Bat For Lashes - aka Natasha Khan - releases her fifth studio album, entitled Lost Girls. Lost Girls is another brilliant full-length in Khan’s incredible, acclaimed discography, mixing sounds she’s always loved - heavy bass lines, synth arpeggios, Iranian pop beats, cascading choruses - with some of her finest songwriting to date. It’s an album full of romance, an homage to Los Angeles, to being a kid in the 80’s, to films that touched and changed her life. Spanning 10 tracks, Lost Girls sees Khan dreaming up her own fully formed parallel universe, creating an off-kilter coming of age film in which gangs of marauding female bikers roam our streets, teenagers make out on car hoods and a powerful female energy casts spells and leave clues for us to follow.

The Dowland Project, established by ECM's Manfred Eicher, would not please musical purists; in this installment, Romaria, it brings together an assortment of old and new instruments, including violin, viola, soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, tenor and bass recorders, Baroque guitar, and vihuela, performing music spanning nearly a millennium, most of it written before most of these instruments had been developed. The producer and performers may have deliberately chosen to ignore the principle of authentic performance practice, duplicating as closely as possible the sound of the music at the time it was created, but they are principled in the aesthetic decisions they have made.

Poor, poor Spohr! He's constantly dismissed because he's not Beethoven. What he was, though, was a thoroughly competent composer of the Beethoven ilk who wrote tons of chamber music that is not only fun to play but to hear. Nothing earth-shattering, mind you, but he was a skillful craftsman and could write in extended forms with the best of them. And he could write a tune, too. Most of his stuff is violin-driven: he was a violin virtuoso and his first violin parts are usually pretty showy.

Scriabin's Piano Sonatas (10) chart his career from Romantic piano virtuoso to mystical voyant more clearly than any of his other works. Yet hearing them in order also reveals that their increasing complexities and stylistic advances developed on a continuum, and that they are actually quite unified, despite their dramatic changes of forms, harmonies, rhythms, and tonality. Some pianists perceive a split between Sonata No. 4 and No. 5, as if that is where the seeds of Scriabin's messianic madness first took root; as a result, the cycle is frequently divided between vaguely Chopin-esque, parlor interpretations for the earlier works, and crazy, excessive readings for the remaining pieces.

The Charlie Mingus Quintet - Chazz! (1955) {Trunk Records rel 2014}
FLAC (tracks) - 16bit/44.1kHz - Official Digital Download (qobuz.com) -> 194 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 104 Mb | Cover | 5% repair rar
© 1955, 2014 Debut / Trunk Records
Jazz / Bop / Post-Bop / Bass

Seminal early work from Charles Mingus – a session that really shows him beginning to work in tightly arranged, deeply resonant styles – pushing much more deeply towards the brilliance of the late 50s! The set was originally issued on Debut, and was recorded with a great lineup that includes Mal Waldron and the enigmatic George Barrow on tenor. There's a fantastic reading of "Percussion Discussion", played here by Mingus and Max Roach (though the drummer on the rest of the set is Willie Jones) as a drum and bass duet (as opposed to Roach solo, as on a later version.) Also featured are the brilliant "All The Things You Are In C-Sharp", a pivotal track in the Mingus book, and one of our favorites ever by him – plus "Septemberly", "Work Song", and "Jump Monk".

Experience the Divine: Greatest Hits is a compilation album by American singer Bette Midler, featuring many of her best-known songs. The fourteen track compilation was released on Atlantic Records in 1993…

Jerry Reed - Four Original RCA Albums (2016) {2CD Set BGO Records BGOCD1267 rec 1967-1969}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 726 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 282 Mb | Artwork | 5% repair rar
© 1967-69, 2016 RCA / BGO Records / Sony Music | BGOCD1267
Country / Folk / Acoustic / Country-Pop / Rockabilly /Nashville Sound

The first four RCA albums of the late Jerry Reed from 1967, 1968 and 1969, Jerry Reed was a multi-talented musician and singer-songwriter, and received great public attention when Elvis Presley landed great hits with Reed's songs 'Guitar Man' and 'U.S. Male'. Reed made it to number 1 in the country charts in the early 1970s with 'Lord Mr. Ford' and 'When You're Hot, You're Hot'. In the mid-1970s he preferred a successful acting career to a return to music.