OH Heck!

Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek’s latest album Yarın Yoksa. The show stopping intensity of Derya backed by the psychedelic soul of Grup Şimşek with production by Leon Michels has yielded a stand out record that challenges genre with a broad appeal and a powerful message.

Memphis in Texas was the first and only album by Shrubbies. In the aftermath of Lake of Puppies, an alt folk/pop band featuring William D Drake, Sharron Fortnam (North Sea Radio Orchestra/Cardiacs/Lake of Puppies/Led Bib/Lost Crowns) and Craig Fortnam (North Sea Radio Orchestra/Arch Garrison/Lake of Puppies) formed Shrubbies with Sarah Smith (Cardiacs/Sea Nymphs) on sax and keyboards, and Ben Clarke on drums. When he left the band, Dominic Luckman (Cardiacs) joined the fold! Following Sarah’s departure from the band, Dan Maitland signed up. They played enthusiastically on the London circuit from 1996-1999, made this record, released it then split up. Craig’s songs are settings of poems that Sharron wrote in her bedroom next the North Sea

When William D. Drake and Sharron Fortnam became friends in 1987, it was obvious they would have to make music together, even if they didn’t know it yet.They were riding the same wave…

1975 facsimile reissue of Mary Lou Williams’s magnum opus of religious jazz: Mary Lou’s Mass. Newsweek called the score “an encyclopedia of black music, richly represented from spirituals to bop to rock.” This is Williams’s “Music for Peace,” a landmark recording which addressed many of the social ills of the 1960s and 70s. It is perhaps the most openly religious jazz recording made at that time. In her own words, it is “Music for the Soul.”

Everything has changed, and it is changing still. The early days of 2025 (an already baleful year, vis-a-vis America’s darkening political horizon) have wrought heretofore unimaginable destruction in the land we now call Los Angeles. The wildfires that began on the morning of Tuesday, January 7th—and which are still raging—are, in scope and intensity, unlike any other disaster, natural or manmade, in the city’s living memory. Thousands of homes destroyed. Twenty four lives lost at the time of writing (that number will almost certainly rise), and innumerable lives forever altered. The devastation arrived suddenly, and has persisted over the course of a punishing and surreal week.