Sticky Fingaz - Black Thrash: Autobiography of Kirk Jones - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

By now, how Jlin went from working in a steel factory in Gary, Indiana to being one of the most widely appreciated electronic musicians is well known. Black Origami was one of the most reviewed and lauded albums last year. She has toured constantly since it's May 2017 and despite being involved in a wide range of projects, still manages to find a balance and do some personal healing and growing. Here we are over a year later with Autobiography, the score for her collaboration with renowned British choreographer Wayne McGregor. This isn't technically her third album (that's due to arrive in 2019 or 2020), but the soundtrack stands up on it's own with all the emotional peaks and troughs of a well-sequenced longplayer. Making music for dance is the fulfillment of one of Jlin's lifelong dreams and Autobiography is a highlight in her evolving and growing career.

Although this overview of Cavalli's music is necessarily condensed, it nonetheless succeeds in painting a meaningful picture of both the nature of opera as it was developing in Venice at the time, and the composer's own artistic and compositional talent. Cavalli was of course influenced by Monteverdi, yet he imbued his music with his own individual style, in effect setting the artistic seal on the rest of the seventeenth century. The tales told by these early operas had a lot in common with our soap story-lines. Heroes undergo the unlikeliest of hardships, become involved in unrestrained love affairs, get caught out in embarrassing situations, and so on, only for everything to be rapidly unraveled for an unambiguously happy ending, removing all concerns from the minds of a rapt audience (the operatic star system had not yet established itself at this point). There was a sense of liberation from the purely aural allusiveness of the madrigal form, as well as from the compositional and performance difficulties also associated with it, and an increasing interest in the visual impact of the sets and costumes that were soon to become the norm. Madrigal quartets, quintets and sextets were on their way out, seen as music for an aesthetic elite, to be replaced by the more approachable duets. There is perhaps an analogy to be drawn with our own times, in which the spoken and written word are being replaced by a TV videocracy, whose power is taking hold in the same way as opera did in the seventeenth century. By happy coincidence, however, Cavalli was born at precisely the right time and place, and his genius was translated into intricate, convoluted love stories and impetuous passions and rages expressed with perfect aesthetic and expressive musical symbiosis in masterly passacaglias. The Lament can be seen as a kind of condensed version of this artistic sensibility, an opera i

NEAL FRANCIS / RETURN TO ZERO Acclaimed singer-songwriter-pianist Neal Francis is ringing in the new year with his eagerly anticipated third studio album, Return To Zero. Francis' first full-length studio effort in more than three years and most extravagantly realized work so far, Return To Zero sees the Chicago-based singer-songwriter-pianist creating a beautifully strange entangling of timeless rock 'n' roll and '70s-era dance music. Merging supremely heavy guitar riffs with rich and pulsating grooves, Francis constructed the album sans digital programming in keeping with his long-standing devotion to all things analog. The album is heralded by today's premiere of the gorgeously sprawling power pop anthem, InchWhat's Left Of Me,Inch available everywhere now. A piercingly candid reflection on life on the road co-written with chart-topping Nashville-based songwriter Chris Gelbuda (Sabrina Carpenter, Meghan Trainor, Zac Brown Band). ATO RECORDS