On Ravenchild, Maddy Prior teamed up again with keyboard player Nick Holland and multi-instrumentalist Troy Donockley, whose arsenal included Uilleann pipes and low whistle, as she had on her previous album, Flesh & Blood. The centerpiece of the album was a six song suite dubbed "In the Company of Ravens" (also the title of the first song), a series of Prior originals concerning the carrion birds who give the word "ravenous" its meaning. This was sometimes gritty stuff, as Prior described the birds' eating habits, though their mating habits were far more inspiring. The album also contained a three song suite, "With Napoleon in Russia," tracing that famous historical defeat. Then there was "Rigs of the Time," a condemnation of contemporary media culture set to a traditional melody, and the album concluded with what Prior herself described as the eerie traditional song "Great Silkie of Sules Skerry." The music and Prior's singing could be haunting, but Ravenchild was an album of disquieting material, whether the subject was aviary, historical, or contemporary.

On this recording of The Seven Words, the Rosamunde String Quartet offers a compelling rendition of one of Haydn's most complex compositions. The Seven Words was originally composed for a full orchestra as a series of seven adagios, which were meant to be interludes during a congregation's meditations on the last seven words of Christ on the Cross. Haydn struggled with a way to compose seven connected pieces of music that were solemn and yet varied enough to keep the listener from getting bored. The members of the Rosamunde Quartet are technically brilliant as they demonstrate the composer's solutions to this musical puzzle. Even though the tempo is slow, they never let the music become ponderous or oppressive. But to Haydn, The Seven Words was more than just an aural conundrum. He felt the composition was perhaps his most sacred work, and the quartet plays this music with reverence for the composer's spiritual intentions. This is a profound piece of music, and the Rosamunde does it justice on each of its many levels.

Bob Dylan and the Band both needed the celebrated reunion tour of 1974, since Dylan's fortunes had been floundering since Self Portrait and the Band stumbled with 1971's Cahoots. The tour, with its attendant publicity, definitely returned both artists to center stage, and it definitely succeeded, breaking box office records and earning great reviews. Before the Flood, a double-album souvenir of the tour, suggests that these were generally dynamic shows, but not because they were reveling in the past, but because Dylan was fighting the nostalgia of his audience - nostalgia, it must be noted, that was promoted as the very reason behind these shows. Yet that's what gives this music such kick - Dylan reworks, rearranges, reinterprets these songs in ways that are still disarming, years after its initial release…

A concept album exploring themes of broadcast communications, Radio-Activity marked Kraftwerk's return to more obtuse territory, extensively utilizing static, oscillators, and even Cage-like moments of silence to approximate the sense of radio transmission; a pivotal record in the group's continuing development, the title track – the first they ever recorded in English – is their most fully realized electro-pop effort to date, while "The Voice of Energy" precipitates the robot voice so crucial to their subsequent work.

James is called a young man on this CD, but he'd already played with Muddy Waters for a time. Recorded in 1967, it showcases his vocals and harp well. The recording, done at Montreal's Penelope Cafe, is a pretty accurate depiction of James Cotton's raw power and force. The sound quality is OK for the time and really captures the feel of a live performance. Cotton has long been one of the greatest of the Chicago blues harp stylists, and his energy, enthusiasm and sincere love for the blues jumps right out at you from start to finish. The idea of a blues musician doing a recording in a static and heavily controlled atmosphere like a studio seems odd; amplified electric Chicago blues really should be both played AND heard in a loud, raucous, dark, smoky bar-type environment. You can smell the smoke and feel the beer being spilled on you while listening to this CD.

As Il Sospiro shows, Rabih Abou-Khalil's music is unique, in that it spans East and West - or rather the Middle-East and Europe - in a way other composers have attempted, but with much greater success. Raised in the cosmopolitan climate of pre-civil war Lebanon, and privileged to learn the oud there, he was forced to migrate to Munich where he studied classical flute. His rediscovery of oriental music from a European vantage point has both freshness and also the familiarity of long acquaintance. His best disc to date has been Yara, a film soundtrack for which he teamed his oud with a violin and cello plus the Middle Eastern frame drum, to create a haunting sequence of visually evocative pieces. With Il Sospiro he makes his first solo foray as an unaccompanied oud player, and the result is even more bewitching…

When the guys of Nuova Era debuted with 'L'Ultimo Viaggio', they were seeing themselves as mere heirs of a glorious prog time passed: what they couldn't foresee by then was that they were actually pioneering an era of, as some label it, prog revival in Europe. Since this is the starting point, Nuova Era has not managed yet to achieve its own voice, that is, they are still very dependant on the peculiar sounds that their old predecessors created. Nuova Era articulates a prog with a hard rock leaning, infused with a melodic sensibility (like Alphataurus, Biglietto per l'Inferno, and to a lesser degree, Museo Rosenbach) and a sombre romanticism (Apoteosi, E. A. Poe). Their repertoire comprises plenty of excellent musical ideas, such as catchy melodies, well crafted textures on keyboards (the main factor), a tight confident rhythm section, interesting guitar and synth solos…

Live Miles consists of two parts, which were both recorded live. "Livemiles I" was recorded during the American tour of 1986, while "Livemiles II" was captured at a concert to commemorate the 750th anniversary of Berlin. As usual with TD, the audience had no clue of what they were going to experience while attending one of those concerts. During that era it was rather common for TD to improvise much of the music on the spot. So when you listen to a live record of TD you mostly hear new music that isn't available as a studio version. The extended pieces displayed on Live Miles cover many musical moods and textures throughout the playing time of almost half an hour: from slow and haunting, through up-tempo and uplifting; from driving and percussive, to grand and majestic. It's all present on both tracks!