The 2010 ECM album Purcor - Songs for Saxophone and Piano features tenor/soprano saxophonist Trygve Seim and pianist Andreas Utnem dueting on various original and traditional compositions. Although this is the first time the two musicians have recorded together, their partnership extends back to the mid-'90s when Utnem, working with Norway's Church City Mission foundation, invited Seim to perform with him at several church services. Choosing from a mix of liturgical compositions for mass and some original pieces, Utnem then played in his own classical- and jazz-based style while Seim improvised around him. The result, as heard on this album, is a kind of hybrid of classical, jazz, and folk styles fits nicely into the softly introspective, and cerebral ECM approach.

In 1997, singer & songwriter Steve Newman formed the band Newman and since 1998 has been producing consistently high quality albums filled with hook laden songs and thought provoking lyrics and released 10 studio albums and one best of compilation up to today. The previous release, "The Elegance Machine", was released in 2015 and the band returned to the road with shows in Europe and their first UK headline tour. Steve Newman continued to write throughout 2016, songs, of which some have featured on various artists releases, and some which are still to come. It was within this writing process that Newman started to piece together the ideas which would become his latest release…

For his sixth recording, Turkish born pianist Fahir Atakoglu has gone retro, recalling the '80s contemporary New York City/Seventh Avenue South neo-bop, skunk funk, and fusion of the Brecker Brothers and Steps/Steps Ahead. Playing exclusively acoustic and not electric piano, he also employs the quite different sounding electric guitarists Mike Stern or Wayne Krantz on alternating tracks, adding Michael Brecker disciple Bob Franceschini, electric bass guitar pioneer Anthony Jackson, and the dynamic drummer Horacio "El Negro" Hernandez. Atakoglu attains the sound he seeks quite easily, a bit derivative, but exciting and refreshingly done some 25 years after the fact.

Ambient music is a genre of music that puts an emphasis on tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. Ambient music is said to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual", or "unobtrusive" quality. According to Brian Eno, one of its pioneers, "Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."…

Live & Unreleased, 1967 is basically a re-release of 1998's 50 Minute Technicolour Dream, only with four fewer tracks. The radio sessions have the expected sound for the era and offer an alternative to the common versions found on Tomorrow…

Eastern Sierra Black/Death Metal crew VALDUR will release new full-length Divine Cessation December 1 on Bloody Mountain Records. The seven bloodied, snarling tracks therein stand upon a foundation built upon two decades’ worth of filth, sweat, and metal. Divine Cessation was recorded at the Bloody Mountain Bunker by Valdur, mixed by Matthew (Sxuperion), and mastered by Dan at Morbid Mastering. Album cover art comes courtesy of Farron Loathing.