The Knack – Get The Knack (1979) [MFSL 2017]
PS3 Rip | SACD ISO | DSD64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 41:13 minutes | Scans included | 1,66 GB
or FLAC(converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Full Scans included | 892 MB
Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab # UDSACD 2191 | Genre: Rock
The Knack attempted to update the Beatles sound for the new wave era on their debut – a good idea that was well executed, but critics cried “foul” when millions sold after Capitol’s pre-release hype (it went gold in 13 days and eventually sold five million copies, making it one of the most successful debuts in history). Get the Knack is at once sleazy, sexist, hook-filled, and endlessly catchy – above all, it’s a guilty pleasure and an exercise in simple fun. When is power pop legitimate anyway? Includes the unforgettable hits “My Sharona” and “Good Girls Don’t.”
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The Kinks – Low Budget (1979) [MFSL 2003]
PS3 Rip | SACD ISO | DSD64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 59:18 minutes | Scans included | 2,4 GB
or DSD64 2.0 (from SACD-ISO to Tracks.dsf) > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | Full Scans included | 2,35 GB
or FLAC (carefully converted & encoded to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Full Scans included | 1,22 GB
Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab # UDSACD 2008
Low Budget is the eighteenth studio album by English rock group the Kinks, released in 1979. Following the minor success of their 1978 album Misfits, the band recorded the majority of the album in New York rather than London. Unlike the more nostalgic themes of many Kinks albums prior to Low Budget, many of the album’s songs allude to current events of the time. Musically, the album is a continuation of the band’s “arena rock” phase, resulting in a more rock-based sound and more modern production techniques.
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The Kinks – Everybody’s In Show-Biz (1972) [MFSL 2003]
PS3 Rip | SACD ISO | DSD64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 75:44 minutes | Scans included | 3,06 GB
or DSD64 2.0 (from SACD-ISO to Tracks.dsf) > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | Full Scans included | 3 GB
or FLAC (carefully converted & encoded to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Full Scans included | 1,54 GB
Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab # UDSACD 2010
Everybody’s in Show-Biz is the eleventh studio album released by the English rock group the Kinks, released in 1972. A double album, the first disc features studio recordings, while the second disc documents a two-night Carnegie Hall stand. Everybody’s in Show-Biz is often seen by fans as a transition album for the Kinks, marking the change in Ray Davies’ songwriting style toward more theatrical, campy and vaudevillian work, as evidenced by the rock-opera concept albums that followed it.
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Grzegorz Tarwid Trio – Flowers (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 55:09 minutes | 1,00 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Clean Feed
One of the most captivatingly versatile pianists to emerge from Polish music academia in recent years, Grzegorz Tarwid is as influenced by Brian Eno’s earliest ambient adventures and the eclectic rhythmic hustle of the ultra-hip Ugandan Nyege Nyege scene as he is steeped in the traditions of East European and Scandinavian jazz.
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Gregory Porter – Christmas Wish (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 44:22 minutes | 964 MB | Genre: Jazz, Vocal Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Universal Music Division Decca Records France
Gregory Porter, with his customary class, elegance and sophistication, presents his new holiday album ‘Christmas Wish’ – a cool yule selection of festive favourites as well as brand new songs written by the singer himself. Backed by his long-time band, produced by repeat collaborator Troy Miller in New York and London, with orchestral contributions recorded at Abbey Road, and featuring powerhouse guest vocalist, double Grammy-winning sensation Samara Joy, Gregory Porter’s seventh studio album is a loving tribute to his favourite time of year – and to great songwriters, singers and interpreters including Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Dinah Washington. Across its dozen tracks, ‘Christmas Wish’ encompasses the saintly and the secular, the funky and the fun, the Great American Songbook and the best of Motown.
With ‘Christmas Wish’, Gregory Porter has given us a whole new soundtrack to this most wonderful time of year.
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Gewandhausorchester Leipzig – Bruckner: Symphonies Nos. 0-9 – Wagner: Orchestral Music (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 12:34:26 minutes | 23,48 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)
“Bruckner’s music is in the Gewandhausorchester’s DNA,” says Andris Nelsons, the orchestra’s Music Director since 2018. Now their celebrated Bruckner symphony cycle in its unique combination with instrumental pieces from Wagner’s operas is complete. The idea for this was obvious to Nelsons: “Bruckner loved Wagner’s music: he saw its greatness, merits and achievements.” Since 2018, Symphonies Nos. 1-9 have been released on 1 or 2 CDs or digital album respectively, each release combining Bruckner with selected orchestral music by Wagner, underlining the references between the works. For the first time, Deutsche Grammophon now presents the complete Bruckner/Wagner cycle.
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Gerard Salonga & Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra – The Metaverse Symphony (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 40:08 minutes | 404 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sony Classical
Elliot Ho Yat Leung (IPA: eliːət lœŋ) is a composer who seeks to blend the five human senses through poignant musical storytelling. He is the youngest recipient of the prestigious Huabiao Award for music. The South China Morning Post observed Leung as a composer who writes “evocatively with flair and romance.”
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George Szell – Schubert: Rosamunde, D. 797, Incidental Music by George Szell (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 32:43 minutes | 571 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alexandre Bak – Classical Music Reference Recording
George Szell (* June 7, 1897 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary; † July 30, 1970 in Cleveland, Ohio) was an Austro-Hungarian conductor, pianist and composer. He had American citizenship. From 1946 until his death, he conducted the Cleveland Orchestra. With the exception of Eugene Ormandy, no conductor in the 20th century led one of the American Big Five orchestras for longer than George Szell. The conductors Szell, Ormandy, Solti, Doráti and Reiner, who all came from Budapest, brought the American orchestras from the middle of the 20th century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, to a level equal to that of the European orchestras.
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George Szell – Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night’s Dream by George Szell (2023 Remastered, Amsterdam 1957) (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 26:42 minutes | 464 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alexandre Bak – Classical Music Reference Recording
George Szell, originally György Széll, György Endre Szél, or Georg Szell was a Hungarian-born American conductor and composer. Considered one of the twentieth century’s greatest conductors, he was music director of the Cleveland Orchestra of Cleveland, Ohio, and recorded a standard classical repertoire in Cleveland, and with other orchestras.
Through his recordings, Szell has remained a presence in the classical music world long after his death, and his name remains synonymous with that of the Cleveland Orchestra. While on tour with the Orchestra in the late 1980s, then-Music Director Christoph von Dohnányi remarked, “We give a great concert, and George Szell gets a great review.”
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George Rowley – Gurney: Piano Sonatas Nos. 1 & 3 (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:14:37 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Naxos
Ivor Gurney’s songs (Naxos 8.572151) have long earned him renown but his works for piano, composed over the period of a decade, are hardly known. The lyrically beautiful Five Preludes reflect influences as wide as Schumann and Scriabin but preserve Gurney’s expressive freshness. The Sonatas Nos. 1 and 3 inhabit very different sound worlds from each other, and only one movement of Sonata No. 2 has survived, a deeply poignant elegy – all of which are heard here in world premiere recordings. His poem for piano, Autumn, offers further opportunity to discover this rarely heard music by a composer for whom the pursuit of beauty was of the utmost importance.
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Gavin Friday & The Friday-Seezer Ensemble – Peter and the Wolf (Original Soundtrack) (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 49:58 minutes | 551 MB | Genre: Soundtrack
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BMG Rights Management (UK) Limited
The brand new animated rendition of Sergei Prokofiev’s much-loved symphony, Peter & The Wolf, transformed into an enchanting and contemporary visual masterpiece that touches on themes of growing up, loss, courage, transformation, and our relationship with nature. Featuring music and narration by Gavin Friday, and artwork based on original illustrations by Bono, the animated short film is scheduled to premiere later this year and is part of an ongoing relationship with Irish Hospice Foundation.
The uniquely creative project is led by musician and composer Gavin Friday and saw him narrate the reimagined classic tale with The Friday Seezer Ensemble performing Prokofiev score, newly arranged by Maurice Seezer and Gavin Friday. Alongside this remarkable new film, Peter & The Wolf is subject to a re-release as a book and in audio form with brand new auditory and visual material.
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Franziska Pietsch, Maki Hayashida & Hila Karni – Hungarian Heights (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:02:46 minutes | 1,04 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Odradek Records
Following the widespread critical success of their Odradek album Bartok: The Quiet Revolutionary, violist Franziska Pietsch – winner of an ICMA (International Classical Musical Award) in the Chamber Music category – and pianist Maki Hayashida, return with Hungarian Heights: music by Dohnanyi, Kodaly and Liszt, for which they are joined by cellist Hila Karni.
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Frank Sinatra – Platinum (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 02:34:54 minutes | 1,56 GB | Genre: Jazz, Vocal Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Capitol Records
The beautiful LP box “Platinum”, which contains 44 hits, classics and sought-after rarities by Frank Sinatra on four LPs, celebrates the 70th anniversary of the signing of the contract between Sinatra and Capitol Records. Between 1953 and 1962, Sinatra recorded 16 albums for the label, which made him one of the greatest song performers of all time. The titles selected for this compilation offer a cross-section of his versatile work. “Platinum” is also available as a 2CD set.
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Francesca Aspromonte, Boris Begelman, Arsenale Sonoro – Un’alma innamorata (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:07:03 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © PentaTone
Soprano Francesca Aspromonte and violinist Boris Begelman present an all-Handel programme exploring the vicissitudes of love, together with Arsenale Sonoro. On Un’alma innamorata, Aspromonte urges us to take ownership of our amorous infatuations, rather than blaming it on Cupid’s arrows. The programme consists of several worldly cantatas with violino concertante – including the famous Mi palpita il cor and a world premiere recording of S’un dì m’appaga la mia crudele – interspersed with instrumental sonatas. The overall chamber-musical approach of Un’alma innamorata increases the emotional impact of the tragic heroines depicted by Aspromonte.
Francesca Aspromonte presents her third Pentatone album, after having released Prologue (2018) and Maria & Maddalena(2021). Boris Begelman featured on the latter album, whereas Arsenale Sonoro makes its Pentatone debut.
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Evian Christ – Revanchist (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 45:26 minutes | 509 MB | Genre: Electronic
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warp Records
Revanchist (2023) is the long-awaited debut album by Evian Christ, scheduled for release by WARP on 20th October 2023. The eight-track record explores the latent potential in Trance to evoke, beyond Euphoria, the fullest feeling of the Sublime. Revanchist draws from an unlikely and expansive pool of influences; compositing, at once, the suffocating throttle of Demiurge-era Emptyset (2011); the worldliness of Madonna and William Orbit’s Ray Of Light LP (1998); the acute uncanniness of Laibach’s Across The Universe (1988); and a highly stylized approach to mixing and sound design primarily inspired by Sasha’s seminal Xpander EP (1999).
On Embers, Revanchist’s opening track and lead single, perhaps best encapsulates Christ’s inclination towards the total annihilation of Trance’s default affects; rapturous supersaws meet a tempest of indecipherable noise, mangled 808s and broken shards of Defected Records gospel house acapellas. Nobody Else shows reverence to classic Balearic Trance and its associated imagery — a widescreen view of a supermassive Iberian sunset; Apocalypse Now meets Café Del Mar. Its spacious breakdown, featuring an impressionistic treatment of vocals lifted from Clairo’s North, provides one of Revanchist’s most strikingly fragile moments. Yxguden, the record’s final single, is accompanied by a music video directed by early computer graphics pioneer and Tiesto-collaborator Micha Klein, who choreographs a meeting between Drain Gang’s Bladee and a Nordic Bronze Age cave drawing of an axe-wielding Moundperson. Utilising a vocal hook most widely recognised for its use in DJ Hixxy’s “More and More” (2007), Yxguden’s chaotic arrangement jump-cuts between moments of gauzy ambiance and frenzied exhilaration. Run Boys Run, Revanchist’s concluding track, sees Christ summon an enraptured chorus of bending strings and soaring choral threnoi, eventually resting on a single sub-bass note, held to exhaustion
Revanchist’s album artwork, designed by David Rudnick, features a hand-drawn depiction of a crystal-forged newborn, emerging against a backdrop compositing Lars Hertervig’s Gamle Furutrær (1865) and a still from Chris Bucklow’s Jerusalem (1994). The album was mixed and mastered by Chris Pawlusek and Christ in Goa, India.
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