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Ernest Hood’s 1975 proto-ambient masterpiece Neighborhoods is a reminder of what happens when quiet makes space to really listen. Combining idyllic field recordings and washes of synth and zither, the album illustrates the relationship between the specific and the universal.

A new collection from Real Gone Music, “Screamin’ Jay Hawkins: The Bizarre Years,” plucks selections from his albums for the imprint, confirming that right up until the very end, Hawkins was interested in theatrical provocation, gross-out humor, and wild antics.

Experimental pop producer Tōth joins us to examine a few of the items in his emotional and mental toolkit, and his observations reveal that his album’s title—Practice Magic And Seek Professional Help When Necessary—is more than a clever comment on the self-care movement we all find ourselves considering, but rather, a code of openness and directness that finds careful application in his life and creative work.

Primal Boogie! This necessary collection from No Quarter brings together the first two Endless Boogie albums: four sides, six glorious jams, recorded on two mics straight into a cassette deck. To call them “out of print” isn’t quite correct – they were barely ever in print at all. Self-released in minuscule pressings in 2005, the LPs both been longtime collectors’ items (and for those of us without deep pockets, passed around in low bit-rate mp3 versions). Now they’re back, and with a totally sweet gatefold, to boot.

On his latest, a lean, seven-song release entitled New Miami Sound, Davidson shows leaps and bounds in his songwriting, embracing piano-driven rhapsodies found in the unlikeliest of places; nostalgia-tinted folk for long casted shadows just beginning to fade. Branching off some strange lineage of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Harry Nilsson, his warbly, rustic vocals and subtly profound prose seem to sneak up on you. Often, it feels as though you might turn around to find it gone.

Listening to Jay Bolotin’s mysterious songs, it’s easy to hear why people like Mickey Newbury, Kris Kristofferson, Merle Haggard, and other Music City luminaries lauded the Kentucky native’s work.

A “science fiction album about the present,” Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? finds Deerhunter at the mesa of their dream pop playground.

Like his occasional collaborator, Alan Bishop’s Sun City Girls, Egyptian composer Maurice Louca synthesizes sounds from all across the globe: the American and British rock he internationalized as a youth, electronic music, free jazz, avant-garde, and shaabi, or “of the people” Egyptian pop music.

This past week we lost one of the most prolific and influential French film composers, Francis Lai. Best known for his collaborations with director Claude Lelouch, as well as his Academy Award winning score for Love Story (1970), Lai scored over 130 films in his lifetime — between 1966 and 2015.

Straight out of Virginia Beach, Bill Deal & The Rhondels 1970 cover of Lennon/McCartney’s “Hey Bulldog”. The fabs…this is not. Bill Deal & The Rhondels :: Hey Bulldog

Just over ten years ago, in the spring of 2004, two recent college graduates drove to Asheville, NC, to look into opening a record store there. Neither Matt Schnable nor Mark Capon had ever visited […]

2013 has already offered up an embarrassment of riches for fans of the guitar soli world, from necessary reissues of Lena Hughes and Don Bikoff to fresh masterpieces by Chuck Johnson, Glenn Jones and others . But there are still more […]

– Over the weekend I donned my correspondent cap for FOK and hit up the Arts & Leisure closing party event at Space 15 twenty in Hollywood. My findings are now online . – Remember those homemade, New Kind of Mambo, compilations I […]