"Coming Up To Consciousness" is Pure Reason Revolution’s sixth studio album, and the third of its post-hiatus renaissance that began with 2020's "Eupnea" and continued in 2022's "Above Cirrus". Like those two predecessors, the new record is intensely personal.While the band's distinctive style remains, melding prog and pop through dreamy moods, epic riffs and angelic harmonies, Courtney and Greg Jong also tried to go somewhere a bit different, drawing on influences like Talk Talk, Elliot Smith, The Smile and even Arctic Monkeys in addition to perennial favourites - especially Pink Floyd

2014 four CD release, an installment in the popular The Box Set Series, which come packed with original hit recordings by the biggest artists in music history. This set from the Classic Rock duo features 44 tracks including 'Barracuda', 'Straight On', 'Even It Up' and the previously unreleased "Stairway to Heaven".
Sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson are the creative spark behind Heart, a rock group who initially found success in the mid-'70s via guitar-heavy radio hits like "Magic Man" and "Barracuda," only to reach greater heights after engineering a major pop comeback a decade later. Drawing from progressive rock, hard rock, and folk, the band's 1976 debut, Dreamboat Annie, and 1977 sophomore effort, Little Queen, helped establish Heart as a hard-hitting hitmaking machine with both hooks and attitude…

Leonard Bernstein No figure in 20th century American classical music had as prominent or controversial a career – or did more to sell classical music to the general public as something genuinely exciting and worth getting into a sweat over – than Leonard Bernstein. For more than 30 years, from his assumption of the post of Music Director of the New York Philharmonic in 1958 until the final concerts that he conducted in obviously failing health near the end of his life in 1990, he was the most widely recognized American-born conductor in the world, and the dominant personality in American classical music as both a conductor and, to a lesser degree, a composer.

Johnny Winter's sixth Columbia album was also his second since his comeback from drug addiction. Its predecessor, Still Alive and Well, had been his highest charting effort. Saints & Sinners was just as energetically played, but its mixture of material, including '50s rock & roll oldies like Chuck Berry's "Thirty Days," Larry Williams' "Bony Moronie," and Leiber & Stoller's "Riot in Cell Block #9," recent covers like the Rolling Stones' "Stray Cat Blues," and a couple of originals, was more eclectic than inspired. (Van Morrison completists should note that the album also contains Winter's cover of Morrison's "Feedback on Highway 101," a typical bluesy groove song that Morrison recorded for his 1973 Hard Nose the Highway album but dropped. Winter's is the only released recording of the song)…

Eugene Ormandy Over a period of four decades, from the 1940s until the beginning of the '80s, Eugene Ormandy was a mainstay of the classical music world. As music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra for more than 40 years, beginning in 1938, he was one of the most popular conductors in America, and his recordings with that orchestra on the Columbia Masterworks label consistently outsold by a wide margin the recordings of the admittedly superior New York Philharmonic under Dimitri Mitropoulos. Ormandy was a supremely competent, often inspired conductor whose approach to music displayed extraordinary care and polish. Although never regarded as a musical trailblazer, he also presented the first recordings of several important works during his career, and helped several composers achieve wider recognition than they'd ever had before.

Paul Desmond's first genuine all-Brazilian album under the Creed Taylor signature was a beauty, a collection of songs by the then-moderately known Edu Lobo and the emerging giant Milton Nascimento, then only in his early twenties. All Desmond has to do is sit back and ride the Brazilian grooves while lyrically ruminating on whatever pops into his head. It sounds so effortless - until you try it yourself. The swirling, often gorgeous orchestral arrangements are by Don Sebesky (one CD edition mistakenly gives Claus Ogerman credit on the cover), Airto Moreira leads the samba-flavored percussion forces, and Lobo and his wife Wanda de Sah appear on three of Lobo's four songs. Lobo's "To Say Goodbye," "Circles," and "Martha and Romao" have exactly the brand of wistful sadness that Desmond could communicate so well; on the former, de Sah has to sing well below the register with which she is comfortable, and the strain is painfully obvious…

Put this in your mug and sip it. We’re excited to announce Night Lights, a new compilation collecting cuts from Prestige Records’ imprint Moodsville, featuring hauntingly beautiful late-night tunes from multi-instrumentalist Yusef Lateef, guitarist Kenny Burrell, saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and Gene Ammons, and many more. The smoke-hued blue vinyl befits the album’s enchanting sonic landscape, complimented by original artwork from acclaimed illustrator Liam Cobb.

The Bandit Records legend could almost be fiction. The house passing as a home, the harem passing as a family, the rising star brutally murdered in his prime, the dream, the con: The end. Arrow Brown inhabited the same south-side Chicago landscape as Afro-Noir author Iceberg Slim’s ghetto characters, taking inspiration from the same sources that shaded Airtight Willie, White Folks, and Blue Howard. Drawn to the underground and fancying himself a rogue entrepreneur, Brown and his Bandit label operated somewhere in the space between money laundering outfit and sex cult. Brown poured proceeds from straight jobs held by his many “daughters” into sumptuously rendered, forward-looking soul records by the egotistically named Arrows and the Majestic Arrows, as well his seven-year-old son Altyrone Deno Brown, whose father hoped to push to Jackson-style child-fame heights. Putting beauty and genius in front of commercial viability, Arrow laid down lush, sweeping strings to lure the listener into a hipster fantasy world, sharply incongruent with the sometimes-criminal reality of the city that dreamt it. In 2005, novelist and essayist Jonathan Lethem called the entirety of the Bandit Records tale “Haunting… haunted… Like a little novel.” In its darker corners, 003 Eccentric Soul: The Bandit Label may more closely resemble true crime.

GROOVE HIP HOP R&B : 3CD set. Superfly 53-track collection features Soul II Soul, Des'ree, Billie, Eric B & Rakim, Shabba Ranks, Fatboy Slim, Mantronix, DNA featuring Suzanne Vega, D'Angelo, Young Disciples, Stereo MC's, Crystal Waters and others!

Xhol Caravan drops the Caravan for the simpler Xhol - but the jazzy psychedelic sound is as adventurous as ever - with a sharper focus on the jazzy elements that always lingered in the group's sound - which is fleshed out incredibly on these 3 lengthy tracks captured live in Altena in 1970! The saxs, flute, organ and kinetic drum work always at the core the German psychedelic/jazz/prog progenitors are given lots of room to vamp here - and the set overall is among the more muscular and outwardly jazzy work we've heard by them!

BBC Jools Holland 1999-12-04 & TFI Friday 1999-11-26. Track 11 is an unlisted track of 4 seconds of silence. The BBC tracks are known to come from the Later…With Jools Holland show, but this is not mentioned on the release.

Recorded live at Wembley Arena, London, June 9th 1991.

Maretimo Records is a German record label, music publisher & radio station, specialized in the styles: Lounge, Chillout, Latin & House Music. The company was founded by the multiple award-winning DJ Michael Maretimo. For more than 25 years he stands with great passion at the mixing desk.

With a title like Time & Eternity and graphics featuring the disembodied head of violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, you know you're in for an ambitious program. Kopatchinskaja's albums have been getting increasingly experimental as her career has developed, and this one is at no time boring, whatever you may think of the overall concept. Sample Crux, by Lubos Fiser, for violin, timpani, and bells, with the timpani pounding away as a kind of avatar of dread. This said the structure of the program is not quite as unconventional as it may at first appear to be.

The start of another Hyperion Lieder series is always cause for celebration. In advance of his bicentenary in 2011, we turn to a composer whose songs, against the vast bulk of his compositions in larger genres, were considered insignificant for well over a century.