Good Morning Susie Soho peaked on the Swedish pop album chart at 15, above the likes of Whitney Houston, Britney Spears and Pearl Jam, yet was named album of the year for 2000 by the critics in the British magazine Jazzwise. At the same time, Svensson was on the covers of two German jazz magazines, was the cover feature, along with Jacky Terrasson, in the French magazine Jazzman and was hailed by the German news weekly Der Spiegel as the future of jazz piano (together with Brad Mehldau). Clearly then it's not unreasonable to suggest that this album is making waves across Europe. That the cutting edge can live on without necessarily inhabiting volatile experimentation is hardly new, and Svensson's trio, while darkly lyrical, is also fiercely contemporary…

Neurosis is a band with a distinctive sound driven by sludgy guitars and aggresive screaming vocals while still maintaining atmospheric. They are often regarded as the pioneers of post- metal and have influenced many major bands in that genre, like Isis and Pelican. The band's seventh full length studio album, A Sun That Never Sets, shows the band taking a more avant- garde and experimental direction than before.
The album features very frequent softer and atmospheric parts, making the album very atmospheric. The songs often progress, starting out with clean guitar playing and slowly moving towards sludgy riffs and fierce screams. Despite the low tempos that the sludgy riffs are played in, they rarely fail to sound powerful, fierce and rough…

Mother Gong's first album Mother was released in 1978 and the band found Gilli Smyth collaborating with many musicians including Harry Williamson and various friends and family including on this album Owl In The Tree from 1990, former partner Daevid Allen. The album is split into two halves and both Allen and Smyth work well within the limitations set out by vinyl bearing in mind that the days of vinyl made for a more convenient division, which is defined, by the individual styles of both Allen and Smyth. The album is a mix of both styles including Allen's blissed out space rocker style and Smyth's more laid back fairy tale recitations and a smattering of typically Gong like instrumental work.

What would singing be without words? When you combine wonderful poetry with exquisite music, the result is magical. In a rare break from the sacred collections they are famed for, this album from The Sixteen features a whole programme of secular music devoted to English partsongs. From Stanford’s cycle of Eight Partsongs based on the sparing yet infectious poetry of Mary Elizabeth Coleridge to Bridges’ lyrically descriptive writing in Finzi’s Seven Poems of Robert Bridges and Imogen Holst’s idyllic Six Part-Songs Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow using verses by John Keats, each setting captures the mood of the poem brilliantly.

Two opulent choral masterpieces by Richard Strauss frame an eclectic programme from one of Europe’s most highly acclaimed choirs. The name of the young Slovenian composer Matej Kastelic may still be relatively little known, but the title track Credo / I believe is simply extraordinary, and demands to be heard.

Irene Kalisvaart was awarded the highest prize at the National Competition for Young Guitarists in Amsterdam at the age of 17. She studied with Jorge Oraison in Rotterdam, and continued with Ansgar Krause and Hubert Käppel at the Musikhochschule Köln where she finished her studies with distinction. She then went on to complete the ‘concert exam’ with Hubert Käppel in 2001. In between and thereafter she received numerous scholarships, international prizes and awards. Valuable musical mentors and masterclasses include Darko Petrinjak, Laura Young, Dale Kavanagh, Zoran Dukić, Àlex Garrobé, Pablo Márquez, Marco Socías, Thomas Müller-Pering, Aniello Desiderio and David Russell.

I Fagiolini’s re-discovery and recording of Striggio’s longlost Mass in 40/60 Parts was ground-breaking when it was released in 2011. The premiere recording won awards around the world including the Gramophone Early Music Award and a Diapason d’Or de l’Année in France and remains a trailblazing account of this Renaissance epic. It is complemented on this album by Tallis’s Spem in alium which it is said to have inspired. The Gramophone citation particularly mentioned the new lustre brought to the piece by instrumental involvement and the clarity brought to the detail by the use of viols, cornetts, sackbuts, dulcians and more. Eight further works by Striggio are also included, each of them premiere recordings in 2011.