There's no mistaking Tony Joe White's signature swamp boogie. Patented in the late '60s, White has been working that same low-down blues grind ever since, taking a long sojourn from recording in the '80s before settling into a regular groove sometime around the time of the new millennium. Usually, these collections of new songs were on tiny labels – including his aptly named Swamp imprint – but 2013's Hoodoo appeared on Yep Roc and received an appropriately larger push than its recent predecessors.

Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905-88) is considered one of the most enigmatic musical figures in the history of 20th century music. He very famously, after suffering a breakdown in the late 1950’s, sat and played a single note on the piano for hour after hour, in an attempt, as he said, “to absorb the world and its overtones.” This is a fascinating sound world both simple and complex and at times hauntingly beautiful.

Christian Wolff was once the baby of the New York School, only 19 when he cast his lot with John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Earle Brown; in 2008, he is the last man standing. Solo piano music is central to Wolff's output, and on Neos' Christian Wolff: Piano Pieces, German pianist Sabine Liebner performs a nice cross section of his efforts in this medium from 1969 to 2006. It takes a pianist with some amount of insight to realize Wolff's compositions, all to some degree open ended, and he does not spell out all of the details.

Luigi Nono (1924-90) was one of the foremost composers in the 20th century who experimented in the field of electronic music. The musical score, written and adhered to by the performers, could be changed and altered by a process of electronic manipulation during the performance.

There are those for whom playing Bach's Goldberg Variations on anything but a harpsichord is an aesthetic sin. The work, they argue, was written to be played on the harpsichord and any other instrument is simply wrong. Then there are those for whom playing the Goldberg Variations on anything but a modern piano is an aesthetic mistake. The work, they contend, may have been written to be played on the harpsichord, but that is no reason to deny the music the clarity and power of the modern concert grand.

The conductor and composer Robert HP Platz was born in Baden-Baden in 1951. His musical mentor and teacher was Karlheinz Stockhausen. Robert Platz was the founder of the Ensemble Koln and was its leader for over 20 years. Rolf Hind had appeared at all the major contemporary music festivals, including Huddersfield and Brighton, and has earned himself the reputation of one of the foremost interpreters of new music.

Recorded and originally released in 1996, Rheo-Umbra is a two-part composition by Elliott Sharp for a typically bizarre ensemble consisting of electric harp, electric bass, two bass clarinets, percussion, sampler, string quartet, and electric guitar (along with the Slab, a somewhat guitarish instrument invented by Sharp himself). The first six minutes of "Rheo-Umbra 1" are built on a repetitive theme that is carried by the string quartet and muttered about, commented upon, subtly undermined and sometimes supported by the others.

Stone Records is delighted to announce the release of its first organ recital disc, the much-loved Goldberg Variations, performed by internationally-renowned organist Robert Costin. The organ used for this performance is that of Pembroke College, Cambridge, a modern reconstruction of a period instrument dating from 1708 that has been widely used for Bach performances.

On her sixth album So Good, So Right: Nicole Henry Live, Henry demonstrates her gift for sublime interpretation as well as her love for the emotionally tinged soul, pop and rock songs that were staples of the 1970's. The 13-track live album, which was recorded at Henry's sold-out performances at Feinstein's in NYC in May 2012, showcases her soulful, inspired interpretations of some of her favorite classic hits of the decade from iconic artists including Bill Withers, Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, The Commodores and Gladys Knight.

German composer Matthias Spahlinger (b. 1944) scored his Farben der Frühe (Colors of Morning) for the unusual, if not unique, ensemble of seven pianos. It's impossible to know the composer's motivation for limiting a work whose subject is "color" to the single color of the piano, but apparently it proved to be a daunting task, because it took eight years to complete. The six-movement, 45-minute piece falls squarely into the tradition of European modernism, with a spiky tonal language and loads of rhythmic complexity.

Differences between Dido albums can be measured on a small sliding scale. She never changes her style but she does change her sound, however subtly. Girl Who Got Away, her fourth album and first in five years, differs from its predecessor, the meticulously woven Safe Trip Home. That was an album tailored for domesticity, while Girl Who Got Away is a soundtrack for a night out, going so far as to make space for a guest spot for Kendrick Lamar, the alt-crossover rapper du jour of 2013.