By the mid-'70s, Soft Machine had moved from the global Columbia Records family to Harvest, a British label specializing in U.K. and European rock bands. After their pivotal albums Fifth, Six, and Seven, the group acclimated guitarist Allan Holdsworth, and eventually John Etheridge, to their more distinctly instrumental jazz-rock sound, while retaining electric bass guitarist Roy Babbington, keyboardist and reedman Karl Jenkins, drummer John Marshall, and keyboardist Mike Ratledge. Long gone were the days when Kevin Ayers and Daevid Allen identified the group's more hippie-ish sound, Robert Wyatt was a driving force in their collective consciousness, Elton Dean was injecting exciting creative improvising saxophone, and Hugh Hopper was their definitive bassist…

2007 installment of Warner UK's very popular Platinum Collection series. Each disc contains the artist's finest recordings from the WEA vaults including album tracks, singles and more. This 16 track compilation from Soul diva Betty Wright includes 'Clean Up Woman', 'He's Bad Bad Bad' and 'Girls Can't Do What the Guys Do'. Warner.

In the Baroque period, there really was no such thing as an "orchestra" as we understand the term today. There were large collections of singers and players brought together for special occasions, but aside from those, an "orchestral" work was anything that required more than five or six players. Bach's harpsichord concertos, for example, can be performed by a couple of dozen string players plus the soloist, or with an accompaniment of one person per part, which is more or less what we get here. These small forces permit an unprecedented transparency of sound and sharpness of attack, even if some weight and body of tone necessarily get sacrificed. It's a perfectly legitimate way to play the music, however, and you won't find it better done than here.

San Diego, California-based metal outfit CARNIFEX will release its seventh studio album, "World War X", on August 2 via Nuclear Blast. World War X was produced by Carnifex and Jason Suecof. Recording and mixing was handled by Jason Suecof at Audiohammer Studio in Sanford, Florida. Vocals were tracked by Mick Kenney at The Barracks Studio in Huntington Beach, California. Arch Enemy frontwoman Alissa White-Gluz guested on the track ‘No Light Shall Save Us’, while New York-based guitarist Angel Vivaldi guested on the song ‘All Roads Lead To Hell’.

Joan Osborne set the world on fire for a few minutes back in the '90s with her reading of Eric Bazilian's "One of Us," a single that dominated the charts for the better part of a year and continues to get radio play. The album, Relish, sold into the millions, making everybody and her brother (especially the folks at her label Interscope) think she was going to be a superstar. It didn't work out that way. Despite being one of the greatest R&B and soul singers around (before she played in the big leagues she issued a few independent recordings on her own Womanly Hips label that offer stellar proof of this), she got her rep as a pop singer; worse yet, as part of the '90s wave of female acts who dominated the charts for a little while and was a part of the first Lilith Fair, while singing pop songs at half power no less.

Walter Wanderley's debut album 'O Samba É Mais Samba' was released in Argentina as 'El Samba Es Mas Samba Con Walter Wanderley', the North American market named this LP as 'Walter Wanderley's Brazilian Organ', and a second release in US made it as 'From Rio With Love'. Wanderley was known for his distinctive staccato stuttering style and mastery of the Hammond B-3 organ and on later recordings and during live concerts a L Series Hammond. Walter Wanderley was already famous in his native country Brazil in the late 1950s and became an internationally renowned star in the mid-1960s through his collaboration with the singer Astrud Gilberto.

Robert Schumann's late music has undergone a revival, with its main traits of monothematicism, dense, close motivic work, and a certain spiky unpredictability having been redefined from faults into virtues. A good way, perhaps, to think about works like these three violin sonatas is that the young Brahms, visiting the Schumann household and mooning over the unavailable Clara, might easily have heard them and been directly influenced by them. Indeed, these pieces have the kind of long-range connections you find in Brahms, combined with a somewhat gnarly level of local detail, without the memorable tunes of Schumann's earlier works.

When dissected carefully, The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking becomes a fascinating conceptual voyage into the workings of the human psyche. As an abstract peering into the intricate functions of the subconscious, Waters' first solo album involves numerous dream sequences that both figuratively and symbolically unravel his struggle with marriage, fidelity, commitment, and age at the height of a midlife crisis…

Based out of the hard rock-rich Finnish capital city, Helsinki's Battle Beast specializes in no-holds-barred, mace to the face, vintage European power metal. Originally formed in 2008, the band underwent a few lineup changes before settling on guitarists Anton Kabanen and Juuso Soinio, drummer Pyry Vikki, bass player Eero Sipilä, keyboard player Janne Björkroth, and powerhouse female vocalist Nitte Valo. They inked a record deal with Finnish label Hype Records in 2010 and issued their debut album, Steel, the following year. The record did well regionally, and eventually caught the ear of Nuclear Blast, which reissued the album internationally in 2012.

Under his stage name Forteba he has produced outstanding deep house and tech house singles and albums for the UCM.ONE music label "Plastic City". Now the Hungarian-born artist presents his first lounge longplayer "System Comfort" under his real name Krisztian Dobrocsi for the label Mole Listening Pearls. Krisztian Dobrocsi comes from the Hungarian town of Vac, where he found his true vocation relatively early: to produce electronic music of all colours. Starting with breakbeat and chill-out music, he soon ventured into the world of four-four rhythms, deeply inspired by the German Deep House. For Mole Listening Pearls he has now found a more colourful, almost cheerful colour for his music with his album of 13 tracks. "System Comfort" sounds organic and like pulsating but relaxed life.