"A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City for over 30 years, Elliott Sharp has released over eighty-five recordings ranging from orchestral music to blues, jazz, noise, no wave rock, and techno music.

Behind The Sky proudly presents Portals: A Kosmiche Journey through Outer Worlds and Inner Space. Featuring enough analog and modular synths to build a rocketship, Portals features 13 tracks of berlin school inspired electronic music from legends of synthesis like Steve Roach, Ian Boddy and Steve Moore, as well as music from new school wizards of the electron like d'Voxx, Polypores and Listening Center. Lovingly curated by Behind The Sky label head Bluetech, this 2xLP compilation is a love song to unabashedly melodic analog synthesizer music of cosmic proportions and the utopian science fiction of the 70s.

Once again finding harmony and creating alchemy between seeming opposites, on Volta Björk is bold but thoughtful, delicate yet strong, accessible and avant. The intricacy and complexity of projects like Medúlla and Drawing Restraint 9 suggested that she might have left the more direct side of her work behind, but Volta's opening track and lead single, "Earth Intruders," puts that notion to rest: the song literally marches in, riding a bubbling, ritualistic beat courtesy of Timbaland and Konono No. 1's electric thumb-pianos.

Bjork's Vespertine: an album as an opera. Pop music is theatrical, it lives on stories, constantly creating new characters of art. In addition, no other style has changed and influenced music reception so enduringly as pop music. Most people can draw biographical references on the map of pop music. So, it seems high time to open the doors of the opera to a new visitor. With its symphonic elements, dramatic singing lines and ethereal choir vocals, Vespertine seems to be the perfect model for the complex project. A contemporary coproduction between Nationaltheater Mannheim and Hotel Pro Forma.

Medulla, which derives from the Latin word for “marrow,” is Icelandic recording artist Bjork’s fifth studio album. It was released back in 2004 on August 30th and received two Grammy award nominations. With her last album, Vespertine, which was released in 2001, being electronic influenced, Bjork wanted to step away from that style. With Medulla, she wanted an album to be almost entirely a cappella and constructed with human vocals. The idea, though unique was very much what Bjork is known for. In the album, she collaborated with beatboxers Rahzel and Dokkaka, Inuit throat singer Tanya Tadaq as well as the lead singer of Faith No More, an American rock band, Mike Patton.

Homogenic is the third studio album by Icelandic recording artist Björk.

After the breakup of her band Sugarcubes, Icelandic singer Björk released her first solo album with the fitting, yet misnamed, name, as this musical genius made her debut in 1977 at the tender age of eleven.

If this is blues, it's blues in the Billie Holiday sense, not the Muddy Waters one. This is one of Nina Simone's more subdued mid-'60s LPs, putting the emphasis on her piano rather than band arrangements. It's rather slanted toward torch-blues ballads like "Strange Fruit," "Trouble in Mind," Billie Holiday's own composition "Tell Me More and More and Then Some," and "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out." Simone's then-husband, Andy Stroud, wrote "Be My Husband," an effective adaptation of a traditional blues chant. By far the most impressive track is her frantic ten-minute rendition of the traditional "Sinnerman," an explosive tour de force that dwarfs everything else on the album.

Paul McCartney retreated from the spotlight of the Beatles by recording his first solo album at his home studio, performing nearly all of the instruments himself. Appropriately, McCartney has an endearingly ragged, homemade quality that makes even its filler - and there is quite a bit of filler - rather ingratiating. Only a handful of songs rank as full-fledged McCartney classics, but those songs - the light folk-pop of "That Would Be Something," the sweet, gentle "Every Night," the ramshackle Beatles leftover "Teddy Boy," and the staggering "Maybe I'm Amazed" (not coincidentally the only rocker on the album) - are full of all the easy melodic charm that is McCartney's trademark. The rest of the album is charmingly slight, especially if it is read as a way to bring Paul back to earth after the heights of the Beatles. At the time the throwaway nature of much of the material was a shock, but it has become charming in retrospect.

Beauty & Crime is the seventh studio album by singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega. It is her first album of new material since 2001's Songs in Red and Gray and her first for Blue Note Records. It was released on July 17, 2007. Beauty & Crime won the Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical, on February 11, 2008. On Beauty & Crime, Suzanne Vega's Blue Note Records debut, the Manhattan native uses New York City as the backdrop for a collection of eleven new songs that juxtapose acoustic guitar-driven melodies with coolly synthesized beats; intensely personal lyrics with compelling, short story-like narratives; images of today's scarred cityscape with memories of Vega's old Upper West Side 'hood and Lower East Side haunts. The past commingles with the present, the public with the private, familiar sounds with the utterly new, just like the city itself. Making her first new studio album in six years, Vega says, "I feel like I really stretched my limits. I pushed myself out of my comfort zone–to sing in keys I wouldn't have sung in before, to work with different textures, to be unafraid of doing what ever sounded good to me. I wanted to make a modern classic."

Maria João Pires “shapes and colours every phrase, and with immaculate taste, and she makes sure the phrases end as eloquently as they begin,” wrote Gramophone in 1974. “She conveys not just the details but the relevance of every note to the whole … Best of all, she communicates everything she has discovered about the music, and it is worth having.” This Portuguese pupil of Wilhelm Kempff, Pires was one of the artists who defined the Erato label in the 1970s and 1980s. This 5-CD box gathers together the recordings she made over the period from 1976 to 1985 and it reflects the consistent focus of her repertoire, with its special emphasis on Austro-German composers of the Classical and early-Romantic periods. Embracing solo works, piano duets and concertos, it contains works by Mozart, Schumann, Beethoven, but also by Bach and Chopin.

American singer/guitarist Eric Bibb and West African singer/guitarist Habib Koité have come together for Brothers in Bamako. It is an exciting gumbo of the two artists’ influences of blues, folk, gospel and world music.
The 13 tracks on Brothers in Bamako showcase songs penned by each artist, as well as several written together, plus a fascinating cover of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and the traditional blues, “Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad.” The CD represents a musical crossroads of Bibb’s blues, folk and gospel influences, blended with Koité’s contemporary West African folk/world roots into a unique mixture of voices and guitars that is both passionate and ebullient.

Celebrate this magical decade with 60 of the biggest and best hits from the world of 90s pop, rock, RnB, dance and reggae. This hit-packed 3CD set features a host of chart-topping pop stars that took the world by storm in the decade including George Michael, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Wet Wet Wet and Robbie Williams. The 90s were famous for spawning some of the coolest guitar music ever produced and it's represented here by the likes of Lenny Kravitz, Paul Weller, Manic Street Preachers, The Cranberries and Suede. Adamski, Olive, N-Trance and Robert Miles remind us of some of the biggest dancefloor smashes while Usher, Soul II Soul, Jamiroquai, P.M. Dawn, Salt-N-Pepa and Run D.M.C. highlight the strength and eclecticism that urban music went though in this great decade.

Mark Whitfield has long had an attractive tone, and his melodic style is in the forefront throughout this fairly varied date. Accompanied by a 21-piece string orchestra arranged by Dale Oehler, Whitfield and his quartet mostly stick to standards. Fortunately, tempos are varied (although there are a few sleepy ballads) and Diana Krall has guest vocals on "Some Other Time" and "Early Autumn." The strings generally do not add much, but Whitfield's inventive playing makes this a recommended set anyway. Highlights include "You Don't Know What Love Is," "My One And Only Love," an accompanied guitar feature on "I Want To Talk About You" and Whitfield's "Forever."

Rubicon Classics is proud to present the third album on the label from award-winning pianist, conductor, and composer Karim Said. Karim first came to the attention of the UK audience through Christopher Nupen’s film Karim’s Journey, which followed the then 14-year-old from his family home in Jordan to the Purcell School in London.