Electro/Ambient

Artist: The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project Label: Glitterhouse (Indigo)

Artist: the Nest Label: Album Label (Indigo)

Artist: Grenier; Artist: Archie Pela Label: Melodic

Artist: Various Artists Label: Zyx Music (ZYX)

Artist: Astralasia Label: Talking Elephant

Artist: ERNEST KOHL Label: Unidisc

Artist: Andrew Liles Label: United Dairies

Artist: Various Artists Label: Luaka Bop

Artist: Various Label: Not Bad

Artist: Unterschicht Label: Danse Macabre (Alive)

This DVD is an absolute collector’s item. Historic Jazz videos showing legends like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and many more. Style: Jazz

Artist: Candie Hank Label: Shitkatapult

Artist: Candie Hank Label: Shitkatapult

Artist: Die Partei Label: Bureau B

Wilson Pickett’s best years were those when he recorded for Atlantic Records, and he remained convinced of this even after changing to other labels in his later career. Atlantic boss Jerry Wexler took the promising young Gospel singer under his wing and launched him on his rapidly developing career as an unruly soul man. Pickett’s aggressiveness, which in his mature years occasionally resulted in him having backstage fights with musicians and managers, are expressed here in strong words and are given further bite by his antagonistic band. Although he lashed out to the full in his emotional, crackling vocal attacks, he never lost control and even his strongest outbursts remained highly musical. His unique, breathless sound and his ferocious efforts to express himself succinctly do not make for easy listening on this superb hit record and for white people, who according to Pickett would never understand soul music anyway, could well present a real challenge. Is this such fascinating music that you become dumbstruck? Very possibly, as critic Joachim von Mengershausen writes: His voice is hard, aggressive and strained; it hardly binds the tones together, chops up the phrases, blurts out the essentials – Pickett has eliminated all the Uncle-Tom warmth in soul and has virtually rocked it away. Record Label: Atlantic SD 8145 Style: Soul

Artist: Halls Label: No Pain in Pop

INVENTIONS is the new band formed by longtime friends, tourmates, and labelmates Matthew Cooper of ELUVIUM, and Mark T. Smith of EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY. There are plenty of talking points here: The fact that Cooper hasn't been in a "band" of any sort since he was a teenager; no member of EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY has released an album outside of the context of EITS since their inception in the late 90s; and, of course, this is a dream duo for anyone familiar with the unparalleled emotional resonance of Cooper and Smith's respective day jobs. However, thirty seconds into their eponymous debut album, you realize that the esteemed pedigree is irrelevant. INVENTIONS exceeds all expectations by discarding them from the get-go. They have created their own tiny, wondrous corner of the world, one with ever-changing sounds and colors. INVENTIONS began in earnest last year when Cooper invited Smith to collaborate on a song for ELUVIUM's otherworldly double-album, "Nightmare Ending". The track, "Envenom Mettle", was a standout on an album full of them, and just like that a longstanding friendship blossomed into a full-fledged creative partnership. The following six months the duo continued to send audio files back and forth to each other from their respective homes in Portland, Oregon and Austin, Texas. The collaboration proved fruitful, inspiring, and truly enjoyable from the outset, and in less than a year they had amassed more than an album's worth of material. They traveled together to a secluded beach house on the Oregon coast to complete the album, an environment that proved not only highly productive but also clearly influential on the album's windswept beauty and warm vibrations. Across eight songs the duo explore the delicate and disturbing - and virtually everything in-between - with majestic abandon. It's the kind of beauty and brilliance that only masters of their craft can accomplish when all egos and expectations are cast aside in pursuit of the splendor of sound Style: Ambient

Most terribly cold it was; it snowed, and was nearly quite dark, and evening-- the last evening of the year. In this cold and darkness there went along the street a poor little girl, bareheaded, and with naked feet. ..." Hydras Dream is a special collaboration between the Swedish musicians ANNA VON HAUSSWOLFF and MATTI BYE (winner of the Guldbaggen 2014 price for scoring the film drama ""Faro"" and composer of the film score for ""The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared""). The concept behind this project is to interpret stories, movies and myths into musical landscapes. For their debut album ""The Little Match Girl"", von Hausswolff and Bye construed the beautiful and melancholic story by H.C. Andersen of the same title. Asked about the reason for this particular choice, the two musicians state: ""It was her tragic faith in the winter's cold that inspired us. She is freezing to death with no money and no comfort, she is all alone, dreaming of a warmer place. When death strikes her she is filled with magical illusions and dreams. Oddly enough, hypothermia and death are the only two comfort zones we experience in this story. Sad but beautiful."" "". The lights [.] rose higher and higher, she saw them now as stars in heaven; one fell down and formed a long trail of fire. ""Someone is just dead!"" said the little girl; for her old grandmother, the only person who had loved her, and who was now no more, had told her, that when a star falls, a soul ascends to God. She drew another match against the wall: it was again light, and in the lustre there stood the old grandmother, so bright and radiant, so mild, and with such an expression of love. ..."" The music of Hydras Dream is mostly made through improvisation and by using repetitious patterns and melodies. Indeed, the two musicians state ""We want to use intuition and spontaneity as two key elements in the compositions, and therefore we don't pre-record anything. We just play whatever feels good and fits the theme and press rec."" Thus it is no surprise that ""The Little Match Girl"" was written and recorded during only three days in Matti Bye's studio. Exploring the entire spectrum of their instruments, von Hausswolff and Bye ingeniously combined their virtuosity in order to craft an eclectic and delicate album, located somewhere inbetween neo-classical experimentalism and avantgarde dream-pop. One can virtually image how the notes of this debut faintly resound behind the candle-lit windows which separate the little match girl from the life-saving warmth, how their echoes join her in her inevitable fate ... "". But in the corner, at the cold hour of dawn, sat the poor girl, with rosy cheeks and with a smiling mouth, leaning against the wall -- frozen to death on the last evening of the old year. [.] ""She wanted to warm herself,"" people said. No one had the slightest suspicion of what beautiful things she had seen; no one even dreamed of the splendor in which, with her grandmother she had entered on the joys of a new year Style: Experimental

Artist: Lace Curtain Label: Mexican Summer

Artist: Inventions Label: Temporary (Cargo Records)