so naturally expressive.