There's a genre of music called 'fusion'. It's what you get when molten rock dissolves in liquid jazz. But there's another way to combine rock and jazz - you can just bolt them together. Take Marbin, for example. Their stock-in-trade is a frothy layer of jazz firmly anchored to a solid base of rock. This tune…Read more Escape from Hippie Mountain
Humboldt Currant
I know of two things named after Alexander von Humboldt: a penguin and an ocean current. The current flows northwards along the coast of Chile and Peru bringing cooler waters from the southern oceans up to the tropics where it provides a plentiful supply of nutrients for the marine life there. The penguin is…Read more Humboldt Currant
Life Goes On
Musicians may die but their music lives on. Pekka Pohjola was a Finnish multi-instrumentalist and composer born in the same month as the Crotchety Man blogger. He studied piano and violin at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and, in 1970, joined the progressive rock band, Wigwam on bass. He left to embark on a solo career…Read more Life Goes On
The Clockwork Fable
I love a good story. And The Clockwork Fable is a splendid story. It concerns the subterranean city of Cogtopolis, founded 200 years or more ago. There is no natural light there. The citizens have legends of a sun that once shone above the surface but its rays were extinguished by clouds of choking, burning…Read more The Clockwork Fable
Matte Kudasai
Old Man Crotchety has been busy lately. There's another post in the pipeline but it needs some lengthy research and won't be ready on the usual weekly schedule. So, in the meantime, rest assured that the wheels are still turning here at Crotchety Mansions and when the cogs have aligned there will be much more…Read more Matte Kudasai
Rain Tree Crow
Occasionally we come across a band, an album and a track that all share the same name. If my memory serves me correctly, the Vinyl Connection blog site gave a technical term for this nominal trinity a few months back, but I have been unable to track it down. So please forgive me if this…Read more Rain Tree Crow
A Life Worth Living
Facebook sucks. It's unattractive, riddled with annoying advertisements and never, ever does what I want. So I've been looking around for alternatives. Google threw up this article comparing four somewhat similar apps and diaspora sounded interesting. It's an open source project that provides social networking facilities, much like Facebook, but it's distributed over a network…Read more A Life Worth Living
New Release Pick & Mix
Today you can pick your own treats from an assortment of recent releases that tickled the Crotchety taste buds over the last week or so. Two of these songs came to my attention via Josh Gering's Fortnightly Playlist; the other three appeared on my Release Radar on Spotify. --- *** --- First up we have…Read more New Release Pick & Mix
An Outcast of the Islands
Or, Finding Colin This week Burning Shed is inviting pre-orders for an album called Still. This new release appears to be by a fish called Colin (Bass) and a pen called Daniel (Biro). Crotchety Man recognised the pen as a writer of ambient aural pieces but the fish was hidden in the aquatic weeds of…Read more An Outcast of the Islands
Killing Moon
Echo was a naughty nymph. When Zeus came down to dally with the maidens of Mount Cithaeron, he told the loquacious Echo to engage his wife, Hera, in long conversations so that she would not find out about her husband's indiscretions. And Echo did as she was told, for it would be most unwise to disobey…Read more Killing Moon
