rappin’ flower germs lake man gas safari dawn Moon Rappin’ Jack McDuff [Blue Note 1970] Moonflower Santana [CBS 1977] Moon Germs Joe Farrell [CTI 1973] Moonlake Klaus Schulze [SPV 2005] Moon Man Charles Lloyd [Kapp Records 1970] Moon Gas Dick Hyman / Mary Mayo [MGM 1963] Moon Safari Air [Source 1998] Moondawn Klaus Schulze [Brain […]

thirsty havana new harvest marquee banana pink The fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing. Wot an excuse to post some album covers! But we did space a while back, twice in fact. So this collection presents albums from the VC collection having two-word titles ending in MOON. * Thirsty Moon Thirsty Moon [Brain 1972] Havana […]

Although quite a lot of jazz is played at Vinyl Connection headquarters, I rarely write about it. There are a couple of reasons. Firstly, I am less confident writing about America’s contribution to world music; it somehow seems harder to capture in words than rock. Perhaps the language of jazz is less comfortable, less familiar. […]

More a collective than a formal band, Embryo were formed in Munich in 1970 by keyboard player Christian Burchard. It is as impossible to define their music as it would be to list all of the hundreds of musicians who have contributed to the Embryo story over the decades. However it is the early albums […]

A Catholic Education Bandwagonesque Thirteen Grand Prix Songs From Northern Britain Howdy! The millennial year was a challenging one. Having formed a strong and passionate connection with a new partner, I was dismayed to hear that she was decamping to her English homeland for an indeterminate period. This was not my fantasy of how the […]

Is a world of hardening national borders an expression of a global hardening of hearts? UK based multi-national group Vanishing Twin hope not, and on their 2019 album The Age of Immunology invite us to open our ears and minds to a vision of music sans frontières. Formed in Britain in 2015 around the talents […]

There are only so many times you can say g’day to a workplace acquaintance before you find yourself talking about music. This well known fact was supported by extensive laboratory research at the second-last university I worked for.  One morning, queuing at the best caffeine source on campus, I struck up a conversation with a […]

Having enjoyed a couple of recent posts where fellow music nuts share the, er, nuts they have gathered, I thought I’d join the party. Don’t know how it is in your neighbourhood, but in these parts the price of second-hand records has become so absurd that it is often better value buying new re-issues. Seems […]

A long time ago (about a year) we ran a series of Album Cover quizzes on various decades. We covered three epochs (60s, 80s, 00s) but skipped over Vinyl Connection’s favourite decade, the Seventies. Welcome, then, to the post-sixties comedown. * THE RULES Below are fourteen album covers (CD sized) resting on a 12″ LP. […]

White Music Go 2 Drums and Wires Black Sea English Settlement Mummer What an amazing band XTC were. Few rock outfits have produced such an interesting and diverse catalogue of albums, nor shown the kind of growth and development the lads from Swindon demonstrated across fourteen albums between 1978 and 2000. From angular post-punk through […]

Songs For Beginners Wild Tales Earth & Sky Innocent Eyes Songs For Survivors This Path Tonight Sipping black tea and staring at the pirouetting ghosts in a bush campfire are conducive to having a bit of a sing. I learned this when I participated in the Adventure Camping program of the Anglican Department of Christian […]

The silver-haired gentleman in the skull motif shirt may have had an iPad to remember the set list, but the singing was strong and the words tumbled out like freshly minted coins. The band were great—tight and energetic—and their fearless leader even managed a few quirky dance steps during an uptempo number. At a time […]