Roger Joseph Manning Jr. "Radio Daze & Glamping"
Roger Joseph Manning Jr burst onto the music world’s radar as cofounder of Jellyfish in 1990. After two critically acclaimed and now revered releases, the band parted ways, and Roger began a career that saw him in bands including Imperial Drag, The Moog Cookbook, and TV Eyes, as well as contributing to albums from Beck, Morrissey, Lana Del Rey, Blink 182, Johnny Cash, Adele, and more!
He also continued to record as a solo artist, releasing the EP Glamping independently in 2020. That was soon reissued with three live bonus tracks, but neither received a wide release. That brings us to 2023, and Roger is ready to unveil 4 new songs—two co-written with Glamping’s Chris Price (Emitt Rhodes).
Radio Daze & Glamping contains Roger’s four new studio tracks, plus the four from Glamping on LP. The CD and Digital add the three live bonus tracks from Glamping’s limited edition expanded edition, but three new live tracks and two instrumentals.
Radio Daze & Glamping revitalizes the musical landscape of Roger Joseph Manning Jr., making his music available worldwide, on multiple formats, and essential.
Radian "Distorted Rooms"
Vienna has a storied history as a ground-zero for new music. Radian, who calls Vienna home, embodies the city’s spirit of innovation. Martin Brandlmayr (drums, electronics), Martin Siewert (guitar, electronics) and John Norman (bass) are stalwarts of the European contemporary music community. Radian’s angular, expansive music delights in tension and contradiction, sound and silence, improvisation and composition. The trio employ a singular and wholly unique sense of microtonality. While their creation process is complex, the resulting music is emotionally affecting, creating an aura of suspense and at times unease. Distorted Rooms presents a dazzling new elevation of the trio’s employment and manipulation of microtones with a new emphasis on abstracted guitar motifs, often employing a more loop-based or electronic approach to the guitar’s sonics.
Sally Anne Morgan "Carrying"
Carrying finds unity in life’s burdens and joys, shared experience of our day-to-day lives. “So much of what we accumulate and carry around with us burdens us, but we also can’t or don’t know how to let go,” says Morgan. The album weaves a thread of common experience wrapping the listener in the intimacy of emotional response while simultaneously demonstrating the universal nature of many of these moments. Says Morgan, “I use my own music, the creation, formation and shaping of songs and compositions, as a way to explore and articulate the deepest, often most hidden and spiritual, parts – of myself, but also since we are all connected at the deepest level, it reaches a common connected force of some kind.” A deeply affecting process for Morgan was contemplating the awesome power of the human body and spirit; the complicated and unpredictable wash of emotions that come with nurturing and nourishing another life, while also starting a new venture with her and her partner’s microbrewery. The album’s songs are snapshots of Morgan’s own self-reflection as these changes came to define the upcoming chapter of her life.
Willow Butler + Sister Squares "Will Butler + Sister Squares"
From the Brooklyn Vegan:
Will Butler and his band Sister Squares (Miles Francis, Julie Shore, Will’s wife Jenny Shore, and Sara Dobbs) will release their new self-titled album on September 22 via Merge. “After Generations, I considered making a weird solo record,” says Will of the new album. “Me alone in the basement, etc, etc. Mostly I realized that what I wanted was the opposite.”
“I had quit my band Arcade Fire very recently, after 20 years—maybe the most complex decision of my life,” Will says of the circumstances leading up to this album. “I had spent the preceding two years at home with my three children. I was 39 years old. I was waking up every morning and reading Emily Dickinson, until I had read every Emily Dickinson poem. I was listening to Morrissey, to Shostakovich, to the Spotify top 50. I had unformed questions with inchoate answers. But, honestly, I was feeling great about the record.”