2018 five CD collection. The Best 80s Groove Album contains the defining tracks of the soul genre. Including Aretha Franklin, Wham!, S'Express, Billy Ocean, Marvin Gaye, Whitney Houston, Luther Vandross, Donna Summer, Deniece Williams and many others.

German synthpop outfit And One formed in Berlin in 1989. DJs/producers Steve Naghavi and Chris Ruiz first met the previous year in a local dance club, bonding over their mutual affection for early ebm acts like Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb and borrowing their subsequent dual synthesizer and beatbox aesthetic from Depeche Mode. Upon signing to the fledgling Machinery label, And One issued their 1990 debut single, "Metal Hammer," a significant club hit that set the stage for their first full-length effort, Anguish, completed with contributions from newly added third member Alex Two.
On August 8, 2014, And One released their 12th studio album Magnet. The album was released by itself, and as the Magnet Trilogie I Box in regular and limited editions on CD and vinyl. The Magnet Trilogie I Box features the additional new albums Propeller and Achtung 80. The Premium Edition contains all 3 albums, and 3 additional live albums…

When Sun Ra released his debut Saturn release in 1957, he signaled the Arkestra’s mission for the future. The cover declared the album a "21st Century Limited Edition." The compositions on Supersonic Jazz conveyed optimism and hope, bringing a message auguring the World of Tomorrow. Ra declared this the first dimension of a fresh art form, as he set about evolving a new American music — a composite of the past and future, the known coalescing with the unknown. The album, not very well received upon release, reveals a vibrant universe of sound, with highly developed arrangements and sophisticated musicianship, especially Ra’s innovative keyboard work and John Gilmore’s astonishing tenor sax solos. Official expanded 2xLP / 2xCD edition features 14 tracks of alternate versions and studio takes, and the CD contains an additional four bonus tracks. Liner notes by avid Sun Ra fan Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo, and additional essay from longtime Ra blogger Rodger Coleman (NUVOID Sun Ra Sundays). Vinyl includes a 12x12 insert reproduction of the alternate Saturn jacket art.

Our mission at Complete 60s Records to collect every U.S. pop instrumental hit of the 1960s produced three spectacular box sets, but when we found it impossible to go forward past 1962, collectors demanded we turn back the clock to 1959, another great year for instrumentals. So now, on two jam-packed CDs, we have collected every charting U.S. pop hit from 1959 in sparkling fidelity, all 66 of them! Nearly a third of these (21) are CD debuts, tracks that appear on CD for the first time ever.Even more exciting, Complete Pop Instrumental Hits of 1959 sports EIGHT iconic 1959 songs in real STEREO for the first time. These aren't just minor hits, but the biggest hits of the year in spectacular new STEREO that will knock your socks off. Check out the sound samples available elsewhere (search for CD Title + Listen). You won't believe your ears!

"For the second time in a matter of weeks, here we have an opportunity to hear more from guitarist Derek Bailey, this time performing with John Stevens. Neither man should need much by way of introduction: both were seminal figures in the world of free improvised music as it took shape in the 1960s and 70s. Thanks to Michael Gurzon’s recording, here they are, in 1989, performing together at The Duke of Wellington in London. The first track, ‘I’m Alright Actually’, begins with a series of slippery shapes, the noise-elements of Bailey’s guitar merging with those of Stevens’ percussion in a non-stop stream of invention. The music reaches a point of stasis before moving off into a series of angular shapes which give way to a stream of more slow-moving ideas. There is always a sense of restlessness though, a feeling that, at any moment, things might get more chaotic, which, inevitably, the do. The music ebbs and flows, but the inventiveness and the sense of restless energy is always there. A few seconds of applause have been left in at the end, which really captures the ambience of the venue (the same goes for both the other tracks, too). The second, ‘What’s the Time?’, begins with more spacious, harmonic-dominated ideas from Bailey, in dialogue with Stevens’ ‘pocket trumpet’. Almost seven minutes in, the music becomes more dense and agitated.

His17th album with Signum Classics, the Welsh pianist Llŷr Williams, brings a profound musical intelligence to his work as soloist, accompanist and chamber musician. His second album of Robert Schumann works explores a selection of works that span a substantial part of Schumann’s life. Llŷr Williams’ long and successful collaboration with Signum Records includes the 8-disc box-set ‘A Schubert Journey’ (2020), the 12-volume ‘Beethoven Unbound’ (2018), a ‘Wagner Without Words’ double album (2014) and highlights from Liszt’s ‘Années de pèlerinage‘ (2012).

French-Hungarian pianist Suzana Bartal joins Sébastien Rouland and the Saarländische Staatsorchester in this release of two warhorses of the Romantic repertoire, Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor and Camille Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor. Although not successful at its premiere with the composer at the piano, Saint-Saëns’ 2nd went on to be beloved by the public, and is probably the most played of his 5 concertos for piano. Very few pieces of music are as iconic as the only concerto Grieg ever completed: his famous Piano Concerto in A minor. Liszt famously sight read and lavished praise on it when it was written in 1870, and it has been a perennial favourite since then.

On the occasion of her first recording, Sophia Liu has chosen to highlight the romantic music repertoire through performing contrasted pages by Franz Liszt and Frédéric Chopin, themselves pianists. Along with her virtuosity, the young quick-handed soloist achieves a perfect symbiosis of lyricism and a sense of poetry in addition to an uncommon maturity that already places her among today’s rising stars of the keyboard.

This album is inspired by the fantastic physicality and variety of dance forms in which composers from Granados to Shostakovich excelled. There are some hidden gems as well as pieces that will be familiar to all - and they have the novelty, as transcriptions, of all having been 'stolen' from the original. These arrangements are creative, fun and often virtuosic.

A world removed from the grand and awesome visions of the Last Judgement that so often characterize settings of the Mass for the Dead, Brahms conceived a work of ‘consolation for those who are suffering’. Having spent more than ten years absorbing this German ‘humanist’ Requiem, Pichon and Pygmalion have meticulously shaped every bar of this compact work, achieving a form of polyphonic transparency that confounds the senses and transcends the universality of the Requiem's message.

Orjan Hulten presents a brand-new quartet and a new album. Under the name "Peaceful Warrior," the quartet features some of the finest musicians, with the fantastic Isabella Lundgren as a guest. The music can be described as poetic, lyrical, and free. It is newly composed music by Orjan for the quartet. Isabella joins in performing the poem "Please Call Me by My True Names" by Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, as well as a reinterpretation of Shirley Horn's beautiful ballad "Where Are You Going?". The "Peaceful Warrior Quartet" may not create world peace, but we can start with ourselves. Peace is about a desire for a better world, but also about a journey inward to us. It's about finding a genuine and generous creative process together in the band and with the audience.

For the third volume of their complete Mozart series, Maxim Emelyanychev and Il Pomo d’Oro bring together the Haffner and Linz symphonies, composed in 1782 and 1783. At this point, Mozart had fully established himself as a composer of opera and dramatic works, and he conceived these symphonies with the mindset of a man of the stage – boldly!

Winner of the 2009 ARD International Music Competition, violinist Hyeyoon Park has made a name for herself as a soloist and chamber musician, performing with the likes of Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, London Philharmonic Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra, Kian Soltani, Timothy Ridout and Benjamin Grosvenor. On her first album for Linn, Silenced, she partners Gergely Madaras and WDR Sinfonieorchester in a beautiful programme that showcases two composers who were at odds with the system in place. Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto was banned for its ‘formalist distortions’ and only premiered in 1955 after Stalin's death. Refusing to join the Nazi-aligned Kultuurkamer, Dutch composer Henriëtte Bosmans’ work was banned. Her Concert Piece for Violin and Orchestra, composed in grief, is introspective and bitter in tone. A youthful academic exercise, Shostakovich’s Variations Op. 3 brings the album to a rumbustious end.

One of Saxony-Anhalt’s oldest and most tradition-rich orchestras presents a compelling combination of two major orchestral works on GENUIN, marking the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus’s relocation from Weimar to Dessau: the Anhaltische Philharmonie of the Bauhaus city Dessau, under its general music director Markus L. Frank, pairs Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (in Ravel’s orchestration) with Feininger Fractals by Eisenach-born composer Thomas Buchholz (b. 1961) – two orchestral works closely connected to visual art. The finely spun textures of Buchholz, who in this work engages with Bauhaus master Lyonel Feininger, and the endless colors of Mussorgsky/Ravel are in the best hands with this Dessau ensemble. Magnificent but not pompous, virtuosic yet full of meaning, the orchestra plays with intelligence and nuance under its chief conductor.

Alain Altinoglu and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra have begun to record the complete symphonies of Shostakovich, starting with his Fourth and Fifth symphonies. Shostakovich dared to express human suffering, passion, fear and catastrophe in his music, but always asking the same nagging question: what is man? In this sense, these two symphonies open with a question — an idea of martyrdom that was to become one of the central ideas of his later symphonies and, of course, of his Lady Macbeth of Mzensk. Both symphonies are dated between 1935-1937 when Shostakovich was in his thirties; this was one of the darkest and most difficult phases of his life, marked as it was by the repercussions of some of his writings and the arrest of many people close to him, including members of his family.