Search results: Crystal Lake

Review: Greg Foat is something of a musical polymath, with his various solo and collaborative albums touching on everything from spiritual jazz, library music and soundtrack sounds, to Balearic beats, jazz-funk and deep house. On Psychosynthesis, his first solo set for two years, he largely keeps things warm, chilled and dreamy, joining the dots between horizontal jazz-funk, exotica, Balearica, and sensuous sun-down sounds with the aid of a vast battery of analogue and modular synthesizers. The results are predictably impressive, with the album's many highlights including the spacey, slo-mo shuffle of 'Underwater Fantasy', the throbbing, Sun Palace-esque starry jazz-funk of 'Psychosynthesis (Part 1)', the gaseous ambient drift of 'The Green Odyssey' and the Wally Badarou style warmth of 'The Investigation'.

Review: Glasgow grime producer Konchis engages his Jetsam alter ego for a wavier sonic serenade than we're used to from him. Tapping into his dreamier, more emotional side for an album length narrative, the Scottish scientist switches from tripped out swooning harmonies wrapped casually over Dilla-ish beats ("End Of Stars") to woozy cries over fuzzy synth riffs ("Cathedrals") to soul-jarring deep sea strangeness ("Mermaids"). Otherworldly, cosmic and mischievously off-kilter, Konchis has found the perfect muse in his alter ego right here. One of a kind.

Review: Let's take you back to the year 2000. A time when we'd all just realised the world wasn't ending (just yet, anyway), hopes for the future outweighed existential fears over what it might hold, and Granddaddy released The Sophtware Slump On A Wooden Piano to critical acclaim. As timely as they come, critics cited a meeting point where the death of the wild American frontier dream ran into the start of technologically-driven madness.

Both an outdated and perfectly fitting record for our times, or those times, like anything made well from wood the album hasn't really dated, but instead matured and taken on a life of its own. Coming at us with little else other than heart-wrenching ivories and Jason Lytle's lone, tender but not beaten voice, it's enough to inspire a serious emotional response in anyone. A lo-fi indie landmark worth revisiting.

Review: The festive season is just around the corner and nothing makes a friend or family gathering more magical that a damn good soundtrack. The people behind the long-running and frankly legendary NOW series have been putting together the best collections of genre music for decades now so you need to look no further than this bumper Christmas-themed collection. It comes across no fewer than six - yes six - sides of vinyl and covers all bases from the age-old classics to some of the newer tunes to have been added to the wintry canon.