Harpist Julie Campiche’s instrument and music are polyphonic and polymorphous. She plays jazz with her quartet, modern chamber music with her Strings Project and also composes music for performances and film. By that she courageously seeks a musical expression for contemporary themes The new release Unspoken is Julie Campiche’s first solo album, with individual contributions about important and world changing women.

"Shards" continues the sonic exploration the trio began in 2023 with "Refract", which The New York Times praised for working “across medium and style, with composed elements and prepared loops.” "Shards" reflects a deepening and maturation of the group’s collaborative language, pushing further into the real-time design and construction of musical events.

The recording project Northscapes weaves works—from the first decades of the twenty-first century by composers from the Nordic and Baltic countries of Europe—into a tapestry of soundscapes, vibrating between landscape and the imagination, between the external and internal, between nature and psyche. What these works for piano solo share is a particular attunement to nature, reverberating out of the ever-present reservoir of pagan myths, legends, and folk music of the region. Their sensitivity to the sonic environment allows these composers to explore the liminal space dividing yet connecting landscape, soundscape, and mindscape.

Ondines releases on Baltic composers continue with a new exciting release featuring recent orchestral compositions by New York-based Lithuanian composer ibuokle Martinaityte (b. 1973) composed within a span of six years performed by Lithuanian orchestras conducted by the young talented Lithuanian conductor Giedre slekyte and pianist Gabrielius Alekna as soloist. Martinaityte was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020. Among her output are impressive orchestral compositions with evocative titles and beautiful orchestral textures with precision to detail.

Contralto Nathalie Stutzmann shines a light on the deep-voiced female singers of the Baroque era, often overshadowed by the extravagant talents and reputations of castrato singers like Farinelli and Caffarelli. Her programme of Handel, Vivaldi, Porpora, Bononcini, Caldara and Gasparini displays the variety of operatic roles – both female and male – assumed by contraltos like Vittoria Tesi and Anna Marchesini. “We must remember that the opera composers of the early 18th century saw the female contralto and the male castrato as vocally interchangeable,” says Stutzmann, “and that the voice most closely resembling a castrato is not the countertenor – produced using a falsetto technique – but the contralto, which is a natural voice.” Stutzmann both sings and conducts Orfeo 55, the instrumental ensemble she founded a decade ago

British blues guitarist Joanne Shaw Taylor comes off as a talented, if unfinished, young blues artist on her second album, Diamonds in the Dirt. Leading a quartet also including Steve Potts (drums), Dave Smith (bass), and Rick Steff (keyboards), Taylor turns in a set of original songs that serve as platforms for her electric lead work. The CD booklet prints all her lyrics, which she sings in a smoky, throaty alto, and the words turn out to be a succession of clichés, with a heavy emphasis on fire imagery, as titles like "Let It Burn" and "World on Fire" suggest. Bad behavior, bad luck, and bad love are alluded to, all of which are more than enough to justify the emotion Taylor expresses in her singing and the fervor with which she plays the guitar.

BMA Winner for Best New Blues Artist 2012, Samantha Fish makes much of her growing maturity on her second solo album ‘Black Wind Howlin’. Given the wide variety of relationship songs and a mix of reflective and self confident narratives, it appears she’s taken stock and come out the other side with a clearer sense of who she is.