The BIS Skalkottas series goes from strength to strength, opening up a series of fascinating doors on the music of this neglected composer. The Third Quartet is a concise, three-movement piece, which seems to have been written at white heat, from its arresting opening, through the lyrical central Andante, to the contrasts of the final rondo. People often complain that they can’t follow serial music, but Skalkottas has a knack of writing memorable melodic shapes and devising contrasting textures which really underpin the musical structure: the first movement is one of the clearest examples of sonata form imaginable. The New Hellenic Quartet, led by Georgios Demertzis, who has already shown his prowess in recordings of Skalkottas’s solo violin music, performs with extraordinary virtuosity, passion and love – qualities which are even more apparent in the Fourth Quartet, a massive piece of amazing power and energy. The angry first movement must be one of the most concentrated eight-and-a-half minutes of music since Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, while in the extended variations which follow, Skalkottas encompasses an enormous variety of moods. And, after the frenetic scherzo, the short finale (another rondo) reconciles the lyrical and incisive sides of the work. Terrific music – a terrific CD.

This intimate VH1 concert from 1999 features her top songs live along with two never-before-seen performances. With her signature long locks, beautiful voice, and attitude to burn, Alanis Morissette took the music industry by storm and stole America's heart with her 1995 album JAGGED LITTLE PILL, and her iconic single "Ironic." This album opened new doors to female singer/ songwriters, introducing a rare honesty that has since changed the face of music. Since then, her music has become somewhat more toned down, but Alanis continues to reinvent categories, not content to remain within the boundaries of what has been done before. This documentary takes a look back on the songstress's career, exploring her inspirations for such songs as "Hand in My Pocket," "You Oughta Know," "Uninvited," "Head Over Feet," and many others. Featured is a live performance from 1999, held at the Roxy in New York City.

Winter's debut album for Columbia was also arguably his bluesiest and best. Straight out of Texas with a hot trio, Winter made blues-rock music for the angels, tearing up a cheap Fender guitar with total abandon on tracks like "I'm Yours and I'm Hers," "Leland Mississippi Blues," and perhaps the slow blues moment to die for on this set, B.B. King's "Be Careful with a Fool." Winter's playing and vocals have yet to become mannered or clichéd on this session, and if you've ever wondered what the fuss is all about, here's the best place to check out his true legacy.

Beyond Description (1973-1989) is a companion set to 2001's 12-disc box The Golden Road (1965-1973), which collected all of the Grateful Dead's albums for Warner Bros, adding bonus tracks to each album, along with a double-disc collection of early pre-Warner recordings called "Birth of the Dead" for good measure. Beyond Description picks up the story after the Dead started their own label with 1973's Wake of the Flood and runs all the way to 1989, when they released their last studio album, Built to Last. Like The Golden Road, each album here is enhanced with bonus tracks, running the gamut from as little as three (on Built to Last) to has many as 16 (a full-length bonus disc added to 1980's live acoustic Reckoning), but there's nothing quite as enticing as "Birth of the Dead." Indeed, "enticing" is not a word that's frequently associated with the albums in this collection.

This is the second recording by BIS of Sally Beamish’s music, and the four pieces it contains confirm utterly her high standing. Her work is thoughtfully lyrical, intense, individual, instinctively dramatic, in ways that remind me somewhat of Nicholas Mawmusic. Like him she has a particular gift for expressive harmony and timbre. The earliest piece here is No, I’m not afraid (1989), six poignant poems written from prison by Irina Ratushinskaya spoken – by Beamish herself – against sparse but hugely effective instrumental backgrounds and interspersed with five purely instrumental interludes. The disc opens with The Caledonian Road of 1997. The name of this piece refers not just to the north London thoroughfare remembered by Beamish from childhood but to her own pilgrimage northward to Scotland, where she now lives. The music resonates with a sense of ritual, of something inevitable. By contrast, the work that follows, the unabashedly poetic The Day Dawn (written for a summer school organised by Contemporary Music-making for Amateurs in 1997, and revised in 2000) derives from a Shetland fiddle tune, and is all about new beginnings. And finally there’s the saxophone concerto The Imagined Sound of Sun on Stone (1999), whose starting point is a Swedish herding call – used as a kind of ritornello – but which is drenched in a plethora of references primeval, religious, mystical and contemporary, music at once hard and soft edged. Fine playing from the soloist, John Harle, in this work and throughout the disc by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra under Ola Rudner.

Violinist Anne Akiko Meyers' Koch release Smile continues, to some extent, from her previous Avie issue Birds in Warped Time in that she is attempting to expand beyond the constraints of typical classical CD programming combining a couple of big works, or collecting a bunch of little ones, "encores" into something more imaginative and in more keeping with her own taste and personality. With that, Meyers has invested some measure of muscle into developing repertoire that fits her generous, yet transparent tone with the same degree of comfort as one of her designer-made concert gowns. Here we have an arrangement of the Japanese melody "Kojo No Tsuki," made by Meyers herself in collaboration with Shigeaki Saegusa, for solo violin.

A rare bird has relieved.. 10 songs that move. Here's a part of the explanation of why it's just called "Rock Music"… It's (or should be) because it's rocking something. This CD makes it!
Claus Clement Pedersen, called Tømrerclaus (born November 21, 1945 in Aarhus) is a danish guitarist, cellist, bassist, clarinettist, singer, hurdy-gurdy player, producer, sound engineer and online store manager.

Pianist Abdullah Ibrahim has celebrated his South African heritage in music ever since being forced to emigrate from his homeland in the early '60s. Considering that this CD was recorded in Cape Town, South Africa in 1997 and that apartheid is a thing of the past, it is not surprising that Ibrahim's music is even happier than usual. The 15 songs, all originals by the pianist, are played in a continuous performance, including some old favorites ("The Wedding" and "The Mountain") plus a few newer tunes; "Someday Soon Sweet Samba" and "African Street Parade" are particularly joyous and rousing. Ibrahim is joined by bassist Marcus McLaurine, drummer George Gray and (on three numbers) trumpeter Feya Faku, whose entry on the seventh song is somewhat jarring. Overall, this is one of Abdullah Ibrahim's best all-around sets.

Written by eccentric French composer Erik Satie in 1893, the extraordinary score for Vexations is just three lines long, yet a complete performance (840 repetitions) may last for anything between 14 and 28 hours. First performed under the supervision of John Cage in 1963, this radical yet enigmatic work is now recognized as a significant milestone in avant-garde music. This meditative 70 minute recording features 40 repetitions of the motif, performed by Alan Marks on piano.

The Space Between è il secondo album della cantautrice italiana Chiara Civello. È stato pubblicato nel 2007 dalla Universal Music Italia.

Nino Rota’s reputation outside Italy as, at best, a civilised purveyor of minor theatre music is turning out to be hardly even a half-truth. BIS’s series of his symphonic and chamber works, and Chandos’s of the concertos, reveals a composer of incisive gifts and technical brilliance. Civilised the music certainly is, but often far more than that, its pervasive wit enhancing rather than detracting from the elegant suggestions of deep feeling. The wise and wily ‘neo-classicism’ of the Third Symphony sets out like an exercise in updated Mozart, but though Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony is brought to mind it soon becomes evident that a strain of acid melancholy undercuts the dapper phraseology. The model here, if there is one, seems more likely to be late Busoni, with disturbing cross-currents just beneath the surface. The Concerto festivo, more obviously a display piece, takes Italian opera genres (aria, cabaletta, etc) and reinterprets them in fairly irreverent orchestral terms, while the ballet music that Rota produced for the tercentenary of the death of Molière – almost his last work –insouciantly mixes Baroque, modern and popular styles, just as it mixes merriment and melancholy, with constant technical brilliance and utter lack of pomposity. The Swedish performers take to the Italianate gaiety as to the manner born. A delightful disc.

Sasquatch is the self-titled debut album by American stoner rocker trio Sasquatch. This was released by Small Stone Records in 2003.

Sacrifice And Bliss is the 2009 album by Philadelphia, Pennsylvania instrumental freaks Stinking Lizaveta. This is their sixth album, the third and last album done for the At A Loss Recordings label.

Nipps presents Tetrad The Gang Of Four is the 2008 album by Japanese hip-hop trio Tetrad The Gang Of Four. This was originally as a CD/DVD set but this is only for the compact disc. This was released by Entotsu Recordings and was their only album.