I thought you might dig these guys. I love the fact that bands with sounds in this vein are all over the indie scene. I know when most people think of indie they think of this latest wave of keyboard and acoustic guitar heavy stuff, but the indie rock scene is currently much more electrified, distorted, and heavily blues influenced…and going nowhere if we can help it lol! 
Seriously though, these fellas can rock!
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And if you liked that you should check out this pick: All Of This Life, a 2018 release from The Record Company.
I’m listening to this album on my SoftEars Twilights running off my A&K Kann Alpha as I’m chillin’ on the most comfortable hotel bed I can ever remember laying on. Hopefully I can catch a few hours of sleep before we have to hop on the bus and hit the road on our way to the next city. Anyways, this album and The Record Company’s work in general is awesome bluesy rock stuff that I can listen to all day and all night and never get tired of it.
Ever feel like you can’t keep up with the onslaught of new music? Well, it turns out that the last sentence was one of the most understated sentences ever written.
I was reading a story put out by Global News (A Canadian TV station), reported by Alan Cross. I will copy the important parts into this post
"Luminate, a company that tracks worldwide consumption of music and follows the habits of music fans, looked at new ISRCs coming into the system. An International Standard Recording Code is assigned to every song that gets released. Think of it as a Dewey Decimal System for books in a library. Better yet, it’s more like the ISBN code assigned to each and every book that gets published. Or you can think of it as the song equivalent of a social insurance number.
Luminate published data early this month that shows somewhere around 98,500 ISRCs are uploaded to DSPs each day. In 2022, a total of 34.1 million songs/ISRCs were uploaded. Today we have the equivalent of a jukebox that holds 196 million songs and videos. And the number keeps climbing every second.
And it’s not the major labels. The same scan of the data showed that only four per cent of daily uploads — 3,940 songs, which is still a lot — come from the big three record labels, Universal, Sony, and Warner. That’s way too much for the music consumer to even begin to process and for the majors to properly market and promote. But it pales in comparison to what’s uploaded by indie labels and DIY musicians. That’s another 90,000 songs. Daily. Music Business Worldwide points out that for every song released by one of the Big Three, 24 come from other sources.
What happens to all these songs? In the case of about 20 per cent of them (39.2 million tracks or roughly one for each living person in Canada) nothing. Nothing at all. They’re completely lost and never heard by anyone, ever.
Another interesting stat: A full third of the 196 million new audio and video tracks were created during the pandemic. If we back up one more year, we see that half of all the music available today was created since 2020. Musicians obviously took COVID-19 lockdowns as an opportunity to write songs. And even though things have returned to normal, that firehose of DIY uploads shows zero signs of slowing down."
Those are some wild numbers.
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Current rig is the Hifiman HE560 v1s plugged into the Schiit Lyr with the Modi Multibit 2 decoding all the bits and pieces from my laptop.
Ever wondered what Israeli jazz-rock fusion sounds like? Check out a group named Marbin. I’m currently listening to their latest release from 2022 entitled Dirty Horse and I’m diggin’ it quite a bit. I stumbled on these guys while trying to find some music that was similar to a few other bands I was groovin’ too. I bought and downloaded a few of their albums off of their Bandcamp page, but hadn’t gotten around to listening to most of it yet. I’m still in weak cell signal purgatory so streaming is out, but thankfully I have a pretty massive collection of local files stored on my laptop and some SSDs. I saw these guys in my recent downloads folder and figured now was the perfect time to get to know their work. Awesome musicianship, engaging and well executed from track to track, and very cool to listen to.
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If there’s anyone, and I mean anyone that’s going to get me to listen to and enjoy classical, it’s going to be one half of my robot overlords.
I’m not versed in classical in the slightest, but I’d be interested in hearing other opinions on these three pieces he’s released leading up to the full release on the 7th of April.
They’re quite expansive, and like all good classical/scores accomplish, I feel like they tell a story even without a visual aid.
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Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter Reveals Himself: As a Composer - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Found this article to be interesting. Also listened to it (those first 3) on AMHD.
Some nice sections and musical ideas and instrumental scoring. Interesting use of pauses within a piece. Solo violin was an interesting twist in Minotaure. The Pas de Deux is lovely.
Would be interesting to see the ballet so as to get better context.
I will watch for the whole album (23 tracks) coming in a few days. Thanks.
Seems promising for his first symphonic work.
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That’s really good insight, Tim, thanks for that. The first piece of music available L’Accouchement has those distinct two sections and I thought that was rather interesting- I thought it went to the next song when it changed over, I must admit. Both are just so different, the first half gives me mixed fillings of stress, triumph and disaster… it’s interesting. I know Guy and Thomas have some experience with orchestral type music with their OST of Tron:Legacy, so it’s nice to see Thomas expanding on those ideas and that experience.
I look forward to your thoughts when the full album is released!
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It’s interesting, but you can hear his Daft Punk/electronic music background shining through in these pieces with the way he uses pauses and sudden dynamic changes rather than the more traditional and drawn out crescendo/diminuendo techniques. Add to that the fact that at times various sections of the orchestra are providing a kind of “beat” (semi-repetitive rhythm underlying the melodic structures) to drive the music and gird the melodies and I can almost envision and electronic version of these pieces. Now don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot more complexity there than what I just mentioned, but that jumped out at me as interesting. For orchestral pieces, his work is very approachable even for those who don’t normally listen to the genre. Overall, I’m impressed and I’ll be looking forward to the full release, for sure. Thanks for the heads-up on this, Dom!
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I love that observation. You’re totally right about that.
In Thomas’ and Guy’s solo work on Crydamoure and Roule, both of them would often exercise their creative muscles with excessively long and drawn out bits that lack any kind of change you’d expect after 4, 8 or even 16 bars. They would just keep it going and going and going… it’s not for everyone, but I’ve always loved both their solo work and of course, daft punk. In the article Tim posted, they even point out that a lot of what Thomas wrote for the music would be difficult for a real human to play, droning on with the same instrument and note for minutes on end. It’s infused in his style to make something go a bit too long - I personally love it. Rollin’ and Scratchin’ off Homework for example, is absolutely a love child of Thomas’ - I can tell it is. While other cuts like Phoenix are most likely something Guy would conjure up.
Excuse me while I geek out for a second about daft punk, I haven’t gotten the chance in literally years 
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Geek away, bro. We all have a band or two we know way too much about and get just a little too nerdy and in depth on when it comes time to bust out the real Trivial Pursuit level knowledge. It’s all part of being passionate about the music. Unfortunately, I don’t have any archaic DP knowledge to spit back or I would. I feel like I let you down lol!
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I appreciate that, man. I spent far too much time back in the day just accumulating excessive knowledge about daft punk. I was completely obsessed and to this day, I still am. Their music hits me like no other artist I’ve ever listened to. Their genius and passion for music coupled with their elusive nature created this overwhelming obsession with them since 3rd for me - all the way back in 2003. Field day at school, the DJ played One More Time and I remember being absolutely taken over by the sound… 20 years later and I still can’t get enough
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Awesome story! It’s cool to see that kinda passion in appreciating an artist’s work. I have a ton of out of the way knowledge about some obscure punk acts from back in the day because I was WAY into punk (still love it and listen often) in jr high and high school and I loved how some of the bands would drop an album recorded in someone’s garage when they were 16 and it would become huge even if the band disappeared. Just sorting through all the random history and side stories became a big part of the allure for me.
Edit: P.S. I’ll quit derailing the thread now lo!
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Yeah I should stop derailing the thread as well - mention dp and it’s off the tracks for me 
Music is infectious, in the best possible way, brother 
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Indeed it is!
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Currently listening with the ThieAudio Prestige plugged into my Cayin N8ii which is providing the evening’s hi-res musical entertainment.
I’m listening to an album I stumbled upon during a recent deep dive on Bandcamp and Qobuz looking for cool jazz-rock/jazz fusion kinda stuff. This band/album are labelled as jazz-rock and there are definitely some jazz influences, but they lean much harder into rock and have a sort of prog feel. Regardless of what they are Grand General’s one and only self-titled album from 2013 is a keeper. The drumming and cymbal work is very good and the interplay between the violin and the guitar on some of these tracks is a treat to listen to.
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Consider it in the queue!
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Moved on to the Hifiman HE560s through the Schiit Lyr with the Modi Multibit 2 decoding all the bits and pieces from my laptop.
For music I have on another 2013 release this time from a band named Volto entitled Incitare. This group is a Danny Carey (Tool’s drummer) side project. They play some good instrumental rock/fusion/prog stuff and they’re very good at it. Unfortunately, they record and release very little, choosing instead to focus on live performances. I got to see them live in LA shortly after this album released thanks to a friend of mine who invited me and the who set was chock full of sick improvised sections. It was an awesome show!
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Definitely going to give this rec a try. It sounds like something I could jam to!
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You should try Volto and Marbin. I think you’d really like both and if you check out Marbin I would start with either Israeli Jazz or Aggressive Hippies which are their two most fun albums, IMO. Both Volto and Marbin are very jammable!
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Thank you, brother! Listening to Volto now that intro to the first song is absolutely nasty. That drum kick hits deeeeep - I absolutely love it.
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