Rushden & Diamonds - 2010 (Digi) - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

The self-titled debut by Soft Palms is the brainchild of Julia Kugel (The Coathangers, White Woods) and husband/musician/recording engineer Scott Montoya. The album is a feast of rich sounds and simple, comforting melodies threading together scrappy dream pop and ethereal torch songs into a sublime journey towards brighter horizons. Kugel and Montoya's positivity in Soft Palms serves as the creative arm of their ongoing behind-the-scenes work in the Long Beach music community, such as planning Happy Sundays free music festival, running the arts non-profit Studios for Schools, and organizing Long Beach POP local events calendar. Bio InchMy goal was to create something that sounded like a mental hug, a sonic embrace,Inch says Julia Kugel (The Coathangers/White Woods) about the self-titled debut album by Long Beach duo Soft Palms. InchEverything can feel so wild and out of control, we really wanted to create something you could sink into and use to calm those emotions.Inch To achieve this goal, Kugel and her husband and partner Scott Montoya threaded together sock hop rock n' roll, scrappy dream pop, and ethereal torch songs into a sublime journey towards brighter horizons. Though the album's eight songs were written in fits and starts over the course of nearly a decade, Soft Palms ultimately came together over a two-year period as an extension of Kugel and Montoya's broader musical ventures. Together they book the Happy Sundays music festival, run the non-profit Studios for Schools, and organize the events calendar Long Beach POP-all in an effort to celebrate, promote, and produce art and music through community and positivity. In the moments when the wife-and-husband team aren't elevating and empowering other artists, they've channeled their passion into Soft Palms.Album opener InchBaddyInch sets the tone for the album by laying down a simple guitar line with a grandio

Starting off their careers as young proteges to the legendary hip-hop producer Kutmasta Kurt, Rushden & Diamonds first got their start writing rhymes and making beats while digging in the crates of 1980s rnb and royal orchestral music. The duos early productions would eventually make their way onto R&D's debut 2010, a critically acclaimed double album hip-hopera which featured the likes of MC Paul Barman, Moka Only, Dylan Ross (Rozz Dyliams) voicing as an alias and more. Now, while channeling inspirations from their favorite retro music, video games, and action movie culture, Rushden & Diamonds' bring you their highly anticipated follow up to 2010 appropriately titled Inch2020Inch. The new 10 track studio album features the likes of Kool Keith, Kutmasta Kurt, Moka Only, Dylan Ross, Mega Ran, Naoto Tanaka, Castro Satoshi and others.

Several attempts have been made over the last sixty years or so to record all Robert Schumann's works for solo piano, a fascinating cosmos full of variety that ranges from extremely virtuosic pieces for the concert hall to valuable literature for piano tuition. This attractive but difficult quest has unfortunately been marked by a lack of the necessary care, not to mention purely artistic deficiencies, so that none of the releases deserves the name Inchcomplete recordingInch. Since Schumann published several works in two more or less different versions, it is not legitimate in a Inchcomplete recordingInch to include only one of the versions, let alone to amalgamate two of them. Moreover, works published at remote places as well as unpublished works and fragments that could easily be completed without too much speculation, have so far been taken into account only in exceptional cases. Florian Uhlig's 15-album set is the first genuine complete recording of Robert Schumann's works for solo piano. On albums sensibly concentrating on different themes, the pianist for the first time attempts to present all the original piano works between 1830 (Abegg Variations op. 1) and 1854 (Theme and Variations in E flat Major), using the latest critical editions and/or first editions. Several of those releases include first recordings. The introductory notes written by Joachim Draheim, who has discovered and/or edited a number of the works, throw light on the biographical and historical backgrounds of the respective groups of works.