Here you can find more info about a selection of artists we played in our show.
A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z
69 aka Innerzone Orchestra, C2, Paperclip People but mostly known as Carl Craig is an American technoproducer from Detroit, with a big love for jazz music, and also the owner of the Planet E record label. He made remixes for Cesaria Evora, Laurent Garnier, Theo Parrish,...
A
Absynthe Minded is a Belgian rock band, around frontman, vocalist and guitarist Bert Ostyn. Their songs have a lot more focus than their band name suggests. They play a mix of thirties jazz, with a touch of funky soul, Balkan beats and Merseyside pop. This comes from their latest album (2009), which was highly praised in reviews.
Adam F is one of the world's premiere jungle/drum and bass DJs. His breakthrough hit was the techstep classic Metropolis/Mother Earth, released in 1997 on the Metalheadz record label. What is considered to be his greatest early work is his Drum & Bass/Jazz fusion "Circles", with its unique structure and build, and famous bassline.
Air is a French (from region Ile-de-France) music duo, consisting of Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel. The name AIR is a backronym for Amour, Imagination, Rêve which translates to Love, Imagination, Dream. AIR's music is often referred to as electronica; their form of electronic music was influenced by the synthesizer sounds of the 1970s such as Jean Michel Jarre, Vangelis, and Francis Lai. Other influences include: psychedelic rock pioneers Pink Floyd; krautrockers Tangerine Dream; Jean-Jacques Perrey (although there are some echoes of dance music styles in the production); and French crooner Serge Gainsbourg. They worked together with Sofia Coppola (soundtrack for Virgin Suicides), contemporary Italian writer Alessandro Baricco (City Reading album), singers Françoise Hardy, Beth Hirsch and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
All aka Wolfgang Voigt is the co-owner of the German based record label Kompakt. He creates here a silvery monolithic drone, this time textured into a reflective mosaic surface.
Allez Allez is the funky follow-up of the Brussels-based collective Marine. The more experimental part of Marine also continued to make music, under the flag of the wild and wonderful La Muerte. The trademark of Allez Allez were highly danceable and catchy rhythms, African influences and high quality singing. Together, this formed a powerful and funky mixture. Their motto was wrap your legs around your head. The group was headed by the American singer Sarah Osbourne.
The Alps are a San Francisco based trio who make sun-drenched progressive pop for the Italian horror film you never knew existed...The finest excesses of progressive rock and the leanest intricacies of the psychedelic folk scene have been splashed together with a distinct dusty funk overlook to produce something which is totally out of time.
Alva Noto is a stage name of sound artist Carsten Nicolai who uses art and music as complementary tools to create microscopic views of creative processes. Carsten Nicolai also works as a visual artist. Using the principles of Cymatics he visualizes sound. Nicolai’s practice is formed by a convergence of sound, painting and sculpture that results in installations exploring the idea of creativity filtered through modularized systems and codes. His music features prominently in his art. Nicolai’s work exposes the limitations, and potential beauty and creativity, possible within strict logical systems. Nicolai plays with the rules of physicality. Sound is changed and evolved into time and space and transformed by looping oscillators and tone generators. Through these processes the essence of pure electricity is made audible. He works without sequencers, but mathematically edits his work to give his compositions precise rhythmic structures.
Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto When Carsten Nicolai and Ryuichi Sakamoto got together to record 2003's highly acclaimed Vrioon, it probably hadn't occurred to them that they were single-handedly re-positioning minimal piano music at the head of the electronic food chain. To imagine that a follow-up (Insen, 2005) might match the transparent loveliness of the original, not to mention transcend its soul-searching beauty, would, at best, seem unlikely. The album Insen, where you can find this track, finds Carsten Nicolai treating Ryuichi Sakamoto's cascading piano compositions with a surgeon's hand, embelishing notes and melody with a tapestry of digital emissions and breakages that seem to envelop the whole album with a reflective neon glow, becoming a vessel for all the emotions and memories each and every listener to this amazing work will no doubt find hard to control.
a Mute is a Belgian band, based in Brussels. They play a loud mix between folktronica and experimental pop. Sometimes aMute is also a solo act focused on a more electronic approach.
Laurie Anderson aka Mrs Lou Reed is an American experimental performance artist and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles. Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson did her first performance-art piece in the late 1960's. Throughout the 1970's, Anderson did a variety of different performance-art activities. She became widely known outside the art world in 1981 when her single O Superman reached number two on the UK pop charts. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave.
times they never quite got the acclaim it deserved.
Andrew K was born and raised in Thessaloniki, Greece. As a producer, Andrew K has already over 30 releases under his belt. is tracks have been supported by djs as Sasha, John Digweed, James Zabiela, Nick Warren, Hernan Cattaneo, Armin Van Buuren, Markus Schulz and Mashtronic, just to name a few, and aired in radio stations as Radio 1 (UK), Kiss FM (UK) and Metrodance (AR) and many others worldwide.
Andrew Liles has been recording since the mid 80's. His music, which both eclectic and diverse is often minimalist, surrealistic, experimental and hypnotic, and attempts to transcend any noticeable style or clique.
Annexus Quam is the most innovative of German underground Krautrock bands who built the foundation for a new type of music on the cosmic edge of jazz-fusion, creating a really spacious fusion of avant-garde, rock, jazz, and unusual use of psychedelic studio effects (lots of twangy slap-back echo and ring modulation).
Silvester Anfang is the Funeral Folk collective gathered in a free folk droneband. The band started as a three-piece of Per, Edgar and Hellvete, but now the line-up depends on who's available to record/perform. Together with Ignatius Van Kempenhof and PI666 (who now became a vulcanologist in Switserland) Silvester Anfang started searching for a sound that might be something called Pagan Belgopsych. The compositions are mostly non-musical offertories to worship their almighty overlord Brohll, but every now and then things just work out as free psychedelic improvisations.
Amon Tobin is a Brazilian electronic musician and DJ. He is best known for his use of sampling. Tobin is also credited with helping to create the emerging trip hop genre in the late 1990s. He has released seven major studio albums since 1996 under the London-based Ninja Tune record label where he is considered one of their most successful artists. In 2005, he created the musical score to Ubisoft's critically acclaimed and successful video game Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. He is also noted for his entirely field-recorded album Foley Room, released in 2007. His music has been used in numerous major motion pictures including The Italian Job and 21
Aphex Twin aka Richard David James is a British electronic musician described by The Guardian newspaper as "the most inventive and influential figure in contemporary electronic music." He founded the record label Rephlex Records in 1991 with his friend Grant Wilson-Claridge.
Audrey is a Swedish four-piece group formed in 2002. Describing Audrey's music is no easy task. If the group has succeeded in finding a central theme, it's a balance in the melodies - shimmering, beautiful moments of pop meet dark sadness.
Autechre are an English electronic music group consisting of Rob Brown and Sean Booth, both natives of Rochdale, England. The group is one of the most prominent acts signed with Warp Records, a label known for its pioneering electronic music artists. Much of Autechre's music has a strong focus on complex rhythm, driving percussion, and meticulous sequencing. Often unusual rhythmic loops repeat and change incrementally, with the music constantly in transition. Sometimes patterns are set against one another, implying several time signatures at once. Later work has been notably experimental and abstract, in contrast to the more club-friendly and conventional early 1990s releases.
Aranis is a group that devotes its time to creating and performing new, adventurous music. The music is filled with contrasts and opposing themes. It's dark and light at the same time. Aranis is composed of a core of five impassioned musicians. Depending on the project Aranis is working on, they call upon guest musicians to complete the sound. The main characteristics of their performances are a delicate and dynamic orchestration in which they constantly search for a fresh and lively rendition.
Arbouretum first began in late 2002 as a vehicle for singer/guitarist David Heumann's songwriting. Since their debut album, Long Live the Well-Doer, there have been several lineup changes that have included musicians such as Ned Oldham (Anomoanon), Walker Teret (Cass McCombs' band), and Jennifer Hutt, as well as drummers Mitchell Feldstein (Lungfish) and David Bergander (Celebration). The sweeping, atmospheric textures of the first record soon gave way to a more visceral, elemental approach. Amplifiers were turned up, drums were hit harder, and songs crescendoed into spiraling, noise-soaked climaxes on the second full-length, Rites of Uncovering. Released on Thrill Jockey in early 2007, the record garnered much attention and critical acclaim.
Louis 'Satchmo' Armstrong & Ella Fitzgerald recorded three albums together: Ella and Louis, Ella and Louis Again, and Porgy and Bess for Verve Records, with the sessions featuring the backing musicianship of the Oscar Peterson Trio and drummer Buddy Rich.
Olafur Arnolds Olafur Arnolds is Iceland's latest export. Having already sold out The Barbican Hall in London, toured major European festivals and having opened for Sigur Rós on their most recent European tour, the future seems bright for this young (21), extraordinary talent. The music of Ólafur Arnalds can only be described as achingly beautiful. He creates a world of delicate symphonic compositions. His music scales the heights perfected by the romantics. Yet by mixing strings and piano with loops and edgy beats it remains equally engaging to the contemporary ear. Succeeding in making the cross-over from classical to pop, Ólafur’s motivations are clear: “The classical scene is kind of closed to people who haven't been studying music all their lives. I would like to bring my classical influence to the people who don't usually listen to this kind of music…open people's mind. Especially young people, who seem to be the biggest part of my audience...”
Art Ensemble of Chicago is an avant-garde jazz ensemble that grew out of Chicago's AACM in the late 1960s. The group continues to tour and record through 2006, despite the deaths of two of the founding members. The Art Ensemble is notable for its integration of musical styles spanning jazz's entire history and for their multi-instrumentalism, especially the use of what they termed "little instruments" in addition to the traditional jazz lineup; "little instruments" can include bicycle horns, bells, birthday party noisemakers, wind chimes, and a vast array of percussion instruments (including found objects). The group also uses costumes and face paint in performance. These characteristics combine to make the ensemble's performances as much a visual spectacle as an aural one, with each musician playing from behind a large array of drums, bells, gongs, and other instruments. When playing in Europe in 1969, the group was using more than 500 instruments.
Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound is a psychedelic rock group out of San Francisco. The Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound is the combination of 1920s science fiction books, hallucinogens, and the west coast. If there were a soundtrack for Pranksters who went on a voyage in outer space, the Assemble Head would be first request.
Mulatu Astatke is widely regarded as the father of Ethiopia's jazz scene. There are some very modern elements to this music (first released between 1969 and 1974) with Big Muff-saturated electric guitar leads and wailing horns all very in keeping with the spirit of the time. Astatke's certainly enjoyed a rich and varied career, collaborating with Duke Ellington in the '70s and more recently enjoying some crossover exposure thanks to Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, which featured some of Astatke's music on its soundtrack. He's certainly one of those artists who merits a wider audience than the awkward 'world music' bracket could afford him. In 2009 he recorded an album with the British funk/jazz band The Heliocentrics.
David Axelrod is an American composer, arranger and producer, across a wide range of musical genres. He worked with Lou Rawls, Electric Prunes, David Rose and was sampled by artists as dj Shadow, Dr. Dre and Lauryn Hill.
Top
B
Battles is an American experimental rock group, founded in 2003 in New York City. The band's current line-up comprises guitarists Ian Williams (formerly of Don Caballero) and Dave Konopka (formerly of Lynx), drummer John Stanier (formerly of Helmet), and Tyondai Braxton (son of avant-garde composer Anthony Braxton), who plays keyboard and guitar and creates live voice samples.
Jeff Beal is an American composer of music for film, television, recordings, and the concert hall. Highly regarded as a jazz instrumentalist and versatile composer, Beal's music often incorporates a synthesis of improvisatory and composed elements. This piece was created for the tv series Carnivale.
Marcus Belgrave is a jazz trumpet player from Detroit, born in Chester, Pennsylvania. He has recorded with a variety of famous musicians, bandleaders, and record labels since the 1950s. Notable among them are: Ray Charles, Charles Mingus, Gunther Schuller, Motown Records, Tribe Records, Blue Note Records, A. Spencer Barefield, The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, Rodney Whitaker, and Carl Craig. He has performed with Ray Charles, Max Roach, Ella Fitzgerald, Charles Mingus, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr., Dizzy Gillespie and John Sinclair, amongst others.
Baby Grandmotherswere a short-lived Swedish band, but one of the most prolific and unique psychedelic, modal, experimental power-trios to emerge out of the Scandinavian psychedelic underground-scene in 1967.
Angelo Badalamenti is highly regarded for his award winning scoring work in film (Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive) and television (Twin Peaks). Best known for his many collaborations with director David Lynch, he is also a popular and respected recording artist, having worked with the likes of David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Pet Shop Boys, Anthrax, Michael Jackson, Julee Cruise, Marianne Faithfull and Dolores O'Riordan, to name a few. Badalamenti 's music is most commonly described as "haunting." His forte lies with dark, dreamy melodies that evoke emotions of passion and paranoia.
Willie Baker was supposedly from the Patterson (Pierce County) area of southeastern Georgia, and his open-tuned, banjo-like guitar style allies him with the Hicks Brothers, Charley and Bob, although how well they knew each other is unknown. What is known for sure is that Baker recorded about a dozen sides for Gennett Records in Richmond, IN, in 1929, with sessions listed for January, February, and March of that year. Some reports place him in Florida in the mid-'60s, but it is uncertain whether this was the same Willie Baker who recorded for Gennett. He remains a shadowy and tantalizing figure whose unique frailing 12-string guitar style gives him a footnote position in the history of early blues.
Bai Tian (aka Bai+ian)is a sound artist, flute player and organizer of independent music in Chengdu. As a sound artist, he plays in a wide range of styles such as noise, cut'n'paste etc.
Bark Psychosis 'sound has covered various musical styles including minimalism, introverted indie rock, psychedelia, post-punk, cool jazz, outright mechanical/industrial noise, and electronic dance music. However, the band's music is best characterised by a sense of acoustic space, moody atmospherics, murmured vocals, abstract but emotional lyrics, and a particularly sensitive and acclaimed mixture of electronic and acoustic instrumentation. Bark Psychosis was founded in East London in 1986. Rather than the familiar alternation of verse and chorus, their songs mostly develop as a succession of related sections.
Batsumiis one of the holy grails of South African spiritual jazz. Batsumi fused jazz, African drums, poetry and words delivering a powerful fusion that was in itself an expression of freedom from physical and mental chains.
BB King is an African American blues guitarist and singer-songwriter known for his expressive singing and inimitable guitar playing. In the mid-1950s, while B. B. was performing at a dance in Twist, Arkansas, a few fans became unruly. Two men got into a fight and knocked over a kerosene stove,
setting fire to the hall. B. B. raced outdoors to safety with everyone else, then realized that he left his beloved $30 acoustic guitar inside, so he rushed back inside the burning building to retrieve it, narrowly escaping death. When he later found out that the fight had been over a woman named Lucille, he decided to give the name to his guitar to remind him never to do a crazy thing like fight over a woman. Ever since, each one of B. B.'s trademark Gibson guitars has been called Lucille.
The Beatles were a rock and pop band from Liverpool, England that formed in 1960. During their career, the group primarily consisted of John Lennon (rhythm guitar, vocals), Paul McCartney (bass guitar, vocals), George Harrison (lead guitar, vocals) and Ringo Starr (drums, vocals). Although their initial musical style was rooted in 1950s rock and roll and skiffle, the group worked with different musical genres, ranging from Tin Pan Alley to psychedelic rock. This track, Number 9, is taken from the legendary White Album. The recording began as an extended ending to the album version of Revolution, to which were added vocal and music sound clips, tape loops, reverse sound/music and sound effects.
Bersarin Quartett is a one man project from Münster, Germany founded by Thomas B. in 2006. His self-titled debut album was released February 2008 on Lidar Records. Lurching classical strings are the first sound heard, eventually inhabited by sparsely paced, mildly glitched downtempo beats, just to carry the listener through.
Big Boy Cleveland The story goes that a slave get a piece of cane from a canebrake and cut some holes in it. He then commenced to play a "blues" on his whistle. As time went by, the instrument evolved into a set of "quills". On l2th April 1927, Big Boy Cleveland recorded 2 quill solos, for Gennett, one of which was issued. "Quill Blues" which lets the instrument "sing" the blues, could not have been too far removed from the l7tn.Century ex-African slave in the canebrake.
The Black Angels bring the aura of mid-1966 - the drilling guitars of early Velvet Underground shows, the raga inflections of late-show Fillmore jams, the acid-prayer stomp of Austin avatars the 13th Floor Elevators - everywhere they go.
Blackie & The Oohoos is the project of two Belgian sisters Loesje and Martha Maieu. They create low-fi, intimate, fragile songs that take you on a journey through their fantasy world.
Black To Comm is an alias for Dekorder label owner Marc Richter’s audio excursions. Richter creates his music using scratchy shellac and vinyl records, field recordings, a so called “kitchen gamelan,” and more traditional instruments like organs, guitars, pianos and mbiras. The layering and hypnotic repetition of short loops from Psychedelia, Free Jazz, Vaudeville, and various other old recordings reveals alternative melodic dimensions not apparent in the source material. His work evokes a contradictory feeling of lightness and intensity, a bittersweet melancholy tempered by the chill of something ominous beneath the surface.
Art Blakey was an American jazz drummer and bandleader. Along with Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, he was one of the inventors of the modern bebop style of drumming. He is known as a powerful musician and a vital groover; his brand of bluesy, funky hard bop was (and remains) profoundly influential on mainstream jazz. For more than 30 years his band the Jazz Messengers included many young musicians who went on to become prominent names in jazz.
Blues Control are a psychedelic Queens NYC, New York band featuring the members of Watersports: Russ Waterhouse (guitar, electronics, tapes) and Lea Cho (keyboards, electronics). The duo of Lea Cho and Russ Waterhouse have somehow found a hazy but powerful common musical thread between Conrad Schnitzler’s jabbering electronic workouts, the gauze of Locust Abortion Technician-era Butthole Surfers, and the more unicorn-saddling moments of Jan Hammer.
Bj Nilsen is a Swedish sound artist who lives and works in Stockholm. He has since 1990 been putting out work in various constellations. Primarily focused on the sound of nature and its effect on humans, field recordings and the perception of time and space as experienced through sound, often electronically treated. He has worked for documentary film, television and as sound engineer.
Bohren & Der Club of Gore is a band founded in 1992 in Mulheim an der Ruhr, Germany by Thorsten Benning, Morten Gass, Robin Rodenberg and Reiner Henseleit. Originally, members of Bohren started out playing in various hardcore bands such as 7 Inch Boots and Chronical Diarrhoea. In 1992 they produced a crossover of jazz, hardcore, and ambient, which they self described as an unholy ambient mixture of slow jazz ballads, Black Sabbath doom and down tuned Autopsy sounds.
David Bowie is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger who needs little introduction. You can find this song on Low, the first of his Berlin trilogy albums with Brian Eno. Often incorrectly given credit as Low's producer, Eno was responsible for a good deal of the direction and composition of the second side of the album and actually wrote the theme and instrumentation for "Warszawa" while Bowie was in Paris attending court hearings against his former manager. Eno in turn was helped by producer Tony Visconti's four-year-old son who sat next to Eno playing A, B, C in a constant loop at the studio piano. This phrase became the "Warszawa" theme. On Bowie's return Eno played him the work which impressed Bowie who then quickly composed the vaguely Eastern European-sounding lyrics.
Marlon Brando was an Academy Award-winning American actor whose body of work spanned over half a century. He is widely considered one of the greatest actors of all time. As a young sex symbol, he is best known for his roles as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, both directed by Elia Kazan in the early 1950s. In middle age, his well-known roles include his Academy Award-winning performance as Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Colonel Walter Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, both directed by Francis Ford Coppola and an Academy Award-nominated performance as Paul in Last Tango in Paris. This extract comes from Apocalypse Now.
The Break-Ups are Dave Miller & Manuel Bonrod.They make electronic music.
Jacques Brel was a Belgian singer-songwriter. Brel composed and recorded his songs almost exclusively in French. The quality and style of his lyrics are highly regarded by many leading critics of popular music. Brel's songs are not especially well known in the English-speaking world except in translation and through the interpretations of other singers, most famously Scott Walker and Judy Collins. Others who have sung his work in English include Marc Almond, Dave Van Ronk, Alex Harvey, David Bowie, Spencer Moody, Barb Jungr, Dusty Springfield, Ray Charles, The Dresden Dolls, Frank Sinatra, Terry Jacks, Nina Simone, Rod McKuen, The Kingston Trio, Gavin Friday, Jack Lukeman, Camille O'Sullivan, Dax Riggs and Beirut. In French-speaking countries, Brel is also remembered as an actor and director. Jacques Brel has sold over 25 million records worldwide, including over 12 million albums and singles in France and Belgium.
Brethren Of The Free Spirit are guitarist/composer james blackshaw and lutenist/composer jozef van wissem. Named after a cult of 13th-century northern european religious heretics (they’re detailed in greil marcus’s lipstick traces), this duo play with an appropriately zealous intensity.
Broadcast & The Focus GroupFrom their beginnings in Birmingham in 1995, Broadcast’s aesthetic has remained a combination of their love for film, library music and electronics with psych-pop colour – a style which has gained them fans including musicians such as Flying Lotus, Tim Gane from Stereolab, Grizzly Bear, Atlas Sound and Dangermouse.
The Focus Group is Julian House, long time friend of the band and renowned artwork designer. House is co-founder of the Ghost Box label, which in the last few years has birthed a cult of its own with releases reflecting its creators' obsessions with library music, English folklore and the eerie feel of vintage programmes for schools and colleges. His music as the Focus Group offers some of the most enchanting distillations of all the above, instantly complementing Broadcast's own long-standing aesthetic. Their collaborative mini-album 'Broadcast & The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age' was voted as best album of 200ç by Wire magazine.
Peter Broderick is a young talented musician from Portland, that relocated to Copenhagen to join Efterklang. Using multi-tracked vocals Broderick has concentrated on his two favourite instruments -guitar and voice, though there is also harmonium, glockenspiel organ, vibraphone , banjo and Celeste , though never all in the same song. The results are often stunning songs replete with choral majesty infused with cosy layered voices and temperate layers of instrumentation.
Andrew Brown played the kind of guitar that let all of his emotions hang out, whether it be weeping with stinging wails or getting an audience up on its feet with a fast lick. He put out a few great albums on Alligator Records (including Big Brown's Chicago Blues before his death in 1985.
The Dave Brubeck Quartet is a jazz quartet, founded in 1951 by Dave Brubeck and originally featuring Paul Desmond on saxophone and Brubeck on piano. They took up a long residency at San Francisco's Blackhawk nightclub and gained great popularity touring college campuses, releasing a series of albums with such titles as Jazz at Oberlin, Jazz Goes to College, and Jazz Goes to Junior College. Well know is their platinum album Time Out (including Take Five). The quartet followed up its success with several more albums in the same vein, including Time Further Out, Countdown: Time in Outer Space, Time Changes, and Time In. These albums were also known for using contemporary paintings as cover art, featuring the work of Neil Fujita on Time Out, Joan Miró on Time Further Out, Franz Kline on Time in Outer Space, and Sam Francis on Time Changes.
Arturas Bumsteinas is composer of acoustic and electronic music (graduated from Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater), founder of Quartet Twentytwentyone, visual artist with various projects presented in more than 30 exhibitions around Europe. The festivals where Bumšteinas participated with his music and audiovisual projects among others include The Holland Festival, Sensoralia/Romaeuropa, Avanto, Sonic Circuits, Skanumezs, Full Pull, Cut & Splice etc... Since the year 2000 Arturas has collaborated with artists Laura Garbštienė, Jesse Glass, Anton Lukoszevieze, Antanas Jasenka, Antanas Kučinskas, Maarten Ornstein, Simon Wickham-Smith, Jeff Surak, Borut Savski, Max Reinhardt, Rytis Mažulis etc... Amongst the publishers of Bumšteinas' music is new polish label Bolt Records and his visual art is represented by Galerie Antje Wachs in Berlin. Arturas lives and works in Vilnius and Warsaw.
Michael Bundt played in several bands like Sirius, Medusa. He recorded several solo electronic works that resembled both the space majesty of early Jean Michel Jarre and the quirky krautrockish kinetics of Moebius & Plank. Today he works as a jazz producer.
Kate Bush has built a reputation that remains unrivalled in terms of musical ambition, pioneering sonics, stirring emotional content and sheer originality. In her twenty-sever year carreer she had several hits like Wurthering Heights and Running Up That Hill. This song is taken from her masterpiece album Aerial, her first album in a decade.
David Byrne is a Scottish-American musician and artist perhaps best known as a founding member and principal songwriter of the new wave band Talking Heads, which was active between 1974 and 1991. Since then, Byrne has released his own solo projects on record, and worked in a variety of media, including film, photography, opera, and Internet-based projects. He has received Grammy, Oscar, and Golden Globe awards for his achievements.
Top
C
Canon Blue aka Daniel James makes eccentric-pop compositions wrapped warmly in a fluffy electronic blanket.
The Carter Family was a country music group that recorded between 1927 and 1956. Their music had a profound impact on bluegrass, country, southern gospel, pop and rock musicians as well as on the U.S. folk revival of the 1960s. They were the first vocal group to become country music stars. Their recordings of such songs as Wabash Cannonball, Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Wildwood Flower and Keep On the Sunny Side made them country standards.
Johnny Cash as known for his deep, distinctive bass-baritone voice, the "freight train" sound of his Tennessee Three backing band, his demeanor, and his dark clothing, which earned him the nickname "The Man in Black". On 2003's American IV: The Man Comes Around, he gave, together with producer Rick Rubin new meaning to Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" (the video for "Hurt" was 6 times nominated at MTV's 2003 VMA's and also won a Grammy for "Best Short Form Music Video" that same year).
Lynn Cassiers is a young Belgian jazzsinger, who manipulates her voice with machines. This multi-talented artist performs with a lot of bands, her own quartett, Lynn Cassiers Quartet (Augusto Pirodda/ piano, Manolo Cabras/ bass & effects, Marek Patrman/drums), but also Wrapped (duo met Giovanni Di Domenico/ piano, fender rhodes, keyboards); Magine (Alexandra Grimal/ sax, Mathieu Calleja/ drums, percussion); with Pierre Perchaud/ guitar and Chris Jennings/ bass,...
Nick Cave & Warren Ellis have been playing together for more than fifteen years, with The Bad Seeds, Grinderman and The Dirty Three. More recently, they've been collaborating on soundtracks for films such as The Proposition (2005) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) as well as Gisliörn Gardarsson's acrobatic theatrical productions of Woyzeck (2005) and Metamorphosis (2006).
Don Cherry was an innovative African-American jazz trumpeter whose career began with a long association with saxophonist Ornette Coleman. He played with Sonny Rollins, Gato Barbieri, Charlie Haden and Latif Khan (on this track). In the 1970s he ventured into the developing genre of world fusion music, Cherry incorporated influences of Middle Eastern, traditional African, and Indian music into his playing.
Sylvain Chauveau was born in Bayonne, France and now lives in Brussels, Belgium. Since 1998, he composes music for piano, strings, winds, voice and electronics. He is the composer of the soundtracks for films by Sébastien Betbeder and wrote original music for dance shows. Sylvain is also a member of the avant-rock band Arca (with Joan Cambon), of the ensemble 0 (with Maitane Sebastian, Stéphane Garin and J. Merah), and of the improv duo ON (with Steven Hess).
The Chocolate Watch Band was a garage rock-band formed in San Jose, California in 1965. The band had finally broken up indefinitely by 1970 but then reunited in 1999 at the 66/99 show Mike Stax put on in San Diego. They continue to play today at garage rock shows in Europe as well as the States with Little Steven and the Electric Prunes. The band's music was largely described as a blend of 1960s-style garage rock with a distinguishable rolling San Francisco sound. The group's early music appeared to contain blues influences, and later it developed psychedelic elements through use of instrumental experimentation.
Cinematic Orchestra is a British-based jazz and electronic outfit, created in the late 1990s by Jason Swinscoe. The band is signed to Ninja Tune independent record label.The Cinematic Orchestra's sound, in both live and studio contexts, employs a live band which improvises along with a turntablist and electronic elements such as samples provided by Swinscoe. In their studio releases Swinscoe will often remix the live source material to produce a finished product that is a seamless combination of live jazz improvisation with electronica, such that it is difficult to tell where the improvisation ends and the production begins.
Cloudland Canyon is a German band who's music you could describe best as extra damaged super freaked out sixties or seventies psychedelia, but filtered through modern technology.Rich clouds of metallic shimmer surround looped guitars, creepy chanted vocals are submerged in demented spacey FX, dense deconstructed pop songs emerge from the chaos, rife with swirling vocals, and layer after layer of drone and processed harmonies, fuzzy shopping mall synth warbles beneath straining lo-fi vocals, the whole thing run through some intense stereo panning.
Cluster is a German experimental musical group who influenced the development of contemporary popular electronic and ambient music. They have recorded albums in a wide variety of styles ranging from experimental music to progressive rock, all of which had an avant-garde edge. Cluster has been active since 1971, releasing a total of 13 albums. Cluster has been widely influential not only to ambient and electronic music artists, but to techno, electronica and popular music as well.
Alice Coltrane was offcourse John Coltrane's wife. But she was also a talented American jazz pianist, organist, harpist and composer. She played together with Pharaoh Sanders, Santana and many more. The innovative, futuristic sounds of the Coltrane musical heritage have set a new pace for modern music that sounded the unstruck chord throughout the world.
Paolo Conte is an Italian singer, pianist, composer and lawyer notable for his grainy, resonant voice, his colourful and dreamy compositions (evocative of Italian and Mediterranean sounds, as well as of South American atmospheres and of French-language singers like Jacques Brel and Georges Brassens) and his wistful, sometimes melancholic lyrics. Max was one of his biggest hits.
Coil were an English cross-genre, industrial experimental music group formed in 1982 by John Balance—later—and his partner Peter Christopherson. The duo worked together on a series of releases before Balance chose the name Coil, which he claimed to be inspired by the omnipresence of the coil's shape in nature. Today, Coil are one of the most influential and best known industrial music groups. John Balance died in 2004, and as a hommage several artists reworked songs by Coil. This version is made by Yann Tiersen and was released on the compilation The Dark Age of Love.
Ry Cooder (born 15 March 1947, in Los Angeles, California) is an American guitarist, singer and composer. He is known for his slide guitar work, his interest in the American roots music, and, more recently, for his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries. Cooder was ranked number 8 on Rolling Stone's The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. He played and recorded songs with Randy Newman, Captain Beefheart, Rolling Stones, Ali Farka Toure, to name a few. Cooder has worked as a studio musician and has also scored many film soundtracks including Wim Wenders film Paris, Texas (1984). Cooder based this soundtrack and title song Paris, Texas on Blind Willie Johnson's Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground), which he described as the most soulful, transcendent piece in all American music. In recent years, Cooder has played a role in the increased appreciation of traditional Cuban music, due to his collaboration as producer in the Buena Vista Social Club (1997) recording, which was a worldwide hit.
Martha Copeland was singing the blues and its variants back in the 20s. This song was recorded in 1926. I was not able to find more info about this singer.
Cornershop are a British indie rock band formed in Leicester in 1991 by Wolverhampton-born Tjinder Singh (singer, songwriter, and guitar), his brother Avtar Singh (bass guitar, vocals), David Chambers (drums) and Ben Ayres (guitar, keyboards, and tamboura), the first three having previously been members of Preston-based band General Havoc, who released one single (the "Fast Jaspal EP") in 1991. The band name originated from a stereotype referring to British Asians that they often own street corner stores. Their music is a fusion of Indian music, Britpop, and electronic dance music. Their most famous songs were Brimful of Asha (in a remix version by Fatboy Slim) and Lessons Learnt From Rocky I to Rocky III. On Spectral Mornings, Noel Gallagher of Oasis plays sitar.
Cosmic Jokers was a German krautrock band, but played never as an ensemble; its members did not play together as Cosmic Jokers, and in fact were not even asked to join the group. Their music was created from sessions put together by Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser early in 1973. He arranged for several acid parties to be held at the sound studio owned by Dieter Dierks, where musicians were offered drugs in exchange for recording tracks. Participants included Manuel Göttsching and Klaus Schulze of Ash Ra Tempel, Jurgen Dollase and Harold Grosskopf of Wallenstein, and Dierks.
Gregory Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers (with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs).
Top
D
Daan is a Belgian band and solo project, formed by Dead Man Ray member Daan Stuyven. He released some electronic albums, where he searched the borders of kitsch. He also composed music for indie films. His fifth studio album, "Manhay", was released in 2009. The album saw a return to the more rock/pop-influenced sound of his first solo-album and his Dead Man Ray-era. The album does not contain electronics, synths or beats. Death of a Housewife is a remix by Jeroen Swinnen of one of Daan's biggest hits, Housewife, an instrumental electro hit.
DAAUSince their early days, Antwerp (Belgium) based DAAU, or Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung have always combined a healthy urge of experimenting, together with their very particular and recognisable sound of classical instruments wrestling with modern music. They reworked several songs of Coil for the Immortal Coil compilation.
Dakota Suite is a Leeds-based band centered around the group's talented frontman, singer/guitarist Chris Hooson; the only other firm member of the group is producer Richard Formby -- formerly a collaborator with Spaceman 3, the Telescopes, and Jazz Butcher -- who handles occasional guitar chores and various other instrumentation, including harmonium, Fender Rhodes, lap steel, bowed double bass, and tape effects.
Miles Davis was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. Widely considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Miles Davis was, with his musical groups, at the forefront of several major developments in jazz music including cool jazz, hard bop, free jazz, fusion and techno. Many well-known jazz musicians made their names as members of Davis's ensembles, including John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Bill Evans, Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Cannonball Adderley, Gerry Mulligan, Tony Williams, George Coleman, J. J. Johnson, Keith Jarrett, John Scofield and Kenny Garrett. You can find this track on his Live/Evil album.
Deaf Center are collaborators Erik Skodvin (AKA Svarte Greiner, Xhale, Solitaire Albread) and Otto Totland (AKA Supine, Nest), operating out of Norway since 2003. Sounds from battered old records, cash registers, broken machines and a half-dead piano were all blended into the mix to add a warm, homely depth to their recordings.
Deerhunter is an American band founded by Bradford Cox and Moses Archuleta in 2001, along with drummer Dan Walton. In 2004, bassist Justin Bosworth died after suffering head injuries in a skateboarding accident and was replaced by Joshua Fauver, previously of the band Electrosleep International. The band cites negativity in the wake of Bosworth's death as the inspiration behind their 2005 debut album's angry, brooding sound. In 2005, the band recorded their second album, Crypotgrams, in just two days for Kranky Records. The band started to find a wider audience afer this release.Their music is situated somewhere between punk and ambient. Or, as said in a quote by Jean Genet on their blog: to achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegence.
Vladislav Delay is a Berlin-based Finnish artist, who has experimented with ambient, broken beat, glitch as well as grooves and house music with soulful vocals. In addition he has collaborated with and worked for a wide range of artists ranging from Scissor Sisters and Craig Armstrong to AGF, Black Dice, Massive Attack, Towa Tei and Ryuichi Sakamoto. While his side-projects and remixes are there to flirt with more stable rhythms and dancefloor institutions, his main love as well as his background is in experimenting with different kind of sounds and rhythms; a quest to find some music not heard yet.
The Detroit Experiment is one of the many projects of Detroit based dj/producer Carl Craig. Carl is resident multiinstrumentalist, producer and remixer when a dream lineup of detroit black music talent gathered to record these sessions. He is a producer of techno music, and is considered to be one of the most important names in the Detroit second generation of techno producers and DJs.
Max de Wardener is a true original, a talented multi-instrumentalist and composer. His debut EP for Accidental Records, "Stops" (2002) wove a solemn tapestry of gentle oratorio, tonal grandeur and shimmering, cut-up electronics. With his debut album, 'Where I am today' (2004) he presented the widescreen version of his musical vision. 'Where I Am Today' manages that rare thing, an electronic album that relies more on actual musicianship than recording techniques. He also plays in the band of Dani Siciliano.
Dez Mona is a Belgian duo between double bass player Nicolas Rombouts and vocalist Gregory Frateur. They find themselves in their mutual roots of jazz, drama, experimental music, gospel and spirituals. The surprising unique experience of their very first concert at Recyclart in 2003 convinces them to continue working together. Shortly after Gregory and Nicolas start writing their own songs. Dez Mona is born. They choose a path of intense playing and create a strong live-reputation in the belgian underground. This results in three concerts at belgium’s most famous concerthall, Ancienne Belgique in Brussels. Dez Mona becomes the first band ever to do this without having released any album. Next step are concerts on famous festivals like Motel Mozaïque in Rotterdam, Crossing Border in The Hague, Noorderzon in Groningen, Feeërieën in Brussels, Literaire Lente in Gent, Klara Festival etc. Gregory gets nominated for the Flemish Zamu-Awards 2005 category best singer and on 1st March 2006 he is playing live with Nicolas on the catwalk in Paris during a fashion show from Veronique Branquinho in Théatre La Cigale. They just released their third album, produced by Paul Webb.
Directions In Music are Bundy k. Brown, James Warden and Doug Scharin… (made one album together, consisting of) eight instrumental songs recorded in the Spring of 1996 at IDFUL music in Chicago. Although the sessions were largely engineered by Bundy Brown, all the members of the group took part in the recording process at a variety of levels. Likewise, the songs were composed in the studio, or significantly realized through the recording process. Bundy, James, and Doug began the recording with several musical elements as the “root” of the songs. The “roots ” were then taken and collectively developed into the versions presented on the record. The development was a natural result of the groups improvisation stemming from their exploration of texture, rhythm, color, and harmonic interplay.”
Bo Diddley is the stage name for Ellas Otha Bates, an American rock and roll vocalist, guitarist, songwriter, and inventor. He was known as "The Originator" because of his key role in the transition from the blues to rock & roll, influencing a host of legendary acts including Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, and Eric Clapton. He introduced more insistent, driving rhythms and a hard-edged guitar sound on a wide-ranging catalog of songs.
Dj Q aka Paul Flynn's recordings have an occasional flourish of Detroit techno but mostly rely on tight but vibrant jazzy house. He began DJing early in the 1990s as a moonlighting gig from his full-time job, hanging suspended ceilings. This track is taken from the Scotsman's debut album 'Face The Music'.
The Doors were an American rock band formed in 1965 in Los Angeles, California by vocalist Jim Morrison, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, drummer John Densmore, and guitarist Robby Krieger. They were considered a controversial band, due mostly to Morrison's cryptic lyrics and unpredictable stage persona. After Morrison's death on July 3, 1971, the remaining members continued as a threesome until disbanding in 1973. Despite a career that barely totaled eight years, The Doors still enjoy a huge cult following as well as status in the mainstream music industry as being hugely influential and original. According to the RIAA, they have sold over 32 million albums in the US alone.
Dolphins Into The Future With micro music labels such as Imvated, Dutch Beer and Taped Sounds, Lieven Martens became one of the key players in the Belgian experimental underground. Dolphins Into The Future is his own musical outlet in which he gives new life to the New Age genre by exaggerating its stereotypes (clichés?) and by mixing it with mantric minimalism and psychedelic easy-listening.
Dave Douglas is a U.S. jazz trumpeter and composer whose music is notable for drawing on many non-jazz musical styles, including classical music, European folk music and klezmer. He has been a member of the experimental big band Orange Then Blue. Douglas is currently the director of the Festival of New Trumpet Music, which is held annually in New York City. Since 1993, Douglas has recorded more than twenty albums as a bandleader. He has also performed and recorded with dozens of musicians, perhaps most notably with various John Zorn ensembles. With his own groups, Douglas has pioneered new settings for the trumpet in jazz and expanded concepts of what the music (and music in general) can be. In more recent years he has explored collaborations involving modern dance, spoken word/poetry, and film.
D.R.Hooker was a man slightly askew with his time: from the robes he wears on the cover to the quasi mystical lyrics, he's very much connected to the hippy era, and given that the album 'The Truth' was recorded in 1972, in a time post-Charles Manson, he was brave to associate so strongly with all the imagery pertaining to cults. Musically, Hooker looks beyond the parameters of the hippy movement, dipping into a more ambitiously studio-oriented sound than Hooker's half-troubadour, half-prophet image on the sleeve might suggest. The noisy, fuzzy elements are particularly effective, and surprisingly intricate in their arrangement and recording.
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, author, poet and painter who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. Much of Dylan's most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when he became an informal chronicler and a reluctant figurehead of American unrest. A number of his songs, such as Blowin' in the Wind and The Times They Are a-Changin, became anthems of both the civil rights movements and of the opposition to the Vietnam War. Dylan's early lyrics incorporated political, social, philosophical, and literary influences, defying existing pop music conventions and appealing widely to the counterculture. While expanding and personalizing musical styles, he has explored many traditions of American song, from folk, blues and country to gospel, rock and roll and rockabilly to English, Scottish and Irish folk music, and even jazz and swing.
Top
E
Earth is an American musical group based in Seattle, Washington, formed in 1990 and led by guitarist Dylan Carlson. Earth's early work is recognized as pioneering the genre of drone doom — an experimental offshoot of doom metal, characterized by droning, minimalist, lengthy, and repetitive structures. Earth's early albums could be seen as a variation of the experimental doom-influenced metal of The Melvins. Following a hiatus due to Carlson's personal problems, Earth reappeared with a markedly different sound, still slow-paced and lengthy, but now featuring strong elements of country music and jazz.
Efterklang & The Danish National Chamber Orchestra is the name of a Danish rock group formed in December 2000. The name 'Efterklang' comes from the Danish word for remembrance or reverberation. Though it consists of four core members, the group regularly includes three or more members for live gigs and plays orchestral and experimental rock music. Formed in Copenhagen, its four core members are: Mads Brauer, Casper Clausen, Thomas Husmer and Rasmus Stolberg. The original lineup also included Rune Mølgaard, but he has taken a more secluded role since 2007. When performing live, the core four-piece band is complemented with the addition of three to four closely-related live band members, like Peter Broderick. Performing Parades, the title of the album with the Danish Chamber Orchestra, is literally what it says it is on the cover: the band captured live, supported by the Danish National Chamber Orchestra, performing their celebrated Parades album of 2007 in full. This recording dates from September 2008, the show held at Copenhagen’s DR Koncerthuset. The skittering electronics of the studio album remain, but traditional instrumentation dominates this set, the assembled orchestra complementing the original arrangements superbly.
Electric Chairs made an obscure cover of the number 1 hit Barbie Girl, originally performed by Aqua.
T.S.Eliot was an American poet, playwright and literary critic, living in the United Kingdom. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Among his most famous writings are the poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent.
Sidsel Endresen & Bugge Wesseltoft, both Norwegians (Sidsel is vocalist, Bugge is keyboard wizzard) already collaborated for three albums. The musical path they have chosen together, mixing the known and the unknown, has broadened and grown richer through deep mutual understanding. Both of them have their solo-projects outside of the duo so they naturally bring with them their points of interest and different angles into the duo.
Enigma is an electronic musical project founded by Michael Cretu, David Fairstein and Frank Peterson in 1990. The Romanian-born Cretu conceived of the Enigma project while working in Germany, but has been based at his recording studio A.R.T. Studios in Ibiza, Spain, since the early 1990s, where he has recorded all of Enigma's studio releases to date. Cretu is both the composer and the producer of the project. His former wife Sandra often provided vocals on Enigma tracks. Jens Gad co-produced and played guitar on three of the Enigma albums. Seven studio albums have been produced under the name of the project. Their first and most successful album, MCMXC a.D., sold more than 22 million copies worldwide.
Brian Eno is an English musician, composer, record producer, music theorist and singer, who, as a solo artist, is best known as the father of ambient music. Art school-educated and inspired by minimalism, Eno became prominent in the early 1970s as the keyboards and synthesiser player of the glam rock and art rock band Roxy Music. Eno has worked frequently with Harold Budd, John Cale, Cluster, Robert Fripp and David Byrne. He produced three albums by Talking Heads including Remain in Light (1980), six albums by U2 including No Line on the Horizon (2009), and albums by James, Laurie Anderson and Coldplay. He even created ringtunes for Nokia. This track was created for 'Music for Films III'.
Brian Eno & David Byrne recorded together My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, that came out in 1981. Over the last decades, hundreds of artists in genres ranging from DJs to alternative to electronic have all borrowed from its ideas and claimed its influence. Last year, their second collaboration was released. Eno is best known as producer, Byrne as former singer of Talking Heads.
Es is a recording project of Finnish musician Sami Sänpäkkilä. The project began around 1993 when Sänpäkkilä started experimenting with sound. Es' first album was released in 2000 on the K-RAA-K label. The project has been associated with a movement of psych folk influenced Finnish artists which emerged in the mid-2000s.
Top
F
Nathan Fake is an English electronic music artist from Norfolk, who has released numerous singles as well as a full-length album on labels such as Border Community and Traum Schallplatten. In 2006, his debut album Drowning in a Sea of Love was released on Border Community. The album received excellent reviews in the music press and was voted the second best album of the year in the Mixmag 2006 Best Album list.
Wang Fan is a pioneer of China's experimental music scene, a talented singer, minimalist, sound designer, componist, and a noise maker. He also works as composer for drama and film.
Dennis Farnon is the young brother of the late soundtrack, light classical, and pop composer Robert Farnon. His primary instrument was the trumpet, but he also gravitated toward composition and, like his better-known elder sibling, made part of his career in England, writing library music for the BBC -- some of the latter turned up in the scoring for the Dr. Who episode The Tenth Planet the second half of the 1960s. The younger Farnon also spent a good part of his career in Chicago, and among his other work - in addition to conducting and arranging pop-instrumental music, including material now identified as space age pop - he wrote the background scores to the Mr. Magoo cartoons.
Faust are one of the seminal Krautrock bands--they even gave the genre its name with one of their early song titles. Their music is a heady mix of rock, avant-garde electronics, and trippy psychedelia. This track is taken from their latest album.
Fat Freddys Drop are a six-piece roots/dub/reggae/jazz/soul band from Wellington, New Zealand.
Fear Falls Burning was launched in the winter of 2005 as an outlet for vidnaObmana’s fascination with lo-fi and post-rock music, and as a way to return to his roots in drone music, where he first began 23 years ago. By processing the sounds of his Les Paul guitars through a large and elaborately configured collection effects pedals, Fear Falls Burning produces improvisational music that is by turns meditative, rhythmic and occasionally thunderous. A typical performance begins with a simple, sustained guitar chord. This opening sound seeds the ground from which the entire piece is grown. As the looping and processing techniques are applied, the music evolves, dictating the direction of the performance. Organic variations and imperfections are spontaneously introduced, giving the performance a rich hue of unpredictability
Fennesz uses guitar and computer to create shimmering, swirling electronic sound of enormous range and complex musicality. Christian Fennesz is published by Touch Music. He lives and works in Vienna and Paris. Check our agenda to see when he plays in Belgium.
Fenn 'O Bergis an improvisional computer music trio made up of members Christian Fennesz, Peter Rehberg and Jim O'Rourke.
Fever Ray is an alias of Karin Dreijer Andersson of the electronic duo The Knife. She strips away the dance beats that grounded Silent Shout, her album with The Knife, leaving behind ominous clouds of electronics and a penchant for synthetically manipulating her vocals in a way that might be the flipside of R&B and pop's current obsession with chroming the human voice via Auto-Tune: instead of achieving a perfect metallic sheen, she uses technology to make herself sound older, huskier, wearier.
Ella Fitzgerald was an American jazz vocalist. With a vocal range spanning three octaves, she was noted for her purity of tone, phrasing and intonation, and a "horn-like" improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing. She is widely considered one of the supreme interpreters of the Great American Songbook. Over a recording career that lasted 59 years, she was the winner of 13 Grammy Awards, and was awarded the National Medal of Art by Ronald Reagan and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George H. W. Bush.
Fjordfunk made with this track an anthem for the pre-apocalyse generation, spinning a woven path to dancefloor bliss and enlightenment. Norwegian goodies!
Fleet Foxes, a five-piece Seattle-based band, describe their music as "baroque harmonic pop jams". Their debut full length album Fleet Foxes received four stars from Rolling Stone, who compared it to the likes of the Beach Boys, Animal Collective, and Crosby, Stills & Nash.
Fleetwood Mac are a British/American rock band formed in 1967 which have experienced a high turnover of personnel and varied levels of success. From the band's inception through the end of 1974, no incarnation of Fleetwood Mac lasted as long as two years. The two most successful periods for the band were during the late 1960s British blues boom, when they were led by guitarist Peter Green, and from 1975 to 1987, with more pop-orientation, featuring Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Shortly after the release of their second album Fleetwood Mac added guitarist Danny Kirwan to their line-up at the tender age of 18. Kirwan brought a harmony-rich sound that was indicative of his range of influence. A mature and accomplished self-taught guitarist, Kirwan's signature vibrato and unique style added a new dimension to an already complete band. With Kirwan the band released its first number one single in Europe, Albatross. In 2009, they announced a new world tour. Thoughts on a Grey Day is a poem read by an elderly woman, Mrs Scarrott, who lived near the band's communal home in southern England.
Florence & The Machine is the recording name of Florence Welch and a collaboration of other artists who provide backing music for her voice. Musically Florence and the Machine's sound is generally referred to as soul-inspired indie.
Fuck Buttons are a two-piece experimental group formed in Bristol, England in early 2004 by Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power. Time Out magazine described the band's live sound as "adrenaline pumping, ear purging slab of towering, pristine noise… Their latest album was produced by Andrew Weatherall and acclaimend good critics.
Top
G
Laurent Garnier is a French techno music producer and DJ. Laurent Garnier began DJ-ing in Manchester during the late 1980s. By the following decade, he had a broad stylistic range, able to span classic deep house and Detroit techno, the harder side of acid/trance and jazzy tracks as well. He added production work to his schedule in the early 1990s and recorded several LPs. This track comes from the album The Cloud Making Machine (2005), one of his best albums where he experiments with house, jazz, dub, electronics and hip hop.
Duke Garwood is first paid musical job was back in the late eighties playing guitar on The Orbs seminal Perpetual Dawn taken from their debut album co-produced by Youth. Nearly twenty years and many musical wanderings later Duke Garwood released an album on Youths new label Butterfly Recordings.
Howe Gelb is an American singer-songwriter, musician and record producer based in Tucson, Arizona. Gelb's approach to music is collaborative and he has recorded with a number of side projects. Boxers is a cover of John Parish.
Philip Glass is an American music composer. He is considered one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century and is widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the public (along with precursors such as Richard Strauss, Kurt Weill and Leonard Bernstein). Although his music is often, though controversially, described as minimalist, he distances himself from this label, describing himself instead as a composer of music with repetitive structures. Although his early, mature music is minimalist, he has evolved stylistically. He has written works for his own musical group which he founded, the Philip Glass Ensemble (for which he still performs on keyboards), as well as operas, musical theatre works, eight symphonies, eight concertos, solo works, string quartets, and film scores.
Roy Glenn was an American character actor. He recorded with the Gerry Mullingan Quartet.
Goldfrapp is a British electronic music group. The band was formed in 1999 in London, England, and consists of Alison Goldfrapp (vocals/synthesizer) and Will Gregory (synthesizer). This song comes from their ambient debut album. Their later albums were more poppy, with synthpop and glamrock influences.
Al Green is an American gospel and soul music singer who was popular in the 1970s, and is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His best known album is 'Let's stay Together'. Nowadays, he is a preacher man in Memphis, where he owns his own church, but he still records music.
Johnny Greenwood is a multi - instrumentalist, best known for his work with Radiohead, where he plays guitar, viola, xylophone, keyboards etc. Besides that, he also works for the BBC and composes movie scores like this one, for 'There Will Be Blood' from director Paul Anderson.
Grooverider began his DJing career at illegal raves and warehouse parties in Britain in the late eighties, and rose to prominence with partner Fabio through his innovative sets at influential club nights such as Rage. At these nights, Grooverider championed the emerging UK breakbeat culture that would eventually split from house and techno to become hardcore, from which developed jungle, which would in turn become known as drum and bass. He is widely recognised as a godfather of drum and bass for his pioneering work in the development of this genre.
Grouper is the artist name of Elizabeth (Liz) Harris from Portland, Oregon. Harris's voice is submerged beneath layer upon layer of dense noise and tape saturation, looping into a degraded whirlwind of cascading sound and on every play you wipe away another layer and discover something more.
Guru Guru is a German Krautrock band formed in 1968. Guru Guru were related to the free jazz music scene both through their work with Swiss female pianist Irène Schweizer and through Neumeier, who had already won several Jazz-prizes . The band was also influenced by rock music, such as Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, The Who, Rolling Stones and early Pink Floyd. Among the band's friends were Amon Düül, Can and Xhol Caravan, with whom Guru Guru played jam sessions. Frontman Mani Neumeier (drummer and singer) has an original style of playing drums, and is known in the European jazz rock-scene.
Hildur Gutnadottir is an Icelandic cellist and composer. Best known for her collaborations with múm and guest appearances with Pan Sonic and Johann Johannssonn she has a rich catalogue of collaborations and varied projects behind her.
Top
H
Hardfloor is a German techno duo, consisting of Oliver Bondzio and Ramon Zenker. Their distinctive acid house sound is credited to their virtuoso skill at manipulating Roland TB-303 bass synthesisers, they reputedly use up to six of these machines at once.
Harmonia is a Krautrock supergroup from Germany. They formed as a collaboration between Michael Rother of Neu! and Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Möbius of Cluster and later included British ambient music artist Brian Eno.
Haruki is the pseudonym of composer/sonic artist Boris Snauwaert from Ghent, Belgium, who creates sonic environments through the precise, meditated amalgamation of a diverse variety of sounds, both musical and non-musical. In any given track Haruki combines any or all sound sources; field recordings, acoustic instruments, acoustic noises, found samples, sampled instruments and so on.
Eric Hayden is Jamaican who came to London in 1953.His first session consisted of Jamaican mentos; however his composition here is thought to originate from the Virgin Isles.
The Headsare an English stoner rock band formed in Bristol, England in 1990. They have released seven albums, numerous EPs and singles. They recorded 3 Peel Sessions between 1995 and 1999. In the early 90's, in a back street garage somewhere in Bristol, Simon, Hugo, Wayne and founding member Dave Spencer would jam for hours and then retire to Simons house for tea and smoke until we could barely communicate. Dave left and then there were three. After some unsuccessful attempts to find a like minded soul, we were introduced to The Rock Prof. Paul was the missing piece in our puzzle. They put out our first 7", 'quad' in 1994 and have released several albums since.
Heavy Disco Crew I wasn't able to find out much about this remix of The Beach Boys, except it was unofficially released in 2006.
Tim Hecker is a Canadian-based musician and sound artist, born in Vancouver. His works have been described as "structured ambient", "tectonic color plates" and "cathedral electronic music". More to the point, he has focused on exploring the intersection of noise, dissonance and melody, fostering an approach to songcraft which is both physical and emotive.
Helios aka Keith Kenniff is exploring electronic arrangements, blending an incredibly detailed approach to beat making with exquisite harmonies and instrumental melodies derived from an array of acoustic arrangements.
Jimi Hendrix was an American guitarist, singer and songwriter. He is widely considered to be the greatest guitarist in the history of rock music by other musicians and commentators in the industry, and one of the most important and influential musicians of his era across a range of genres.
Gil Scott-Heron is an American poet, musician, and author known primarily for his late 1970s and early 1980s work as a spoken word soul performer and his collaborative work with musician Brian Jackson. His collaborative efforts with Jackson featured a musical fusion of jazz, blues and soul music, as well as lyrical content concerning social and political issues of the time, delivered in both rapping and melismatic vocal styles by Scott-Heron. The music of these albums, most notably Pieces of a Man and Winter in America in the early 1970s, influenced and helped engender later African-American music genres such as hip hop and neo soul. Scott-Heron's recording work is often associated with black militant activism and has received much critical acclaim for one of his most well-known compositions "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised". On his influence, Allmusic wrote "Scott-Heron's unique proto-rap style influenced a generation of hip-hop artists." In 2010, he released a new album.
Dick Heyman studied at Columbia University and played with some of the greatests Jazz musicians like Teddy Wilson, Red Norvo, and Benny Goodman. Hyman did different recordings under different nicknames and in 1966 recorded a cover of "Moritat" on harpsichord with his trio which sold over a million copies. During late 60s he investigated the earliest periods of Jazz and Ragtime and researched and recorded the music of some of the first early Jazz figures. Hyman experimented with various keyboard instruments, including Baldwin and Lowrey organs. In the late 60's he recorded a series of Avant-Garde albums using a Minimoog synthesizer focused in the instrument. He recorded some of the most apreciated albums from the Space Age Pop. Hyman has also worked for TV, scoring film soundtracks for Woody Allen, and as a Jazz pianist and organist.
Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson is an Icelandic musician and an art director. Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson was a pioneer in the use of computers when composing music and cleared the path for new ideas in recording and arrangements. He has worked on ambitious, experimental and original projects with various musicians, such as Psychic TV, Current 93, Sigur Rós, Steindór Andersen and Eivør Pálsdóttir.
Koen Holtkamp is the co founder of Mountains. He uses acoustic instruments and objects played through a series of both analog and digital electronics to create an extremely gradual and hypnotic listening experience. This song comes from his first solo album, released by Type records.
James Horner(born August 14, 1953) is an American composer of orchestral and film music. He is noted for the integration of choral and electronic elements in many of his film scores, and for frequent use of Celtic musical elements. Horner won two Academy Awards for his score and song compositions for the film Titanic in 1997. This is track was made for the movie The Name Of The Rose.
Howlin' Rain is a San Francisco band which formed in 2004 and released their first album in 2006. Described as classically soulful, Howlin' Rain are currently signed with Rick Rubin to the Columbia Records subset American Recordings. Subsequent releases by the band will be handled jointly between American Recordings and the indie label Birdman Records. The band's second album Magnificent Fiend was released on March 3, 2008 and has been described as a "combination of psychedelia, blues, funk and classic 1970s arena rock. This track is a fifteen minute plus monster jam. It is inspired and completely improvised wailing twin guitar, rock meditation on Paul McCartney's Wild Life.
Top
I
Inch Time is Stefan Panczak, a London-based Australian with a penchant for multi-textured electronica.
Indian Jewelry is a band from Houston, Texas that is known for its droning vision music and seizure-inducing stage show. Since forming at in 2002 the band has gone through several touring incarnations as Hong Kong, the Turquoise Diamonds, BENZENE LOTION RASH, the Corpses of Waco, Electric Fuck All, NTX+ELECTRIC, and the Perpetual War Party Band, among others. According to their website, they originally derive from the Swarm of Angels. Like other Houston Noise Bands and their psychedelic rock predecessors, Indian Jewelry are prone to sonic and comic experiments.
Innerzone Orchestra is a special project for techno dj Carl Craig. It's a summation of where he's been, and in these pre-millennium times, a pointer to where we all may be headed. Craig launched a jazz trio, both as a live and recording project. That trio has drastically developed into a assemblage of talent that now includes Paul Randolph, the bassist from Mudd Puppy, Richie Hawtin (aka Plastikman), serious Jazz pianist Craig Taborn, ex Sun Ra sideman Francisco Mora on drums and percussion, and lots more.
Top
J
Jacaszek is author and producer of electroacoustic music, combinig electronically prepared sounds with acoustic instruments.He wants to create his own, personal and recognizable musical language, in which electronic manipulation of recorded sound is going to enrich traditional acoustic instruments. The motivation of these experiments is discovering the hidden and universal beauty.
Jarboe is a singer, performer, composer, lyricist, keyboard player, and arranger. To say she has the most amazing vocal range just doesn't encompass her ability to go from fragility and delicacy to raw screaming power. Half-siren, half-steamroller, a little like Linda Blair in The Exorcist in how she alternates from innocent little girl to roaring demon; 0 to 666 in under two seconds.
Jam & Spoon was an influential electronic dance duo from Frankfurt, Germany that consisted of composers and producers Rolf Ellmer (aka Jam El Mar - classically trained composer) and Markus Löffel (a DJ, stage name: Mark Spoon). They also worked under the pseudonyms Tokyo Ghetto Pussy, Storm and Big Room. They had their first hit with the 1992 song "Stella," considered to be a trance classic. This track comes from their ambient masterpiece Tripomatic Fairytales 2001. Markus died in 2006 at the age of 39.
Johann Johannsson is an Icelandic composer & producer. He is a co-founder of Kitchen Motors in Reykjavík, the art organization/think tank/record label which specializes in instigating collaborations, promoting concerts and exhibitions, performances, chamber operas, producing films, books and radio shows based on the ideals of experimentation, collaboration and the search for new art forms. Jóhann founded the Apparat Organ Quartet in 1999, who have played various European festivals to great acclaim.
Jefferson Airplane was an American rock band formed in San Francisco, California in 1965. A pioneer of the psychedelic rock movement, Jefferson Airplane was the first band from the San Francisco scene to achieve mainstream commercial and critical success. In the 1960s, Jefferson Airplane was one of the most sought-after and highly-paid concert acts in the world and they are also notable as the only band to have performed at all three of the most famous American rock festivals of the 1960s — Monterey (1967), Woodstock (1969) and Altamont (1969),[1] also headlining the first Isle of Wight festival. Their recordings were internationally successful and sold in great quantities, and they scored two US Top 10 hit singles and a string of Top 20 albums. Their 1967 record Surrealistic Pillow is still widely regarded as one of the key recordings of the so-called Summer of Love period and brought the group international recognition (as well as two chart hits: "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit" both of which are listed in Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Songs of All Time")
Marc Johnson is an American jazz bassist, composer and bandleader. Johnson's first record under his own name for ECM, recorded in 1985, was Bass Desires (where you can find this track), with Bill Frisell and John Scofield on guitar, and Peter Erskine on drums. Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Hair is a traditional folk song first known in the Appalachian Mountains region of United States in 1915, but most probably originated from Scotland, as attributed to reference to Clyde in the song's lyrics.
Glenn Jones Since 1989, Glenn Jones has led Boston’s “avant -garage” instrumental rock band, Cul de Sac, whose musical adventures are documented on nine albums to date, including a soundtrack for cult-director Roger Corman, and collaborations with guitarist John Fahey and former Can vocalist Damo Suzuki. A 30-plus-year devotee of the so-called “Takoma school,” Jones has written extensively on the steel-string guitar’s leading lights: John Fahey, with whom he was friends for nearly 25 years, and Robbie Basho, who befriended Jones during the five years before his untimely death in 1986.
Jonsi & Alex Jonsi is the guitar player of Sigur Ros, Alex did a lot fo graphic design for the band and is also Jonsi's boyfriend. They now released a full album, Riceboy Sleeps, which features acoustic instrumental music alongside a string quartet, Amiina, and the Kópavogsdætur Choir.
Josh Roseman Unit is the group around Josh Roseman, trombonist and composer from New York. Roseman's electric quintet, the JRU, has headlined at the Berlin Jazztage, the Zurich Jazz festival, Jazz Wilisau, Jazz Coutances, the Nijmegen festival and elsewhere. His other projects include an acoustic quintet, an improvising trombone ensemble, an eight piece avant-ska & reggae ensemble and a new 11 piece big band.
Marsen Jules is one of the aliases for the musical output of Martin Juhls from Dortmund/Germany. As Marsen Jules he concerns himself with compression of atmosphere and emotion in the most abstract sense, based on carefully selected sound fragments and quotations. Maybe one could think of ordinary sampling, but Marsen Jules processes another step further. Neither the sampled sound nor the Instrument itself is centered in his work, actually its the particular moment, where the authenticity, emotion and overall atmosphere is reflected at the most; the moments that in the ordinary way of listening remain hidden to the usual listener. Moments that are caught and extracted by Marsen Jules, to increase their density, to extend into length and arrange them in continuous loops within a temporal environment. The results are almost static sonorous pictures full of emotion and expression, whose filigrane movements reflect equally riot and composure to the fullest.
Yan Jun is one of the Chinese musicians of the laptop generation who explores dthe convergence of the noise-sculpting techniques that come from musique concrete and the improvised techniques that come from jazz.
Top
K
Kammerflimmer Kollektief is a German musical group, founded by Thomas Weber, consisting of Heike Aumüller, Johannes Frisch, Christopher Brunner, Heike Wendelin, and D. Wurm. They play a mixture of jazz, noise, electronic music, free jazz and experimental music. Formed in 1997, they have released to date 8 albums, and have appeared on many jazz and electronic compilation albums.
Eyvind Kang is an American composer, violinist, tuba, and erhu player. He was raised in Canada and the United States, and has since lived and worked in countries ranging from Italy to Iceland. Kang's work is difficult to classify, but can broadly be seen as a classical approach to jazz music with punk, ambient, and traditional folk influences. However, each of his solo efforts is almost in a different genre. Kang has also worked with musicians including Mike Patton, John Zorn, Trey Spruance, Tim Young, Marc Ribot and Beck, supporting the latter during a 2000 tour of Japan. In addition, he has been a guest musician on many albums, including Bill Frisell's Quartet (1996) and 858 Quartet with music written by Frisell based on the paintings of the German artist Gerhard Richter, Secret Chiefs 3's Book M and playing the viola on five of Laura Veirs' albums.
Kartasan is the new band established around Belgian Jan Vandecasteele, singer, pianist, composer. Kartasan guarantees infectious pop/rock with a twist, jazz and Latin influences are keenly used, songs that you've always known, but never before heard. Jan possesses a unmistakable voice and an impressive band, assisted live by The Killer Horns.
Rina Ketty went to Paris in the 30s. In 1938 and 1939, she made her breakthrough with songs like Sombreros et mantilles and J'attendrai. Despite the popularity of these Chansons during World War II, she was not able to stay in the spotlights after 1945. In 1954 she moved to Canada and in 1965 she returned to France but was unable to revive her pre-war success. In 1991 the French minister of culture Jack Lang awarded her the medal Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Later, her songs were re-interpreted, most notably by Dalida. The song J'attendrai gained some renewed interest in 1981 as part of the soundtrack of the movie Das Boot and in 2006 for its use in a TV commercial.
Takahiro Kido orchestrates a multi-dimensional organism of emotional contemplation and melancholy reflection. Somewhere in Brian Eno's sea of musical influence, Takahiro Kido has nestled a pensive corner as an ambient composer. His music seems to wash over your body and leave a sensation of thought provoking calmness. Electronic garble floats around a lot of the music, but generally stays in good taste and adds a contemporary texture to the compositions. Often the juxtaposition of string instruments such as the cello and viola with computer-generated clamor adds a differentiating depth to Takahiro Kido's music. The electronics remind the listener of where they are in history and give a temporal reference point for the emotional expression.
Kilimanjaro Dark Jazz Ensemble is heavy, evil doom jazz. They started off as an audiovisual project back in 2000, influenced by old silent movie directors such as Murnau and Lang, but also the animations of Jan Svankmeijer or the films of the Quay Brothers. Jason Kohnen and Gideon Kiers, started creating soundtracks to old silent movies (Nosferatu, Metropolis) and progressively composed new music inspired by these images which eventually became TKDE.
Trombonist Hilary Jeffery (originally from the UK, residing in Amsterdam) joined in 2004 and introduced Swiss born Nina Hitz .TKDE expanded to six when Eelco Bosman and French vocalist Charlotte Cegarra joined the ensemble in 2007. In 2009 Chrome Hoof's Sarah Anderson added the ensemble as violinist. Embers is taken from their latest album Here Be Dragons.
Kings Of Convenience s an indie folk-pop duo from Bergen, Norway. Consisting of Erlend Øye and Eirik Glambek Bøe, the musical group is known for their delicate tunes, calming voices, and intricate and subtle guitar melodies. Øye and Bøe both compose and sing the songs.
James Kinds & StackJames Kinds is a natural tenor with a penchant for gospel, rock'n roll and soul. Sixteen years after a career that looked to be going nowhere, Kinds recorded his first 45 for gospel mogul Hayes Farmer's Cloud Nine label. It was not a big success, adn two years later he tried again with California Lady.
The KLF also known as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (which was often abbreviated to The JAMs), The Timelords and other names, were one of the seminal bands from the British acid house movement during the late 1980s and early 1990s. As The KLF, Drummond and Cauty pioneered the genres "stadium house" (rave music with a pop-rock production and sampled crowd noise) and "ambient house". The KLF released a series of international top-ten hits on their own KLF Communications record label, and became the biggest-selling singles act in the world for 1991. The duo also published a book, The Manual, and worked on a road movie called The White Room. From the outset, they adopted the philosophy espoused by esoteric novel series The Illuminatus! Trilogy, gaining notoriety for various anarchic situationist manifestations, including the defacement of billboard adverts, the posting of prominent cryptic advertisements in NME magazine and the mainstream press, and highly distinctive and unusual performances on Top of the Pops. Their most notorious performance was at the February 1992 BRIT Awards, where they fired machine gun blanks into the audience and dumped a dead sheep at the aftershow party. This performance announced The KLF's departure from the music business, and in May 1992 the duo deleted their entire back catalogue. With The KLF's profits, Drummond and Cauty established the K Foundation and sought to subvert the art world, staging an alternative art award for the worst artist of the year and burning one million pounds sterling. Although Drummond and Cauty remained true to their word of May 1992—the KLF Communications catalogue remains deleted in the UK
Klimek aka Sebastian Meissner works as a media artist using sound, video and photography. Employing multiple artistic personas, his works deal with and negotiate urban/cultural/social scenarios, randomness, historical music archives and strategies of networking. He works with computer music sources, sampling and moving photography assembling their interrelation within geographic/historical/political discourses. This track is taken from the album Movies is Magic, lifting its title from a Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks song from their 1995 album, Orange Crate Art. This sublime Klimek album engages with that age-old idea of creating soundtracks for films that don't exist.
Kraftwerk is a pioneering and a highly influential electronic music band from Düsseldorf, Germany. The signature Kraftwerk sound combines driving, repetitive rhythms with catchy melodies, mainly following a Western classical style of harmony, with a minimalistic and strictly electronic instrumentation. The group's simplified lyrics are at times sung through a vocoder or generated by computer-speech software. Kraftwerk were one of the first groups to popularize electronic music. In the early to late 1970s and the early 1980s, Kraftwerk's distinctive sound was revolutionary, and it has had a lasting effect across many genres of modern music.
Alison Krauss is an American bluegrass-country singer and fiddler. She has released eleven albums, appeared on numerous soundtracks, and helped renew interest in bluegrass music in the United States. Her soundtrack performances have led to further popularity, including the Grammy-winning O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack (feat. this track), an album also credited with raising American interest in bluegrass, and the Cold Mountain soundtrack, which led to her performance at the 2004 Academy Awards. During her career she has won 26 Grammy Awards, making her the most awarded female artist (and the third most awarded artist overall) in Grammy history.
Kreng is a Belgian Band that started as a strictly sample-based project, working with sounds from various sources: free-jazz, first generation electronics, improv, classical modernism, vintage ethnomusical fieldrecordings, etc... The project mutated into a cinematic, theatrical device that has been used by various film and theater directors. Kreng scored more that 20 theatre- & danceproductions, most of them produced by the Belgian theatre-company Abattoir Fermé.
Top
L
Oliver Lake/NTU is an American alto saxophonist, flutist, composer and poet. Lake started playing and studying the alto saxophone in 1960, where in the mid 1960s he was working with the St. Louis Black Artists Group (BAG). In 1977 Lake co-founded the World Saxophone Quartet, composing as leader and releasing several recordings. Musician, poet, painter, and performance artist, Oliver Lake has created chamber pieces for the Arditti and Flux String Quartets; arranged music for Bjork, Lou Reed, and A Tribe Called Quest; and collaborated with poets Amiri Baraka and Ntozake Shange, choreographers Ron Brown and Marlies Yearby, and actress/author Anna Deavere Smith. He has done jazz-poetry collaborations with Huang Xiang since 2004.
Daniel Lanois is a Canadian record producer, guitarist and singer-songwriter. He has released a number of albums of his own work and has produced albums for a wide variety of artists, including Bob Dylan, Parachute Club, U2, Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, Emmylou Harris, Scott Weiland, Sinead O'Connor. This song was made together with Brian Eno, his co-producer for the new U2 album.
Elodie Lauten Elodie Lauten's musical oeuvre includes many electronic and electro-acoustic pieces, as well as chamber and orchestral music. No stranger to visual and media arts, Lauten has had solo, collaborative and group gallery showings in New York and Boston including sound installations, drawings, as well as computer-based art and animation.
Yusef Lateef is an American jazz multi-instrumentalist, composer and educator and a renowned spokesman for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community after his conversion to Islam in 1950. Although Lateef's main instruments are the tenor saxophone and flute, he is known for his innovative blending of jazz with 'Eastern' music. In addition to the oboe and bassoon, both rare in jazz, Lateef plays various world music instruments, notably the bamboo flute, shanai, shofar, arghul, sarewa, and koto.
Led Zeppelin were an English rock band formed in 1968 by Jimmy Page (guitar), Robert Plant (vocals, harmonica), John Paul Jones (bass guitar, keyboards, mandolin), and John Bonham (drums). With their heavy, guitar-driven sound, Led Zeppelin are regularly cited as one of the progenitors of heavy metal and hard rock music. However, the band's individualistic style drew from many sources and transcends any one genre. Led Zeppelin did not release the popular songs from their albums as singles in the UK, as they preferred to develop the concept of "album-oriented rock".The band has sold over 200 million albums worldwide.
Leila is the former keyboard player of Bjork. This track is taken from her album on Warp records, with guest vocalists like Martina Topley Bird crooning over synth wiggles seemingly lifted from Aphex Twin's Richard D. James Album. The Iranian expat's last album is as tuneful as it is brazen; it effectively opens a wormhole back to a reality you'd almost forgotten.
Brenda Lee is an American performer who sang rockabilly, pop and country music with equal conviction and power; and had 37 US chart hits during the 1960s, a number surpassed only by Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Ray Charles and Connie Francis. She is best known for her 1960 hit "I'm Sorry", and 1958's "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree", a perennial US holiday standard for more than 50 years. At 4 ft 9 inches tall, she received the nickname Little Miss Dynamite in 1957 after recording the song "Dynamite"; and was one of the earliest pop stars to have a major contemporary international following. Lee's popularity faded in the late 1960s as her voice matured, but she continued a successful recording career by returning to her roots as a country singer with a string of hits through the 1970s and 80s. She is a member of the Rock and Roll, Country Music and Rockabilly halls of fame, and currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
Cecil Leuter is the pseudonym Roger Roger used for his electronic productions. One of the first with Pierre Henry and Jean-Jacques Perrey to try out the Moog synth. Originally his Pop Electronique album was released in 1969. Five years after Bob Moog put his synth on the market. He died in Paris in 1995. Since his death, renewed interest in light music has seen several CD albums released, both in dedicated albums and in compilations, notably of test card music, where some of Roger's music was used by the BBC in the 1970s.
Lightning Dust is a Canadian indie rock band, based in Vancouver, British Columbia. The band is a side project of Amber Webber and Joshua Wells, both members of Black Mountain. Wells has described the band, whose sound is softer and more melodic than Black Mountain's hard rock, as arising from the desire to do something that was sparse and minimal, and with a lot of space around it, while Webber has described the band as an opportunity to explore her goth side.
Georgy Ligeti was a composer, born in a Hungarian Jewish family in Transylvania, Romania. He briefly lived in Hungary before later becoming an Austrian citizen. Many of his works are well known in classical music circles, but to the general public, he is best known for the various pieces featured in the Stanley Kubrick films 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut.
Lightning & Group'Long John was recorded by Alan Lomax at Darrington State Farm in Sandy Point, Texas, in 1933. It's a typical traditional work song, with the rhythm of the task at hand. The driving, intense performance is rooted in the repertoire of early African-American music that informed the blues.
Lindstrom & Prins Thomas are Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and fellow Norwegian, Thomas M. Hermansen (aka Prins Thomas), two of the hottest leftfield dance artists around. Whilst Thomas’s roots come from a more dance/DJ background, multi-instrumentalist Lindstrøm provides the backbone to the pairs beautiful and melodic approach that takes their music from the dancefloor and into a looser groove that could fit happily in any home listening environment. Thier music is organic, psychedelic, live and loose. Featuring elements of italo, krautrock and disco-influenced productions alongside the production spark genius that defined those halcyon releases of the post disco/punk era Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas provide us with yet more lush basslines, sublime melodies and rolling rhythms bursting with pure emotion. Throughout you can find the experimental energy of the continental space-disco of the eighties which the pair still adore: melodic, synth-heavy and cinematic, with arpeggiated basslines set to organic, flowing grooves.
Li Tie Qiao s a Chinese composer, saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist and curator based in Beijing. He is an extended techniques player and an outstanding experimentalist. In his improvisation he bravely experiment in search for a new expression between the boarders of jazz, rock and electronic noise. From 2005 to 2007 Tieqiao lived in Oslo, where he interacted with a number of Norwegian musicians. During his time in Norway he actively explored the Experimental and improvisation scene in Norway. In September 2007 he returned to Beijing where he has become one of the most important persons in the rapidly expanding scene for experimental and improvised music in China. Besides performing live, Tieqiao is also actively nurturing China's fledgling Avant-garde scene.
Loga is a sound artist from Fuzhou, China.
Luciano is a DJ since 1993 and a producer since 1997. In the mid-90's, he was promoting Sense Club and Encuentros con la Technocultura in Santiago de Chile in the company of many initiators of the Latin American electronic music scene: Senor Coconut AKA Atom Heart, Ricardo Villalobos, Dandy Jack & brother Adrian Schopf, Washington Miranda, Argenix Brito, Microman etc. His sound can mostly be described as warm minimalism. Here he sampled a track by Yann Tiersen, who wrote it for the soundtrack of Amelie Poulain.
Lulu Rouge is DJ T.O.M. and Buda, two of the most respected DJs and producers on the Copenhagen scene. Both of these two travellers have been around crashing club land for a decade and a half. Recently DJ T.O.M has been Trentemoller's partner for the last 3 years straight touring the world in nearly every major club you can think of - weekend after weekend. Today the 2 DJ heads, producers and long time friends have decided to join forces and put all the chips on one number; Lulu Rouge.Thus creating one of the most interesting and refreshing sounds coming out of Scandinavia.
Top
M
Yoshio Machida is a Japanese experimental musician, a steelpanist, composer, and visual artist.
Machinefabriek aka Rutger Zyudervelt is a Dutch artist who makes electronic (non-laptop) music ranging from drones to melodica songs and from classical ambient to harsh feedback noise. Rutger was called one of the most interesting new experimental musicians by the Wire magazine.
Manyfingers is the work of Chris Cole, long time mover within the Bristol scene and master instrumentalist on a myriad albums from artists both known and unknown. Chris uses a magical arrangement of acoustic instrumentation and delicate crafting that sound both timeless and haunting. This is soundtrack music at its most evocative - an alchemical journey into audio imagery, with detuned pianos, accordions, flutes, reversed guitars, xylophones and creepy atmospheres that congregate around the suggestion that life really can be elsewhere.
Clint Mansell is a musician, composer, and former lead singer and guitarist of Pop Will Eat Itself. After the disbanding of PWEI in 1996, Mansell broke into the world of film scoring when his friend, director Darren Aronofsky, hired him to score his debut film, Pi. He also created the soundtracks of Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Doom, and Moon, to name a few.
Massive Attack are a British music duo from Bristol, UK, considered to be progenitors of the genre known as trip hop, as well as effectively being a wider collective including other musicians that they assemble. Some of their most noted songs have been without choruses and have featured dramatically atmospheric dynamics, conveyed through either epic distorted guitar crescendos, lavish orchestral arrangements (like swelling, sustained strings or flourishes of grand piano) or prominent, looped/shifting basslines, often underpinned by high and exacting production values, involving sometimes painstaking digital editing and mixing.
Massot-Floorizone-Horbaczewski worked together on the Cinema Novo album. Floorizone is well known for his soundtrack for "Aanrijding in Moscou", an award winning Belgian movie. On this album, they improvise and compose music between jazz and contemporary classical music. They take you on a trip through their world of endless imagination.
Material began as a noisy dance music project, but subsequent releases have been centered around hip hop, jazz, or backing spoken word readings by beat generation icon William S. Burroughs. Similarly, most versions of Praxis have featured guitarist Buckethead, but have explored different permutations with each new album. In 1978, having received a substantial royalty payment for his work with The Yardbirds, Russian music entrepreneur Giorgio Gomelsky relocated to New York in an attempt to open up the American market to the European progressive jazz-rock bands he was working with, such as Gong, Henry Cow and Magma. He established the Zu Club in Manhattan and after meeting 24 year old bass player Bill Laswell, encouraged him to form a band. Three young friends, Michael Beinhorn (17, synthesizer), Martin Bisi (17, engineering) and Fred Maher (14, drums), responded to Laswell's advert in The Village Voice and the band began rehearsing in the club's basement. This track is recorded in collaboration with Whitney Houston. Houston's vocal was on a cover version of Hugh Hopper's "Memories", which also featured a lead break by saxophonist Archie Shepp.
The Memphis Jug Band was an American musical group in the late 1920s and early to mid 1930s. The band featured harmonicas, violins, mandolins, banjos, and guitars, backed by washboards, kazoo, and jugs blown to supply the bass; they played in a variety of musical styles. The band recorded almost a hundred titles. Between 1927 and 1934 various African-American musicians in the Memphis, Tennessee area grouped around singer, songwriter, guitarist, and harmonica player Will Shade (also known as Son Brimmer or Sun Brimmer). The personnel of this jug band varied from day to day, with Shade booking gigs and arranging recording sessions. The band functioned as a training ground for musicians who would go on to success with careers of their own.
Mikkel Metalaka Copenhagen based Mikkel Meldgaard 's musical career started more than 10 years ago as a guitarist in various noise-rock bands. In the mid-nineties focus changed to electronic music, inspiration coming primarily from breakbeat music, especially drum'n'bass. It's this period that gave Mikkel his nickname "Metal", due to his fondness of hard metallic drum'n'bass cuts. Around 1999 Mikkel changed focus towards genres like click'n'cuts, IDM, techo and dub, and started releasing under the "Mikkel Metal" moniker. Primarily he releases on danish label Echocord and German label Kompakt. The former with a dubby grainy sound , the latter focusing on a more melodic and 4/4-based sound.
Mint aka Wolfgang Voigt is an electronic music artist from Cologne, Germany, known for his output under various aliases on a plethora of record labels, including Warp, Harvest, Raster-Noton and Force Inc. Although widely known as a tireless producer, he is best known for co-founding the influential German techno label Kompakt alongside Michael Mayer and Jurgen Paape.
Sven Väth & Miss Kittin collaborated on this Serge Gainsbourg cover. Väth is a DJ who has produced an extensive range of work since his career began in 1982, who owns his own club and record label. He is one of the most asked techno dj's in the world. Miss Kittin is a French dj/producer who released a lot of records with The Hacker and collaborated with Felix Da Housecat, Ellen Alien, Steve Bug and many more. She's one of the leading ladies of electroclash.
Miwon is a German dj/producer/journalist, who also co-founded Laptoporchester Berlin. He is also active in the field of sound design.
Juana Molina is an Argentinean singer/songwriter. She uses a mixture of acoustic guitars, traditional percussion touches, electronic textures and her disarming vocals. It 's kaleidoscopic, edgy and exquisite, sometimes all at once.
Mono is a Japanese band founded in January 2000 by guitarist Takaakira Goto. Written and arranged with a hopeful, romantic narrative in mind, the songs on their latest album string together like chapters in an epic love story. The music is naturally majestic, with MONO's trademark wall of noise crashing beautifully against the largest chamber orchestra the band has ever enlisted. The instrumentation is vast, incorporating strings, flutes, organ, piano, glockenspiel and tympani into their standard face-melting set-up.
Monsters of Folk is an American supergroup, consisting of Jim James from My Morning Jacket, Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis from Bright Eyes and M. Ward. The band was formed in 2004 when the members were on tour with their respective bands and solo projects. After playing together both on-stage and backstage, they started working together on various material. Due to the members' main projects, Monsters of Folk did not wrap up their first album until 2009, and it was released on September 22 on Rough Trade.
Carlos Montoya was a prominent Flamenco guitarist and a founder of the modern-day popular Flamenco style of music. His style was not particularly appreciated by serious flamenco students, who considered it less brilliant than many others, including that of Montoya's uncle Ramón. That he was unpopular among aficionados owes largely to the fact that Montoya learned in a non-traditional way and that he abandoned the compás which has evolved within flamenco over hundreds of years. Many of his works do not even keep perfect tempo, increasing and decreasing in speed almost whimsically. He was admired for the speed of his picados and undoubtedly found popularity on the international stage as a result of this technically impressive pace.
Jason Moran is a jazz pianist who debuted as a band leader with the 1999 album Soundtrack to Human Motion. Since then, he has garnered much critical acclaim and won a number of awards for his playing and compositional skills, which combine elements of stride piano, avant-garde jazz, classical music, hip hop, and spoken word, among others.
Ennio Morricone is an Italian composer and conductor. He has composed and arranged scores for more than 500 film and television productions. Morricone is considered as one of the most influential film composers since the late 1950s. He is well-known for his long-term collaborations with international acclaimed directors such as Sergio Leone, Brian De Palma, Barry Levinson, and Giuseppe Tornatore. He wrote the characteristic film scores of Leone's Spaghetti Westerns A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), The Great Silence (1968), and My Name Is Nobody (1973). In the 80s, Morricone composed the scores for John Carpenter's horror movie The Thing (1982), Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Roland Joffé's The Mission (1986), Brian De Palma's The Untouchables (1987) and Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso (1988).
Dudley Moore was an English actor, comedian, composer and musician.
Moore first came to prominence as one of the four writer-performers in Beyond the Fringe in the early 1960s and became famous as half of the popular television double-act he formed with Peter Cook. His fame as a comedic actor was later heightened by his success in Hollywood movies such as "10" with Bo Derek and Arthur in the late 1970s and early 1980s, respectively. Moore's musical talent won him an organ scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford. While studying music and composition there, he also performed with Alan Bennett in the Oxford Revue. Bennett then recommended him to the producer putting together Beyond the Fringe, a comedy revue, where he was to first meet Peter Cook. Beyond the Fringe was at the forefront of the 1960s satire boom and after success in Britain, it transferred to the United States where it was also a hit.
Mountains is the project of Brendon Anderegg & Koen Holtkamp. Mountains have set themselves apart from a good many of their peers and contemporaries, offering an alternate take on abstract electroacoustic music. They have also been included in several exhibitions, most notably at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. There current performances utilize acoustic instruments and objects played through a series of both analog and digital electronics to create an extremely gradual and hypnotic listening experience.
Mount Eerie is an Anacortes, Washington-based band fronted by Phil Elverum. Elverum is the principal member of the band, but he has collaborated with many other musicians on his records.
The Mount Fuji Doom Jazz Corporation is an alter ego of The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble. They perform with several TKDE members + special guests every now and then. It is a side project focussing on Improv/Jazz/Doom/Drones...heavy and evil!! They release live improvisation albums.
Mori-Shige is a Japanese cello player, who uses a lot of improvisation in his performances on cello and piano.
Murcof is the performing and recording name of Mexican electronica artist Fernando Corona. Corona was born in 1970 in Tijuana, Mexico. Murcof's music is sparse, minimalist, sample-based electronica. Although founded on abstract, glitchy, sometimes complex electronic percussion, Corona's recordings are more melodic and traditionally structured than many contemporary electronic musicians.
Murcof & Erik Truffaz worked together on the album Mexico. Erik started working with Murcof via the internet where recorded pieces were exchanged digitally and at the end of the process, Murcof joined the studio in Paris to polish off the finished product. The result is 3 magnificent tracks where Murcofs dark and moody electronics meets and matches Erik Truffaz’s trumpet wizardry quite excellently and at times reminiscent of Nils Petter Molværs releases on ECM and Sula.
My Bloody Valentine are an alternative rock band formed in Dublin, Ireland in 1983. The band's founding members are guitarist/singer Kevin Shields and drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig. The lineup during the band's late 80s/early 90s heyday included singer-guitarist Bilinda Butcher and bassist Debbie Googe after the band settled in London.
As My Bloody Valentine's music progressed, their use of distortion, pitch bending, and digital reverb resulted in a sound that came to be known as shoegazing. The group's 1991 critically-acclaimed album Loveless took two years to make mostly due to funding problems. Following Loveless, My Bloody Valentine became inactive, with Shields recording and shelving several albums' worth of follow-up material. In 2007, Shields announced that the band had reunited and were recording new material.
Mystic Sounds aka Mike Oldfield is an English multi-instrumentalist musician and composer, working a style that blends progressive rock, folk, ethnic or world music, classical music, electronic music, New Age and more recently dance. His music is often elaborate and complex in nature. He is best known for his hit 1973 album Tubular Bells, which broke new ground as an instrumental concept album.
Top
N
Nara was born in 1984, lives in Bejing and has been a electronic music enthusiast since 2005.
The National Philharmonic Orchestra is a British orchestra created exclusively for recording purposes. It was founded by RCA producer Charles Gerhardt and orchestra leader Sidney Sax due in part to the requirements of the Reader's Digest recording project. The orchestra has been featured on the soundtrack of many films (particularly those scored by Jerry Goldsmith) as well as a selection of Star Wars suites from the John Williams catalogue. Bernard Hermann regularly used the orchestra for recordings of his film work. This track was recorded for the film The Exorcist.
Christian Naujoks is a composer of contemporary music, a singer/songwriter, an electronic music producer, a pop musician or maybe a conceptual sound artist - either way you name it, you won't entirely grasp this artist. Starting off with a set of precisely-composed post-minimal pieces for piano and marimbas, flute and strings carefully recorded on analogue tape at Tobias Levin's Electric Avenue Studio, his latest album leads surprisingly and tenderly through a wide horizon of sonic impressions.
Netherworld is Italian ambient composer Alessandro Tedeschi, who runs the Glacial Movements record label. His fascination for polar landscapes and soundscapes makes him close to industrial ambient pioneers such as Thomas Köner, Rapoon, Biosphere and Lull. Icy, windy, droning and deeply protomelodic at once, his music is a poetic translation of the ice floe.
Neu! was a German band formed by Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother after their split from Kraftwerk in the early 1970s. Though the band had minimal commercial success during its existence, Neu! are retrospectively considered one of the founding fathers of Krautrock and a significant influence on artists including PiL, Joy Division, Brian Eno, David Bowie, Stereolab, Gary Numan, Ultravox, Radiohead, Simple Minds, and much of the current electronic music scene.
Carlos Nino is a Los Angeles based producer, arranger, composer and musician is involved in Build an Ark, Ninja Tune s AmmonContact, The Life Force, What s The Science? or Hu Vibrational. His latest work is titled With A Little Help From and is put out under the name Carlos Niño & Friends. What started as a record session with fellow Build An Ark members, turned into a wonderful journey through analogue ambience and field recordings. It s an album shifting between folky and cinematic themes, almost entirely without the use of percussive instruments, and it s not following any classic song structures. The richness of sound, its dreaminess, is created by a combination of analogue instruments, natural soundscapes and effects from the machine.
Tujiko Noriko is a Japanese avant-pop, experimental musician, sometimes compared to múm, or Björk. Much of her music consists of repetitive layers of samples and electronic beats and melodies being gradually added on top of each other, with her singing on top of that. The lyrics are in Japanese and English. She has worked for the Austrian label Mego, and the German Tomlab. In 2004 she teamed up with Peter Rehberg to form DACM making the album Stéréotypie. She is currently living in Paris and is also working on experimental short movies. According to an article in The Japan Times, she has completed two movies: Sand and Mini Hawaii and Sun.
North Sea aka Brad Rose is easily one of the free-folk movement's busiest exponents, splitting his time somehow between running the Digitalis and Foxglove labels, the FoxyDigitalis webzine and writing his own music under a variety of different monikers with a host of collaborators (Ajilvsga, Eastern Fox Squirrels, Alligator Crystal Moth, Corsican Paintbrush, Sea Zombies).
Nouvelle Vague is a French musical collective led by musicians Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux. Members, former members and contributors include many French artists who are now very well known on their own and considered as part of what is now called the Renouveau de la chanson française: Anaïs Croze, Camille Dalmais, Phoebe Killdeer, Mélanie Pain, Marina Céleste and Gerald Toto. They made several albums covering music from the sixties, seventies and eighties. The original of this track is by Visage.
Top
O
Oakland's Famous One Man Band is apparently a very unfamous blues artist who lived somewhere early 20 th century. I was not able to find information about this artist.
Ozric Tentacles is an instrumental band from Somerset, England, whose music can loosely be described as psychedelic or space rock. Formed in 1984, the band has released 29 albums as of 2007, and become a cottage industry selling around a million albums worldwide despite never having major label backing. Its music is a highly psychedelic mixture of thumping basslines, sound effects and keyboard and guitar work.
Top
P
Paavoharju is from forest-town of Savonlinnas Finland. Esoteric romantic mysticism and darkness floating over deep-sea-level of the christian mind. Paavoharju 's sound is a precise combination of broken chords, acoustic guitars, spiritual choral vocals and digital filters.
The Pains of Being Pure At Heartre an indie pop band from New York City. Their first album was a self-released EP which came out in 2007 through the Painbow label. Their debut self-titled full length album was released on February 3, 2009 via Slumberland Records. The band name comes from an unpublished children's story of the same title that a friend of singer Kip Berman wrote. The group's self-titled album peaked at #9 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart. On September 22, 2009, they released Higher Than the Stars, their second EP.
John Parish is a British musician and producer best known for his work with singer and songwriter PJ Harvey, though he has also worked with Eels, Tracy Chapman, and Giant Sand, amongst others. Parish toured with Harvey during 1995, and in 1996, they recorded Dance Hall at Louse Point together. In 1997 he produced 16 Horsepower's album Low Estate. During 97-98 he also played on PJ Harvey's next album Is This Desire (1998), and in 1998 he wrote and recorded the film soundtrack for Belgian director Patrice Toye's film Rosie, for which he won the Jury Special Appreciation prize at the Bonn International Film Music Biennale in 1999. The soundtrack to Rosie was released as a CD in 1998, and includes one song sung by Alison Goldfrapp. He toured the soundtrack music with a seven piece band under his own name in 1999.
Charlie Parker was an American jazz saxophonist and composer.
Parker, with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, is largely considered one of the most influential of jazz musicians. Parker acquired the nickname "Yardbird" early in his career,[2] and the shortened form "Bird" remained Parker's sobriquet for the rest of his life, inspiring the titles of a number of Parker compositions, such as "Yardbird Suite", "Ornithology" and "Bird of Paradise." Parker played a leading role in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuosic technique, and improvisation based on harmonic structure. Parker's innovative approaches to melody, rhythm, and harmony exercised enormous influence on his contemporaries. Several of Parker's songs have become standards, including "Billie's Bounce", "Anthropology", "Ornithology", and "Confirmation". He introduced revolutionary harmonic ideas including a tonal vocabulary employing 9ths, 11ths and 13ths of chords, rapidly implied passing chords, and new variants of altered chords and chord substitutions. His tone was clean and penetrating, but sweet and plaintive on ballads. Although many Parker recordings demonstrate dazzling virtuosic technique and complex melodic lines – such as "Ko-Ko", "Kim", and "Leap Frog" – he was also one of the great blues players. His themeless blues improvisation "Parker's Mood" represents one of the most deeply affecting recordings in jazz. At various times, Parker fused jazz with other musical styles, from classical to Latin music, blazing paths followed later by others. Parker was an icon for the hipster subculture and later the Beat generation, personifying the conception of the jazz musician as an uncompromising artist and intellectual, rather than just a popular entertainer. His style – from a rhythmic, harmonic and soloing perspective – influenced countless peers on every instrument.
The Passions were a British pop band which formed in 1978, and disbanded in 1983. They were archetypal one-hit wonders with this misty, trance-like pop song, I'm in Love with a German Film Star.
Pelikan is a four-piece instrumental band from Chicago, Illinois who have since relocated to Los Angeles. The band is known for its dense combinations of different melodies and extended track lengths. Their distinctive sound draws from stoner rock, doom metal as well as post-rock and many other influences. Larry Herweg, Trevor de Brauw, and Laurent Schroeder-Lebec also make up three-quarters of the band Tusk.
Pet Shop Boys are a British electronic dance music duo, consisting of Neil Tennant, who provides main vocals, keyboards and occasionally guitar and Chris Lowe on keyboards and occasionally on vocals. Pet Shop Boys have sold about 100 million records worldwide. This track was released from their album Very. It got a huge remix by Jam & Spoon, an influential electronic dance duo from Frankfurt, Germany that consisted of composers and producers Rolf Ellmer (aka Jam El Mar - classically trained composer) and Markus Löffel (a DJ, stage name: Mark Spoon).
Pimmon is the recording name of Australian musician Paul Gough. He has released records on labels such as Fat Cat Records, Fällt, Tigerbeat6, Staalplaat and Staubgold, and collaborated with Fennesz and Oren Ambarchi, among others. Gough started making music in the early 80s, inspired by Severed Heads, but never released any of it commercially. That changed when he sent a CD-R to the Japanese label Meme, who released it in 1999. Since then, Gough has been perfecting his unique mixture of drone- and glitch-based abstract digital soundscapes, which he creates using a variety of sound sources that he manipulates on his computer.
Pink Floyd are an English rock band who initially earned recognition for their psychedelic and space rock music, and later, as they evolved, for their progressive rock music. Pink Floyd are known for philosophical lyrics, sonic experimentation, innovative album cover art, and elaborate live shows. One of rock music's most successful acts, the group have sold over 210 million albums worldwide.
Porest has exploited reckless composition, performance and worldwide documentation via multi-instrumentation, field recordings, perverse cut-uppers, dirty bomb audio downers and whatever else gets in the way. On full-length albums released by Seeland, Resipiscent and Abduction records, Porest has issued a confounding collection of music and audio works ranging from mangled pop and surrealist radio-dramas to highly unrequested and diabolical protean folkloric ear-wash.
Pocahaunted aka Amanda Brown and Bethany Cosentino . Most of Pocahaunted's music has been in the murkier, ambient sort of school of primitive experimentalism. The prolific duo once referred to themselves as the Olsen twins of blissed-out drone and have released tape after tape of ambient, hallucinatory weirdness that seems aimed at hastening the return of Quetzaquatl. Despite their tongue-in-cheek band name, Bethany Consentino and Amanda Brown compose brooding, challenging music that draws inspiration from darker, more ancient sources than Western pop and folk.
Jocelyn Pook is an award-winning composer who writes music for film, television, theatre, dance and the concert platform. Established as a highly original composer of screen music, her score for Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (with this song) garnered a Chicago Film Award and a Golden Globe nomination. Other significant work in this area includes The Merchant of Venice, the classic childrenâs story Heidi and in Martin Scorseseâs Gangs of New York
PrincePrince Rogers Nelson is an American singer, songwriter, musician and actor. He is known under the mononym Prince and a unpronounceable symbol, which he used between 1993 and 2000. This name change invoked controversy and many referred to him as The artist formerly known as Prince. According to Robert Larsen in his book History of Rock and Roll, Prince is one of the most talented and commercially successful pop musicians of the last twenty years producing ten Platinum albums and thirty Top 40 singles during his career. Prince founded his own recording studio and label, writing, self-producing and playing most or all of the instruments on his recordings. Prince has also been a talent promoter in the careers of Sheila E, Carmen Electra, The Time and Vanity 6. Prince has written more than one thousand songs. He has won seven Grammy Awards, a Golden Globe, and an Academy Award. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the first year he was eligible in 2004. In that same year Rolling Stone ranked Prince #28 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. This track comes from his latest album Lotusflow3r.
The Prodigy are an English electronic music group formed by Liam Howlett in 1990 in Braintree, Essex, England. Along with Fatboy Slim, The Chemical Brothers and The Crystal Method, as well as other acts they are pioneers of the big beat electronic dance genre which achieved mainstream popularity in the 1990s and 2000s, and are known for high-quality live performances. They have sold over 17 million records worldwide which is unequalled in dance music history.
Psychonaugts Pablo Clements and Paul Moog, were first signed by visionary label boss and UNKLE frontman James Lavelle. Best known for making electroclash way before the world really discovered the meaning of the word, by 2003, the pair were already onto newer climes but buried amongst the music of the times they never quite got the acclaim it deserved.
Top
Q
Radianis a trio from Vienna, that creates music that plays with your sense of aural identification and aural distance. It goes in hard for little sounds we make when we’re not quite yet “making music”: the tiniest flop and swish of wire brushes on a drum-head, the quick pop of a plug entering a socket or a circuit being switched, the sound of a finger depressing a computer key. On “Chimeric,” its fifth album, those little noises pan across the speakers or create a compound rhythm, arranged by post-editing into elegant, complex syncopation, each portion of the rhythmic cycle expressed with different volume or compression or room tone. Since the band’s beginnings, the timbre, shape and resonance of Martin Brandlmayr’s drums have been its trademark. (He’s a wonder: a drummer with a beautiful sound and feel who pushes back against his own virtuosity.) Those human touches, his perfectly timed, rhythm-conscious strokes and rustles, are surrounded by all kinds of other incidental noises, both handmade and digital.
Radiohead are an English alternative rock band, but they also use a lot of jazz, krautock and electronic music influences. Here you can also hear a remix by Osunlade, who started ad a composer for Sesame Street, but worked since then together with Salif Keita, Cesaria Evora etc. He is a priest of the traditional Yoruba religion of Ifá. Because of his beliefs, Osunlade's music has a deep spiritual root in Yoruba tradition.
Salah Ragab & The Cairo Jazz Band as an Egyptian drummer and musician credited with founding Egyptian jazz. Salah Ragab formed the first jazz big band in Egypt The Cairo Jazz Band in 1968, he was also the leader of the Military Music Departments in Heliopolis, some of the best musicians in Egypt of that time were members of the band, such as Zaki Osman (Trumpet), Saied Salama (Tenor Sax) - Khamis El -Kholy (Piano) and Ala Mostafa (Piano). On this recording the band consists of five saxophones, four trumpets, four trombones, piano, bass, drums and percussion and various other oriental instruments. He also collaborated with Sun Ra.
Radio Moscow is an American band who sounds garage-y, channeled through the blues with experimental breakdowns, unpredictable tempo changes, crazy rave-ups and fuzzed out psychedelic guitar work.
Re:Jazz is a jazz project with varying single artists, led and arranged by Matthias Vogt aka DJ Matt.
Ready Made aka Jean-Philippe Verdin is a French solo artist who makes a rich, multi-layered confection of playful electronic textures, shimmering baroque pop arrangements and memorable guest vocals.
Reigns aka Wessex-based brothers Tim and Roo Farthing - deal in epic, daydream-dizzy atmospherics, and spoken word lyrics that send chills down the spine. A treat of dirty surrealism and sumptuous coastal eccentricity.
Django Reinhardt is a Belgian jazz musician with gypsy roots. His creative genius was not only that of the master improviser, but also that of the composer, and he can be credited with numerous pieces with beautiful melodies and sophisticated, subtle harmonic structures. However, Django could not read or write musical notation and he was at the mercy of others that could to get his ideas down on paper. He formed The Quintet of the Hot Club of France, a band of fourteen musicians.
Reigns aka Wessex-based brothers Tim and Roo Farthing - deal in epic, daydream-dizzy atmospherics, and spoken word lyrics that send chills down the spine. A treat of dirty surrealism and sumptuous coastal eccentricity.
Max Richter is a German-born composer, now living in the United Kingdom. He worked with Future Sound Of London, Roni Size and wrote the soundtrack fot the movie Waltz with Bashir by Ari Folman. Max's records include the acclaimed The Blue Notebooks, with readings by Tilda Swinton, memoryhouse, recorded by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, and Songs from before, featuring texts by Haruki Murakami read by Robert Wyatt. we feature tracks from his album Memoryhouse, recorded by the BBC Philhormonic Orchestra.
Minnie Riperton was an American singer-songwriter best known for her vocal range of more than five octaves and her 1975 single Lovin' You. Her early affiliation with legendary Chess Records afforded her the opportunity to sing backup for various established artist such as Etta James, Fontella Bass, Ramsey Lewis, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Muddy Waters. While at Chess, Riperton also sang lead for the experimental rock/soul group Rotary Connection, from 1967 to 1971. She died at age 31.
Pippilotti Rist (born Elisabeth Charlotte Rist) is a well-known video artist. During her studies Pipilotti Rist began making super 8 films. Her works generally last only a few minutes, and contained alterations in their colors, speed, and sound. Her works generally treat issues related to gender, sexuality, and the human body.In contrast to those of many other conceptual artists, her colorful and musical works transmit a sense of happiness and simplicity. Rist's work is regarded as feminist by some art critics. Her works are held by many important art collections worldwide. Here Pippilotti covers Wicked Game (Chris Isaak) for her album Remake of a Weekend.
Roll The Dice is a very special collaboration between two Swedish studio boffins, Peder Mannerfelt and Malcolm Pardon. The keener eyed among you will recognise Mannerfelt from his involvement with the stunning Fever Ray project, while Pardon is known for his work as a behind-the-scenes producer of music for film and TV. They've shared a studio in southern Stockholm for several years so it only seemed logical to combine their passions for analog electronic music beyond the odd techno track they'd been known to make. So the decision to construct an album using only synths and piano was made, resulting in a semi-improvised opus. The absence of drum machines and computer sequencing means that the duo rely on innate precision, guided by the same sort of kosmiche spirit that made Cluster's heavenly transportations so spectacular.
Root 70 is a band stocked half-and-half with musicians from Germany and New Zealand. The warm, forthcoming interweavings of the two wind players as well as of the wind and rhythm sections prompts the suspicion that the sound of the 1970s or late 1960s would constitute a starting point. The playing is wildly accomplished: virtuosic without calling undue attention to its own virtuosity, it's muscular, tender, and brilliantly nuanced.
Jack Rose recorded crumbling rock, acoustic trance, and full-on noise with Pelt for half a dozen years before he laid down his first finger-style performances. You can hear his amazing guitar playing skills on these four tracks. Jack Rose was a prolific recording artist in his relatively short solo career, with albums, EPs, and compilation tracks on no fewer than ten record labels. Rose performed in many different genres. His depth of knowledge in the traditions of blues, ragtime and Eastern music were complimented by the avant-garde and experimental spirit of Pelt. His compositions were mostly for 6-string and 12-string guitar, as well as Weissenborn-style lap steel guitar. One common characteristic of Rose's music was his playing in open tunings. He gained a new level of public exposure upon his inclusion on Devendra Banhart's sold-out Golden Apples of the Sun compilation in 2004. In 2005 he released Kensington Blues on Tequila Sunrise records. Featuring ragtime, ragas, country blues and lap steel, this was his most accomplished record to date, earning high marks from such media outlets as Pitchfork and Dusted Magazine. Jack Rose and The Black Twig Pickers, his ninth LP, was released in May of 2009. An appearance on the 7" compilation Meet the Philly Elite and a tour-only 7" on the Great Pop Supplement followed. Rose died on the morning of December 5, 2009 from an apparent heart attack. A posthumous release of his final recordings for the Thrill Jockey label is anticipated. We honoured him with a special radio show.
David Rubato is a French songwriter, arranger, multi-instrumentalist, sound Engineer and producer. He studied composition and musicology, but dance music is something of a calling. He got into techno very young. At 15, Rubato writes to French techno legend Laurent Garnier to ask him how to use a TB 303. Garnier invites him at the Rex club. Circuit was his first track, and it was brilliantly remixed by Belgian producers Aeroplane.
Top
S
Raymond Scottwas an American composer, band leader, pianist, engineer, recording studio maverick, and electronic instrument inventor. Though Scott never scored cartoon soundtracks, his music is familiar to millions because of its adaptation by Carl Stalling in over 120 classic Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck and other Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies animated features. Scott's melodies have also been heard in twelve Ren & Stimpy episodes (that used the original Scott recordings), while making cameos in The Simpsons, Duckman, Animaniacs, The Oblongs, and Batfink.
Ulrich Schnauss was an electronic musician and producer based in Germany. He has always loved music that has two elements: melancholy and sadness as a description of the current situation you are in, but at the same time a hopeful, utopian element that reminds you of the possibility of a different life.
Jay Schwartz was born in san diego, california, usa, in 1965. He studied piano and composition. From 1992-1995 he was assistant composer in residence for incidental music at the state theater in stuttgart. He has composed for numerous music theater and dance theater pieces, for film, and for concert music in europe and has created sound installations for prestigious international venues.
Schneider TMis the name used for the solo electronic music projects of Dirk Dresselhaus, a former member of several German indie rock bands, most notably Hip Young Things and Locust Fudge. He released his first single under this name in 1997, but his most notable piece to date was a track named "The Light 3000" on the 2000 EP Binokular (a collaborative EP with KPT.michi.gan). The track is an electronic music cover of "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" by the Smiths and was recently voted by The Wire magazine as one of the best cover versions ever recorded.
The Seeds were a rock band best known for the hit single "Pushin' Too Hard", released in 1966. Based in Los Angeles, California, its raw and abrasive energy and simple, repetitive lyrics came to exemplify the garage rock style of the 1960s. The group are considered one of the pioneers of punk rock.
Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra are a Canadian band which formed in 1999, originating from Montreal, Quebec, Canada. They use a number of different variations of the name on different releases, but the group use the shorthand SMZ and their name is most often simplified to Silver Mt. Zion. Since inception, the group has undergone almost yearly personnel changes. The band currently has five members following the resignation of three in late 2008. The band has released six studio albums and one EP, publishing them through the influential record label Constellation. Silver Mt. Zion's music has been described as "post-rock", though the band members are hesitant to use the term. Singer and guitarist Efrim Menuck identifies with punk rock ethos and aesthetic.
Shantel is a German producer and DJ, known for his work with gypsy brass orchestras, DJing and remixing traditional Balkan music with electronic beats.
Archie Shepp is a prominent American jazz saxophonist. Shepp is best known for his passionately Afrocentric music of the late 1960s which focused on highlighting the injustices faced by the African race, as well as for his work with the New York Contemporary Five, Horace Parlan, and his collaborations with his "New Thing" contemporaries, most notably Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane.
Phelan Sheppard are musicians Keiron Phelan and David Sheppard. They are based in London, UK, and play mainly instrumental music. Phelan and Sheppard have long been associated with each other, having first met as teenagers with a mutual appreciation of Can, Cluster and Brian Eno and formed a band.
SHKVAL is a Belgian post rock band similar to Godspeed You Black Emperor.
Sian Alice Group is an English post-rock band with roots in experimental music and the avant-garde. They just released their second album, Troubled, Shaken, Etc.
Dani Siciliano began her music career both as a dj in San Francisco, and as a vocalist with a jazz combo. It was there that she initially met Matthew Herbert and began collaborating with him providing vocals over his clever quirky songs. She now lives in London and has recently completed work on her debut full-length album.
Nina Simone was an American singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger, and civil rights activist. Although she disliked being categorized, Simone is most associated with jazz music. Simone originally aspired to become a classical pianist, but her work covers an eclectic variety of musical styles that include classical, jazz, blues, soul, folk, R&B, gospel, and pop. Her vocal style is characterized by intense passion, a loose vibrato, and a slightly androgynous timbre, in part due to her unusually low vocal range which veered between the alto and tenor ranges (occasionally even reaching baritone lows). Also known as The High Priestess of Soul, she paid great attention to the musical expression of emotions. Within one album or concert she could fluctuate between exuberant happiness and tragic melancholy. These fluctuations also characterized her own personality and personal life, amplified by bipolar disorder with which she was diagnosed in the mid-1960s, but kept secret until after her death in 2003.
Six Organs of Admittance is the primary musical project of guitarist Ben Chasny. Chasny's music is largely guitar-based and is often considered new folk[1], however it includes obvious influences, marked by the use of drones, chimes, and eclectic percussive elements. Chasny is also a member of the psychedelic band Comets on Fire, and has working relationships with Badgerlore, Current 93, Magik Markers, and many others.
Sleepy Sun is an apt title for this young San Francisco sextet, as their debut record, "Embrace", is one of those rare slabs of rock and roll that will wake you up in the morning, and send you off to sleep at night. After honing their craft in the occult influenced creative community of Santa Cruz, the band has continued to grow, both creatively and in their loyal following, since their relocation to the city by the bay. With their throbbing rhythm section, swirling sea of guitars, and dreamy, haunting duet vocals, the word dynamic is a severe understatement.
The Sound were an English post-punk band, formed in 1979 disbanding in 1988. The band was fronted by Adrian Borland. The Sound were tragically overlooked in their time and have remained unjustly neglected since. Never able to conquer depression, Borland committed suicide on April 26th, 1999, throwing himself in the path of an express train at Wimbledon station. This track is featured on From the lions mouth, one of their best albums.
Spinvis is a Dutch one-man project centred around Erik de Jong. Spinvis made his debut at the age of 40, using experimental and lo-fi music. This song contains a weird monologue, constructed with found sentences and beautiful samples.
Sigur Ros is an Icelandic post-rock band with melodic, classical, and minimalist elements. The band is known for its ethereal sound and lead singer Jónsi Birgisson's falsetto voice. This track comes from the soundtrack Angels of the Universe (a movie about mental illsness), and is co-composed with Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson.
Steven R Smith is an American musician, instrument-builder, and printmaker often associated with the Jewelled Antler collective. Born in Fullerton, California and based in San Francisco and, more recently, Los Angeles, his musical output began in the mid-1990’s and continues on at the present. His main instrument is guitar, both acoustic and electric, although other instruments, including the hurdy gurdy, bouzouki, fretted spike fiddles, and assorted ethnic instruments, have been incorporated into his work.
Paris Smith is a Chicago based vibraphone player who since the late seventies has self-released a number of records.
Smoke City were an English band, who blended acid jazz and trip hop, borrowing from Brazilian styles such as samba and bossa nova. They are best known for their single Underwater Love, which was a major hit in 1997, after being used in a Levi's television advertisement, Mermaids (directed by Michel Gondry). The original music video for the single is notable for predating The Matrix in its use of bullet time motion. The group disbanded in 2002
Soap & Skin is the piano-driven musical project of 18-year-old Austrian artist Anja Plaschg. You could describe her music as neoclassical from Asian horror movies submerged into shady, strange, dramatic folk's bottom with glitch, laptop-electronics' rapid flashes.
Soft Machine were an English rock band from Canterbury, named after the book The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs. They were one of the central bands in the so-called "Canterbury scene," and helped pioneer the progressive rock genre. They played with Jimi Hendrix and sud Barrett and had several band members through the years, even Andy Summers of The Police joined them for a while.
Studio is a Swedish band, they may be Nordic, but their sound is pure Balearic. Sinuous guitar lines wrap themselves around basslines that more often than not ride the two and the four, while synthesizers approximate steel drums or nurse ping-pong melodies.
Ben Solo brings a huge collection of different influences to his sound. A strange blend of indie guitar mixed with chilled out beats and melodic synths - pioneering the genre of Shoe Gazing Electronica Ben is breaking boundaries with this sound. He now does all of his writing in Devon and has drawn on the positives and the negatives of living in such an area. This can be heard in his music. He also has drawn a lot of inspiration from his time living in the French Alps - an area of the world which stimulates some of the more chilled out tracks.
Sunburned Hands of the Man are a band from Massachusetts that formed in 1997 from the remnants of the Boston psychedelic punk trio Shit Spangled Banner. Sunburned Hand of the Man has an amorphous lineup, with composition and instrumentation potentially varying from gig to gig. They release records on the Eclipse Records label, as well as a number of smaller labels, and produce a great number of limited edition albums on CD-R via their own Manhand label. In 2005 the band toured the United States to play Arthurfest in Los Angeles with Magik Markers. Many regard Sunburned Hand of the Man as contributors to the New Weird America folk revival.
Sunn O))) is an American drone metal band that incorporates some elements of the dark ambient, noise and black metal genres. The band consists of Stephen O'Malley (also of Khanate and Burning Witch) and Greg Anderson (of Goatsnake).
Sun Ra was born in Birmingham, Alabama. He was a prolific jazz composer, bandleader, piano and synthesizer player, poet and philosopher known for his "cosmic philosophy," musical compositions and performances. "Of all the jazz musicians, Sun Ra was probably the most controversial," critic Scott Yanow said, due to Sun Ra's eclectic music and unorthodox lifestyle. Claiming that he was of the "Angel Race" and not from Earth, but from Saturn, Sun Ra developed a complex persona of "cosmic" philosophies and lyrical poetry that made him a pioneer of afrofuturism as he preached awareness and peace above all. From the mid-1950s to his death, Sun Ra led "The Arkestra", an ensemble with an ever-changing lineup and name. His mainstream success was limited, but Sun Ra was a prolific recording artist and frequent live performer, Sun Ra's music ranged from keyboard solos to big bands of over 30 musicians; his music touched on virtually the entire history of jazz, from ragtime to swing music, from bebop to free jazz; he was also a pioneer of electronic music, space music, and free improvisation, and was one of the first musicians, regardless of genre, to make extensive use of electronic keyboards.
Skuli Sverisson is an Icelandic composer and bassist residing in New York City. He has worked with numerous musicians and groups, including Hildur Guðnadóttir, Hilmar Jensson, Jim Black, Chris Speed, Anthony Burr, Laurie Anderson, Allan Holdsworth, Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Sylvian, Blonde Redhead, Yungchen Lhamo, Jamshied Sharifi, Ólöf Arnalds and Pachora
David Sylvian is an English singer-songwriter and musician. He came to prominence in the late 1970s as the lead vocalist and main songwriter in the group Japan. His subsequent solo work is described by critic Jason Ankeny as a far-ranging and esoteric career that encompassed not only solo projects but also a series of fascinating collaborative efforts. Sylvian's solo work has been influenced by a variety of musical styles and genres, including jazz, avant-garde, ambient, electronic, and progressive rock.
Syncom Data is a Dutch techno project, by Jan Katsma & Raoul De Vries. They run thier own label and had their own releases remixed by Speedy J, a Dutch techno pioneer, who made this dark, dubby trip.
Top
T
Tangerine Dream is a German electronic music group founded in 1967 by Edgar Froese. The band has undergone many personnel changes over the years, with Froese being the only continuous member. Drummer and composer Klaus Schulze was briefly a member of an early lineup, but the most stable version of the group, during their influential mid-1970s period, was as a keyboard trio with Froese, Christopher Franke, and Peter Baumann. Early in the 1980s, Johannes Schmoelling replaced Baumann, and this lineup, too, was stable and extremely productive.
Tangerine Dream's early "Pink Years" albums had a pivotal role in the development of Krautrock. Their "Virgin Years" and later albums became a defining influence in the genre known as New Age music, although the band themselves disliked the term. Although the group has released numerous studio and live recordings, a substantial number of their fans were introduced to Tangerine Dream by their film soundtracks, which total over sixty and includes Sorcerer, Thief, The Keep, Risky Business, Firestarter, Legend, Near Dark, and Miracle Mile.
Tape
is a Stockholm based trio who's music is seemingly improvised but still so tenderly composed. It took cues from both the most gentle free jazz and Brian Eno’s ideas of ambient music but at the same time leaning against both Swedish folk music and broken pop balladry. In the end Tape created something entirely unique. For quite some time it felt like they – brothers Andreas and Johan Berthling and Tomas Hallonsten – were on their own, whether anyone bothered to listen or not they’d still be walking deeper and deeper down their own musical path, into a very private forest of their collective heart and mind.
Tats Lau is a songwriter, musician and comedy actor in Hong Kong. Tats Lau reached his musical career climax while he established classic Cantopop duo Tat Ming Pair with Anthony Wong Yiu Ming. Tats Lau is the chief music composer and instrumentalist in Tat Ming Pair while Anthony Wong is the lead singer. Unlike other Canotpop musicians in the same generation, Tats Lau has strong influence of Synthpop music from UK. Tat Ming Pair, along with Beyond and Tai Chi, eventually became one of the most important music groups in Hong Kong history.
Telefon Tel Aviv is a Chicago-based electronic-music group that relocated from New Orleans in 2001 and is primarily known for its work in electronica. For their latest album the band drastically changed their production style, reverting to analog tape and analog synthesizers, claiming this method to sound more real. One of the founding members died in 2009.
Jimi Tenor is a Finnish musician, well known for his eclectic mix of jazz, funk & soul, but probably mostly known for his 1994 hit Take Me Baby.
This Mortal Coil was a dream pop supergroup led by Ivo Watts-Russell, founder of the British record label 4AD. Although Watts-Russell and John Fryer were technically the only two official members, the band's recorded output featured a large rotating cast of supporting artists, many who were signed to, or otherwise associated with, 4AD. About half of the songs released were cover songs, often of 1960s and 1970s psychedelic and folk acts, which displayed those two genres' place in the history and formation of dream pop.
The Time & Space Machine is part of the UK school of psychedelic revivalism. The man behind the time machine, Richard Norris, is famed for being one half of Beyond the Wizard’s Sleeve, his past group The Grid with Soft Cell’s David Ball and his past collaborations with Genesis P. Orridge in Psychic TV. His debut LP weaves a trippy sonic nest of psychedelic beats, groove and fuzz guitar crossbreeding the best parts of breakbeat and jam rock.
Toots Thielemans is a Belgian jazz musician well known for his guitar and harmonica playing as well as his highly accomplished professional whistling. Perhaps best known for his 1962 hit single "Bluesette," he is often cited by jazz aficionados and critics as the world's greatest jazz harmonica player.
Torngat is a Montreal indie band and instrumental trio established in 2001, with the former horn player of Arcade Fire.
Tortoise is an influential post-rock band formed in Chicago, Illinois, USA in 1990. Tortoise's almost entirely instrumental music defies easy categorization, and the group gained significant attention from their early career. The members have roots in Chicago's fertile music scene, playing in various indie rock and punk groups. Tortoise was among the first American indie rock bands to incorporate styles closer to Krautrock, dub, minimalism, electronica, and various jazz styles, rather than the standard rock and roll and punk that had dominated indie rock for years.
The Rudy Trouvé Septet Rudy Trouvé is a Belgian musician from Antwerp. In the early nineties he founded the Heavenhotel label and released dozens of records since. Between 1993 and 1995 he was part of dEUS, quitting the band in favour of focussing on his own, more obscure music groups and temporary collaborations. Since 1995, he scored most success with Kiss My Jazz and Dead Man Ray, and recorded a split album with Lou Barlow on the Sub Rosa label. Rudy Trouvé is regarded highly as an improvisor; in jam sessions and experimental concerts he has shared the stage with Mauro Pawlowski, Zeitkratzer Ensemble (Germany), Marc Ribot (USA), Pierre Bastien, Pierre Berthet, members of DAAU, Zita Swoon,... Being a former student at St-Lukas in Ghent, Rudy Trouvé is also famous for his artwork; figurative paintings and blow-ups which can be found on the record sleeves of most of hisself-produced records.
Tunng are an experimental folk band from the United Kingdom, who covered songs by Bloc Party and Tim Buckley. Their music is often called folktronica.
Othar Turner & The Rising Star Fife & Drum Band was one of the last well-known fife players in the vanishing American fife and drum musical tradition. He lived his entire life in northern Mississippi as a farmer, where in 1923, aged 16, he learned to play fifes fashioned out of rivercanes. Turner's Rising Star Fife and Drum Band (which consisted of friends and relatives) primarily played at farm parties. They began to receive wider recognition in the 1990s.
Twinkle3 is a trio whose combined experience in the field of sonic exploration easily justifies claims of them constituting a friendly supergroup. While Richard Scott has immersed himself in the world of modular synthesizers and untiring acoustic curiosity, David Ross' continuous journeys to the heart of the moment have made him one of the UK's most revered improvisers. Clive Bell, on the other hand, has worked with artists as different as Jah Wobble, David Sylvian and Karl Jenkins – signs of a mind finely attuned to music's inherent qualities rather than public images. Much more than a regular ensemble of improvisers, Twinkle3 combine into a fluctuating musical entity not dissimilar to a solar corona, constantly brimming with light-filled energy, yet only occasionally releasing itself in volcanic outbursts.
Troublemakers is a Marseille (France) based trio consisting of Fredéric Berthet, Arnaud Taillefer and DJ Oil was brought together by their shared appreciation for 60's & 70's jazz, funk and film soundtracks. In 2004, Troublemakers' released their second album, entitled Express Way, on the mythic label BLUE NOTE. It is the soundtrack of the film "Express Way" written by Arnaud Taillefer. It is a cinematographic album we can appreciate both with ears and eyes. Vincent Ségal (violoncello), Sébastien Martel (guitar) et Magic Malik (flute) collaborated on this album.
Top
U
Shigeru Umebayashi Once the leader of Japan's new-wave rock band EX, composer Shigeru Umebayashi began scoring films in 1985 when the band broke up. He has more than 40 Japanese and Chinese films to his credit and is perhaps best known in the West for his score for director Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love (2001). Umebayashi also scored House of Flying Daggers, and Wong Kar-wai's long-awaited 2046 (2004). He is also the composer for the music of the first Serbian spectacle, Charleston & Vendetta.
UNKLE is a British musical outfit founded in 1994 by school friends James Lavelle and Tim Goldsworthy. Originally categorized as trip-hop, the group once included producer DJ Shadow and has employed a variety of guest artists and producers.
Urbs aka Paul Nawrata has been dj-ing for 15 years in Austria turning the tables usually hip-hop but also breakz. He changed his style on his solo Album Toujours le même film, from hip-hop to soundtrack but never losing his hip-hop roots producing several breaks and hip-hop remixes for Pulver Records and Patrick Pulsinger.
The Use Of Ashes is a Dutch band, marked by their experimental excursions into the realms of sound art and remixes, however, they also combine an eccentric and gloomy work with tender melodic pieces and ghostly drones and surreal collages.
Top.
V
Sharon Van Etten has a soft, strong soprano that trembles with slight vibrato in the long sustained notes. High, angelic, disembodied, without audible strain or breath, she traces out melodies, yet just when the tone seems too pure, she slips into the smallest earthy slides, the slightest Appalachian catches and yodels, an angel trying out the blues. Because I Was in Love is Van Etten’s first full-length and all 11 songs are originals, written in Van Etten’s deceptively simple style, with long sensual sustained notes and sudden flights of melody.
Vangelis aka Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou is a Greek composer of electronic, progressive, ambient and orchestral music. He is best known for his Academy Award winning score for the film Chariots of Fire, and scores for the films Blade Runner and 1492: Conquest of Paradise.
Herman Van Veen is a Dutch stage performer, actor, musician and singer/songwriter and author. He is most famous as the creator of the Dutch-Japanese cartoon Alfred J. Kwak, for which he also wrote, as well as composed and performed most of the music.
Jozef Van Wissem is a Dutch minimalist composer and lute player. Much of the work of Jozef van Wissem is based on the application of mirror images to lute composition. The work is idiomatic to lute tablature of around AD 1600. Through study in New York City with Patrick O'Brien, he discovered that from the Middle Ages on, one of the variations on the cantus firmus (the given melody) is the backwards performance of the melody. Van Wissem wrote out mirror images of hundreds of classical lute tablature pieces, copying them out from the bottom right to the top left corner. To these inversions he added new themes, accents and rhythms. He then applied the cut up technique of writer William Burroughs and cut, shifted, mixed and pasted the parts together to create new works. One critic has compared this work to that of German painter Georg Baselitz, who paints upside down.
The Velvet Underground was an American rock band first active, in various incarnations, from 1965 to 1973. Their best-known members were Lou Reed and John Cale, who both went on to find success as solo artists. Although never commercially successful while together, the band is often cited by many critics as one of the most important and influential groups of their era, and to many future musicians. The Velvet Underground was a part of the subcultural New York City art collective surrounding Andy Warhol's Factory and his Exploding Plastic Inevitable events. The band's music and lyrics challenged conventional societal standards of the time, and broke ground for other musicians to do the same. The band favored experimentation, and also introduced a nihilistic outlook. Their outsider attitude and experimentation has since been cited as pivotal to the rise of punk rock and, later, alternative rock.
Esther Venrooyis a composer and sound artist working in the field of electronic music. After completing studies in classical saxophone, Venrooy attended the European Dance Development Center (Arnhem) as a composer in residence, where she began employing electronic and digital techniques in pieces aimed at choreography and stage performance. Gradually her music evolved into an independent means of expression and she continued her work with electronica at the IPEM (Institute for Psycho-acoustics and Electronic Music) in Ghent, Belgium where she still resides. At this time she started utilizing film editing paradigms as a foundation for her personal composition methods. Her works range from purely electronic composed music to improvised combinations of electronica with traditional instrumentation such as piano, flute and satsuma-biwa. She has created site-specific works as well as multimedia performances and installations.
Frank Vigroux works in the fields of electronic music, new media, composition and improvisation. He leads many bands and projects such as Push the triangle, Supersonic Riverside Blues. He has played or recorded with musicians such as Bruno Chevillon, Elliott Sharp, Marc Ducret, writer Kenji Siratori, video artists Scorpene Horrible, Philippe Fontes, Mariano Equizzi. In 2009 he won the prize Villa Medicis Hors les Murs for an artist residency in New York. Franck Vigroux is also the founder of d'Autres Cordes a record label dedicated to aventurous music. He has played in hundreds of festivals and clubs in Europe and Asia, as a guitarist or turntablist and conducted improvisers orchestras worldwide ( Nagoya, Barcelona, Leeds,etc...), he has been commissioned by Ars Nova ensemble instrumental and Radio France.
Voice of the Seven Woods' music describes best as entangular acidic folk, polymath fuses Turkish psych and Krautrock influences...It is the project of a Manchester based musician, Rick Tomlinson.
Top
W
Wadada Leo Smith is a trumpeter and composer working primarily in the fields of avant-garde jazz and free improvisation. He started out playing drums, mellophone, and French horn before he settled on the trumpet. He played in various R&B groups and by 1967 became a member of the AACM and co-founded the Creative Construction Company, a trio with Leroy Jenkins and Anthony Braxton. In 1971 Smith formed his own label, Kabell. He also formed another band, the New Dalta Ahkri, with members including Henry Threadgill, Anthony Davis and Oliver Lake.
Muddy Waters was an American blues musician and is generally considered "the Father of Chicago blues", known for hits as Hoochie Coochie Man. Long Distance Call was recorded in 1951.
Weather Report was an influential jazz fusion band of the 1970s and early 1980s combining jazz and latin jazz with art music, ethnic music, r&b, funk and rock elements (in varying proportions throughout their career). Their music is demonstrative of high levels of compositional and improvisational skill. Founders pianist Joe Zawinul and saxophonist Wayne Shorter first played in Maynard Ferguson's Big Band. Zawinul went on to play with Cannonball Adderley's group in the 1960s and Shorter with Miles Davis's second great quintet where both made their mark among the best composers in jazz. Zawinul later joined Shorter with Miles Davis's first recordings of fusion music as part of the studio groups which recorded In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew. Initially, the band's music featured extended improvisation, similar to Davis's Bitches Brew-period work. The group was unusual and innovative in abandoning the soloist-accompaniment demarcation of straight-ahead jazz and instead featuring continuous improvisation by every member of the band.
West African Rhythm Brothers was formed by Ambrose Adekoya Campbell in London during the Second World War, several years before the Empire Windrush discharged its cargo of Caribbean immigrants at Tilbury, two decades before the first Notting Hill Carnival, more than 40 years before the term world music was invented and half a century before the advent of the Mobos. His first public appearance was at the VE Day celebrations in May 1945 when an enthusiastic bunch of revellers followed his Nigerian musicians around Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus, as Londoners let their hair down and celebrated the defeat of Hitler's Germany after six long years of bombing, blackouts, austerity and rationing. He went on to become a celebrated figure in bohemian Soho in the 1950s, playing the only African music to be heard in town, and was immortalised in Colin MacInnes's book, City of Spades, in which he appeared thinly disguised as the musician Cranium Cuthbertson.
WFDD derives from the initial of Wang Fang + Dickson Dee. Wang Fang is the first experimental musician in China. He is from Lanzhou,one of the important industrial Chinese cities. In addition to live performances and sound works creation, he also composes music for experimental films and plays. Dickson Dee is Li Chin Sung, a musician from Hong Kong. In early 1990s, he started to engage in experimental music, industrial noise, and had released an album under the label Tzadik. In recent years, he dedicates himself to live laptop sound performances. He has worked with musicians from Mongolia and Tuva, making a new approach to experimental new world music.
White Denim is a trio, hailing from Austin, Texas. It's very hard to include White Denim in a specific subgenre, but they are known for take several influences of garage rock, dub, soul, alternative rock, country, post-punk, blues, psychedelic rock, experimental rock with home-based recording, intense looping work and unusual song structures
White Hills weaves in and out of anthemic chants, deep space bleeps and other worldly madness for a mix that proves to be intoxicating. f Woodstock 1969 were to happen today, White Hills would probably be the brown acid. This isn't the sixties though and this kind of dark, looming psych-rock is as much a reaction to growing up on grunge and death metal as Woodstock was to the polished rock n' roll of the fifties.
Whitetree are Robert and Ronald Lippok and Ludivico Einaudi. The Lippoks are not your typical electronic music composers. Nor is Ludovico Einaudi your average classical composer. Their individual bodies of art have always been about this special extra mile, an effort hardly anybody seems to care about these days anmore. With their main project ”To Rococo Rot", the Lippoks, together with their fellow colleague Stefan Schneider, have not only recorded an impressive yet diverse catalogue, mixing band-based tracks with all sorts of electronic sounds. The project also always benefited from Ronald Lippok's unique style of drumming, giving their music a lush, yet powerful and almost sequenced feel. While all Whitetree-members found their individual styles and voices to articulate their musical visions, it is this collaboration which brings all their seperately developed talents together in a dense, unexpected sequence of songs.
The Whitefield Brothers are a down-and-dirty funk group that makes raw, organic funk using nothing but instruments and an Afro-Caribbean sense of rhythm. The group is actually a project put together by german funk players The Poets of Rhythm, although the approach is different from their previous output.
Williams aka Willie Threlfall worked together with Mylo and is Scotlands hottest techno export product. Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" meets Williams' "The Shivering" (released in 2006) for the ultimate blissed-out Balearic / cosmic reworking! The first half of the track lets the tension rise with Summer's vocal filtered in and out of lush pads, a throbbing bassline and simple syncopated percussion - all beatless. When her full 'I feel love' vocal finally arrives, so do the 4/4 beats and off we head into deep ethereal electronic house territory. An absolute beauty, and one to get totally lost in...
Wooden Shjips is a four-piece pysch combo from San Francisco, feature a bassist named Dusty, a guitarist named Ripley, and an organist named Nash. On their debut release for Holy Mountain, the Shjips, like the Jefferson Airplane and the Doors, tap into the California frontier sex-and-death cult mentality: drugs and murder and depravity out in the desert where nobody can see whatever it is you do when there's nobody watching. Forty years removed from their closest cousins, the Shjips have little to show for the interim-- a dash of 1970s Kraut two-note rhythm, a gauzy Spacemen 3 filter, a garage-rocked low-fi fetish.
The World Experience Orchestra John Jamyll Jones led World s Experience Orchestra in a session in the basement of a Boston church in either November 1973 or August 1975, depending on which of the liner notes you believe. "The Prayer" was compiled on the Gilles Peterson compilation "Digs America". This song follows a modal form, and the various players improvise off of a steady rhythm section. It s very atmospheric music that picks up the pieces of Coltrane and puts them back together in a new way that is neither a total FMP/ESP label blowout nor a return to bebop or post-bop. What the obscure list of players lack in chops they make up for in creativity.
Top
X
Yma Sumac was a noted Peruvian soprano. In the 1950's, she was one of the most famous proponents of exotica music and became an international success, based on the merits of her extreme vocal range, which was said to be well over four octaves and was sometimes claimed to span even five octaves at her peak. During the 1950s, Yma Sumac produced a series of legendary lounge music recordings featuring Hollywood-style versions of Incan and South American folk songs, working with the likes of Les Baxter and Billy May. The song Ataypura was featured in the Coen Brothers film, The Big Lebowski. Her song Bo Mambo appeared in a commercial for Kahlua liquor and was sampled for the song Hands Up by the Black Eyed Peas. The song Gopher Mambo was used in the films Ordinary Decent Criminal, Dead Husbands, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.
Top
Z
Hector Zazou invited four outstanding instrumentalists from India and Uzbekistan to step into a virtual hall of mirrors, in which sound is reflected from one note to another: an aural equivalent of a famous scene in Orson Welles' The Lady From Shanghai. Twenty-five years after laying the foundations for Afro-electronic fusion (with Congolese singer Bony Bikaye on the "Noir & Blanc" LP), and after many other groundbreaking albums, the innovative Hector Zazou offers a fresh take on classical Asian music, in which the musicians' inspired performances are enhanced by his subtle reprocessing of the original sonic elements (no supplementary electronic sounds having been used). This song is taken from his last album (he died in 2008), that was recorded in Mumbai with a core group of four musicians: Toir Kuziyev (tambur & oud), Milind Raykar (violin), Ronu Majumdar (flute) and Manish Pingle (Indian slide guitar).
Zelien Ople (named after a borough in Pennsylvania) is the moniker of Chicago based musicians Matt Christensen (guitar/vocals), Mike Weis (percussion) and Brian Harding (guitar/clarinet) and between them, in a desolate suburban basement, they have come up with a record of pure psych-rock sludge. There is a feeling that the three musicians don’t need to prove anything, and in that we are treated to an album of crystalline, mysterious beauty; it is something which might take multiple listens to truly uncover, but a record which is infinitely rewarding once you do. Cinematic, but startlingly unpretentious, this is music perfectly primed for the colder seasons. Light a log fire and enjoy.
Zombi aka Steve Moore and A.E. Paterra produce work that is epic in concept, sound, and artistic approach. They have re-imagined the architecture of progressive rock and dynamic instrumentals--carving a niche in underground music distinctly their own.
John Zorn is an American avant-garde composer, arranger, record producer, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist. Zorn's recorded output is prolific with hundreds of album credits as a performer, composer, or producer. His work has touched on a wide range of musical genres, often within a single composition, but he is best-known for his avant-garde, jazz, improvised and contemporary classical music. Zorn has led the punk jazz band Naked City, the klezmer-influenced quartet Masada and composed the associated Masada Songbooks, written concert music for classical ensembles, and produced music for film and documentary. Zorn has stated that "I've got an incredibly short attention span. My music is jam-packed with information that is changing very fast... All the various styles are organically connected to one another. I'm an additive person - the entire storehouse of my knowledge informs everything I do. People are so obsessed with the surface that they can't see the connections, but they are there."
