Chemical Peel
Tensions escalate (to say the least) among group of women gathered at a remote cabin for a bachelorette party when a nearby train accident releases a cloud of caustic chemicals…
Chemical Peel
Awake (2023)
This is a flawed but not bad movie. What starts seeming like a horror movie becomes more of a small-scale postapocalyptic, but not at all scary or supernatural, survival drama.…
Conjuring The Cult
A father whose daughter killed herself has a coven of witches resurrect her. But the plot of this movie doesn't matter. The whole movie is set apart by being an…
Wilson, Cassandra – Blue Light Til Dawn (Jazz & Blues, 1993)
This one is a treasure. In the early 90s, smoky-voiced jazz singer Cassandra Wilson signed with Blue Note and released this stunning, spare, elegant album of mostly reinterpretations of blues…
Kalacakra – Crawling To Lhasa (Progressive/Post-Rock, 1972)
I've had a real soft spot for this obscure German epic since discovering it on some pirate music server decades ago. It might even have come from a Hotline server,…
Blackwood, Easley — Twelve Microtonal Etudes (classical/electronic/avant garde, 1980)
Here we have something very unique. Composer Easley Blackwood programmed a synthesizer to use scales with different numbers of notes than western music's traditional 12 notes per octave, then wrote…
Charles Mingus – Let My Children Hear Music (jazz, 1972)
Ornate, complex, breathtaking. I was eating lunch in a sandwich joint up in Northbeach when I noticed the background music. Complex swing jazz compositions that would pivot off into jagged,…
Luther Wright And The Wrongs – Rebuild The Wall (bluegrass, 2001)
Now, here we have a treat. I found this album at Amoeba Music... a spoof of the album cover of Pink Floyd's "The Wall", with hay bales instead of bricks,…
The Nerve Meter – Poison Pen (rock/pop, 2002)
I'm going to try not to include too many albums for which no video is available, but this one is a favorite and deserves a mention. One night in the…
Sonny Smith – Who’s The Monster… You or Me? (hip-hop, 2000)
An old GOAT (Girlfriend Onceupon A Time) who I dated for three weeks had this charming gem on cassette taped off a friend. Sonny Smith played around the Bay Area…
Jasper And The Prodigal Suns – Everything Is Everything (hip-hop, 1995)
I know next to nothing about Jasper & The Prodigal Suns, or this album. I believe these guys were from Atlanta, they palled around with G. Love & Special Sauce…
J. S. Bach – Trio Organ Sonatas, performed by Wolfgang Rübsam (classical)
The Trio Organ Sonatas not among Bach's more popular works. He wrote them as homework practice for his son, Willhelm Friedemann Bach, sometime in the late 1720s. This recording was…
Mike Oldfield – Hergest Ridge (progressive/symphonic rock, 1974)
Probably one of my top three favorite albums of all time. Mike Oldfield, stylistically and melodically my favorite guitarist of all time, has had decades-long success in Europe but never…
Gryphon – Red Queen To Gryphon Three (progressive/symphonic rock, 1974)
Ah, my beloved "Red Queen To Gryphon Three". A singular all-instrumental album, reminiscent of the proggiest of prog rock, if only it had been invented in a parallel world where…
Rotary Connection – Rotary Connection (psychedelia, 1967)
Kind of an odd gem. This act was put together by Chess Records in 1967 as part of an effort to expand from their classic blues catalog into psychedelia, and…