George Winston's Autumn has served as an emotional backdrop to the change of season. A beautiful recording for solo piano, Autumn finds Winston developing simple melodic motifs with studied left-hand underpinning, on hypnotic pieces like 'Woods,' which moves from a brisk rhythmic figure to rubato minor-key runs. Leaving pauses and breaths in all the right places, Winston suggests the play of color and light, the comfortable melancholy, and the encroaching slow-down that characterizes the fall season. Full of memorable themes and moods, Autumn is a timeless album, and serves as a good introduction for someone who has not heard George Winston. In the context of a career in which he has sold over fifteen million albums, Autumn is the first album that George himself recommends (and often gives to) new listeners.

David Darling’s Other Worlds is a unique New Age album that includes his signature pizzicato, vocalizations, solo and choir cellos; while exploring new canvases of piano, electronic music and percussion, expanded with additional soloists. Guest performers include virtuosos Jiebing Chen (Erhu, Zhonghu) and Lili Haydn (Violin). From the meditative “Amelia,” the trance state of “Voyager,” the blending styles of “Other Worlds,” the drivingpizzicato of “The Benedictine,” the emotional “Rendezvous,” and the other compositions, the listener is invited to explore Other Worlds. As a GRAMMY award–winning cellist, composer, teacher, and collaborator, Darling redefined how the cello is played and how music is taught from teaching students, to directing orchestras, to performing on stage. An innovative improviser, he draws on classical, country, jazz, rock, new age, and world music to create compositions that tap deep into listeners’ souls and through which listeners can bring to life their own stories, meaning, and consciousness. "David Darling played the cello the way Georgia O’Keefe painted mountains; decisive, delicate and dedicated to his truth. He could play joy and grief at the same time, the way they occur in life". - Kate Munger

Sacred Spirit is a musical project by Claus Zundel, Ralf Hamm, and Markus Staab.
Musicians have made astonishing leaps of the imagination in recent years in fusing often contradictory music - Celtic with African, reggae with Bhangra. Sacred Spirit Volume 2: Culture Clash is an album that attempts the audacious: to combine the raw essence of the blues with the sophisticated orchestral structures of classical music, and then to underpin the two with contemporary rhythms.

During the course of her prodigious career as a harpist and singer, concert and recording artist Therese Schroeder-Sheker travelled across three continents, singing in eight languages, roaming every lane and thoroughfare, performing the literature of two distinctly different periods: medieval and late twentieth century. Despite what we may think or feel about past and present eras, their two margins have the shining essentials in common: love song, lament, prayer, and epic ballad. These genres are always fresh, startling and poignant.
Today, in contrast to her previous legacy which roams a wide distance of physical miles and cultural time periods, she presents a bird’s eye view of great intimacy…

Self-described "rural folk piano" player George Winston was among the earliest and most successful proponents of the genre of contemporary instrumental music later dubbed new age.
Signing to the Windham Hill label, between 1980 and 1982 he recorded a trilogy of albums - Autumn, December, and Winter Into Spring - of impressionistic, seasonally themed piano musings that laid much of the groundwork for the new age boom to follow.
In a sense, this second seasonal album follows an opposite direction from Autumn, its hard, isolated notes and stop-and-start style gradually giving way from the stasis of winter to the growth and movement of spring. It's a good album for beginning your day.

For Norwegian musician Erik Wollo, Guitar Nova is a return to his roots. Best known for electronic landscapes on albums such as Solstice and Images of Light, Wollo actually generates most of his music with a guitar synthesizer. For Guitar Nova, however, he returns to pure, mostly acoustic guitar in an intricate, delicately balanced set of compositions. But it's not just another solo guitar album. Wollo multitracks his instruments in elaborate designs that have the same evocative power of his more lushly orchestrated synthesizer works.

Sacred Spirit is a musical project by Claus Zundel, Ralf Hamm, and Markus Staab. This album was nominated for a Best New Age Album Grammy and spawned the international smash hit "Yeha-noha (Wishes of Happiness & Prosperity)," which topped the singles charts in numerous countries, including Germany and France.
"Chants and Dances of the Native Americans" (sometimes labeled as "Indians") is an 11-song journey bridging the gap between ancient and contemporary history, tradition and modern instrumentation. While it is impossible to fully realize such scope on a single disc, Sacred Spirit makes the choice to represent all indigenous Americans rather than become mired in the potentially divisive bog of politics and tribal allegiance. All but two melodies are entirely traditional, bringing together flute, drums, and vocals with a cello and keyboard wash…

Here’s a musical excursion in the best Blue Knights tradition - eclectic, evocative and firmly anchored in the urban American groove. Come along with Curtis McLaw, Jay Heye and friends as they cruise down a California highway, greet a steamy night in the tropics, stroll a city street and comb a remote Far Eastern beach.
The excursion begins with an uptempo “Wake Up Call,” featuring Heye’s bluesy piano over McLaw’s keyboard rhythms and harmonies. They’re joined by Bill Joseph Flynn on guitar and Mr. P.T. on sax. That’s George Bishop doing the plaintive soprano work on “Nightfall” and Flynn in a similar vein on acoustic guitar in “Missing You.” And all hands show major-league chops in the driving, staccato counterpoint of “Tropical Night”…

Deep Forest awash in the Pacific. There is certainly the flavour of that region, with Polynesian chanting and rhythms. However, unlike their other releases, Pacifique is a soundtrack to a movie rather than a stand-alone album.
For Pacifique, they've collected percussion samples and vocals from Samoan and other island cultures. The raw components are fairly good. The sampled voices on Pacifique form a nice melodic and rhythmic counterpoint to underlying percussion. La Legende (Part 2) provides similarly well blended vocals with a solid, if unextraordinary, rhythm and melodic line. And Huaine Reggae is a nice upbeat piece to close the album.

Steve Roach's new purely atmospheric statement hovers within a warm and embracing expression of etheric ambience. One Day of Forever pulls back the layers of memory, time and perception to express life’s amber-lit emotions, continuing an intimate, mystical-revealing vision within Roach's work. In this one day of forever the meditation on longing, nostalgia, connection, loss, grace and gratitude transmutes from fleeting moments into gentle epiphanies. This album furthers the refined intention within the elemental approach first expressed on his previous 2CD, Reflections in Repose.

Portraits (So Long Ago, So Clear) is a set of 15 pieces covering approximately 20 years of Vangelis' career. He is, undoubtedly, the most commercial electronic musician ever. He has recorded dozens of major motion picture soundtracks and dozens of delightful albums. This CD is an accurate cross section of those efforts. Contains two unreleased tracks.

The duo's third album, Comparsa, continues the world music potpourri Deep Forest are known for, though there is a pronounced focus on Latin and Caribbean grooves provided by musicians from Cuba, Belize, Mexico, and Madagascar, among other places. Although the nationalities present are truly global, the actual sound of Deep Forest hasn't changed that much, centering mostly on lush new age music with just a bit more of an edge than is usual, plus several tracks with whispered or restrained vocals.

This portentous tribute to Domenikos Theotokopoulos (16th-century painter "El Greco") divides its ten tracks among as many separate movements (complete with a disc-closing "Epilogue") and explores them with all the excitement of a day at the art gallery (this concept was, in fact, inspired by the National Gallery of Greece's efforts to obtain El Greco's "St. Peter"). Which means it's very studious, very meticulous, and very good for you, but ultimately the (very few) thrills here are intrinsic at best and not really all that thrilling. Composer, arranger, producer, and performer Vangelis gooses up the action with occasional bombast, but the overall tone of El Greco's classical new age is as solemn and washed-out as a centuries-old painting.

A 2 CD Box Set of some of Jarre's favorite pieces, hand selected by the Artist. Essentials includes songs from 1976 - 2000 representing a personal and musical journey honoring his relationship with Francis Dreyfus. The owner of Dreyfus Music. Rarities contains pieces created long before Oxygene, one of Jarre's best selling albums. Early examples of the way he manipulated sounds electronically and bridged the gap between electronic, classical and pop.

Esoteric Recordings are proud to announce the repromotion of a remastered and sonically enhanced edition of Direct. It comes as a deluxe digi-pack design, with the master personally supervised by Vangelis.
Direct was released by Arista Records in October 1988 and was the first Vangelis to be recorded in Athens, following his relocation to the city from London. A fine body of work, the album title was inspired by Vangelis’ method of composing and recording, relying on spontaneity, with the compositional and recording process occurring simultaneously in the studio with few (if any) overdubs taking place.
This Esoteric Recordings release (undertaken with the full approval and supervision of Vangelis himself) features a booklet that restores the original album artwork.