Back in stock: Classical

Review: Widely acclaimed mezzo-soprano and two-time Grammy winner Sasha Cooke's debut album Poeme de la L'Amour et de la Mer 4 is a perfect example of what makes her so popular. Fabulous stage presence, fine vocal range and an emotional allure that really draws you in. The record is fabulously epic and over the top which Cooke deals with well. Her voice rides over Chausson's churning Symbolist score in a bewitching fashion. This special 180 gram heavyweight vinyl version is the best way to experience the record, which comes in just three separate pieces, each of which makes for a unique listen.

Review: Produced at EMS Stockholm on Buchla 200 synthesisers before being mastered down the road in Malmo, Quasai is Francesco Fonassi's first LP based around the Quasi project, and goes well beyond what you might call Traditional Album Territory. Hence the live show this is based around being far more than a gig, inviting audiences into increasingly entangled arrangements that seem to grow and develop, set down roots and respawn like some evolutionary modular array. On record, the complexity of what's here isn't really lost, albeit we'd have a hard job arguing that home listening compares to in person performance. Nevertheless, you'll quickly find yourself immersed in this strange, cerebral place where the music itself seems to take inspiration from blinking control panels, glittering data, plucked strings, and drip-drop percussion.

Review: Sometimes, the only backstory needed is that of a spontaneous friendship. Salenta and Topu met serendipitously in the summer of 2019 at a mutual friend's apartment in Bedstuy. Winding up months later in a miraculously "perfectly treated" recording studio in Bushwick, the pair encountered an ironic hurdle in that they couldn't get any of the awesome gear in the studio to work, so ended up recording everything acoustically on an old recorder. The result is the drained, ghostly and warbled sound of what could have been; a witchy instrumental folk cello and piano album, sounding to have been caught in imrpovised time; the temporality of friendship.

Review: Saxophonist and all-round compositional talent Colin Stetson was tasked earlier in the 20s to soundtrack the recently-released film The Menu, a contemporary whodunnit-style gastronomic thriller in which Ralph Fiennes plays a murderous hell's kitchen chef, bent on finding creative ways to pick off his rich clientele one by one. The soundtrack is suitably chilling; with notes of expressionism and classical music all wrapped up in a cloud of suspense, Stetson ensures we hear a fantasy world turned upside down.