Category GENRE SPECIFIC
TORN SKY
I’ve just woken from a fitful doze, 34,000 feet above the Caspian Sea. Not that it is visible as we hurtle through an orange-pink upper altitude cloud carpet at 578 mph, but it’s down there somewhere below the crumpled sheets of puffy stuff. That is what the animated map tells me, anyway. What a clever little […]
FLOYDITTIES
What do you do when you have the entire catalogue of an artist, the ‘Best of’ albums, most titles on at least two formats, plus a goodly selection of bootlegs? If you answered, ‘See your therapist’, you get points plus that special superior feeling that attends the suspicion a fellow music lover may just be […]
PINK EARS AND TANGERINE NIGHTMARES
THE MUSIC OF TANGERINE DREAM, PART TWO After Electronic Meditation, Klaus Schulze moved on from Tangerine Dream, leaving band leader Edgar Froese in need of a replacement. There was a young musician Froese had encountered in the Berlin scene as the drummer of Agitation Free (a brilliant, inventive band I hope we’ll get to at […]
NORWEGIAN STARFIRE
What a strangely captivating album is Starfire, the 9th from Norwegian band Jaga Jazzist. I stumbled across this recent release, took a punt on the album after auditioning a track on youtube (below) and… got excited. The grooves are inescapable though far from standard issue. Often the melodic lines seem to be layered on top […]
10 ALBUMS TO SAY YES TO
Following the recent departure of Yes co-founder and bass supremo Chris Squire, it seems fitting to revisit the music of a band central to 70s ‘Prog’ who continued to make music through every subsequent decade. Who would have thought that the song-writing partnership that began when Jon Anderson and Chris Squire hit it off in […]
SUNDANCES
One Saturday afternoon in October 1976 I rode my bicycle round to Rod Amberton’s place to watch a total eclipse. It seemed like a friendly thing to do, given that this sort of solar phenomenon only occurred every few decades and Melbourne was, apparently, a prime location from which to view it. Assuming the clouds […]
KOMPUTER WORLDS
“Beam myself into the future” Needing to choose a CD for an album-length child-accompanied drive across the Melbourne suburbs, I pulled out Kraftwerk’s Computer World. There wasn’t much risk as the boy really likes Man-Machine. When he saw what I’d pulled out, he gave it the thumbs up and even an endorsing, ‘Good choice Daddy’, so […]
ON THE ROAD TO GENESIS
Vinyl Connection’s love of live albums is well known. They’ve been written about frequently (the series on triple live albums, for example) but not recently (Back Live goes way back). Not through waning interest nor fears of retribution from the unconverted but simply because there just so much music to enjoy and so little time. […]
AGHARTA GLASSES
There have been occasions when Vinyl Connection has grouched about how much stuff is required to step outside the house. We have been heard to talk movingly of those long gone, halcyon days when a chap simply strolled breezily out the front door unencumbered by anything other than his thoughts. Nowadays it requires a hold-all […]
HEAVEN EARTH RELAY
Rock and roll will never last, you know. Gone in a couple of years. That’s what they said back in the early 60s. Yet not only has the beast survived, some of its protagonists have notched up multiple decades in the biz, inviting today’s extraordinary mission: Reviewing two albums by the same artist, released four […]
AN EVENING WITH HERBIE HANCOCK AND CHICK COREA, MAY 2015
The Melbourne International Jazz Festival began in 1998, co-incidentally the year that the Ms Connection/Vinyl Connection international festival kicked off too. Seventeen years on, both are still going strong though artists in both arenas seem to be a touch more, er, mature. Seasoned. Venerable. Ah shit. We’re all older. Nevertheless, when we noticed that the […]
LASTING FIRSTS
Debut albums are a bit special. Often the result of a long gestation period that may well have begun in someone’s teenage bedroom, there is an exuberance and excitement to a first offering that combines confidence (“Look at me! Listen to my music!”) and nervousness (“Is it OK? Will anyone like me?”). Over the life of […]
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