Nick Allbrook, of Pond: 'Most of the music I love is made by awful musicians'

'Most of the music I love is made by awful musicians'

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Album review: Timo Andres & Metropolis Ensemble, Home Stretch (Nonesuch)

The centrepiece of this album by American pianist/composer Timo Andres is Mozart's “Piano Concerto No. 26 in D”, for which he provides the missing left-hand piano parts and cadenzas, an ambitious and confident performance resulting in a compelling blend of ancient and modern. Andres' own “Home Stretch” was itself conceived as a companion piece to another Mozart concerto, but its jagged and disruptive combinations of high, piercing winds and scattered piano figures resolve into an absorbing musical conversation that sounds more about American music, with its bustling drive and echoes of Copland, Ives and Adams.

Album of the Week: Grown-up grooves make James Blake a key mover again

Album review: James Blake, Overgrown (Atlas)

Album of the Week: Grown-up grooves make Blake a key mover again

Eno pictures paint 1,000 words

The brief? To take photos, perhaps from the window of the room where fans were listening to Brian Eno's latest album LUX, as the light of their day changed.

Reggie Watts, Union Chapel, London

Tonight he regales us with how Druids and Romans clashed in the time of Boudicca

Album: Coldplay, Mylo Xyloto (Parlophone / EMI)

Hearing for the first time the songs that will, inevitably and inexorably, become part of the fabric of Western life from X Factor auditions to shopping-centre muzak, is a strange and often depressing experience.

Album: Brian Eno / Rick Holland, Drums Between the Bells (Opal / Warp)

Holland is a poet and Eno is Eno.

Album: Brian Eno, Drums Between the Bells (Warp)

Brian Eno's second album for Warp involves his settings of the words of Rick Holland, the lyrics recited by a range of vocalists chosen for their characterful delivery, in several cases the result of using English as a second language.

The Word On... Small Craft on a Milk Sea, Brian Eno

"In part, these recordings are a return to the frosty ambient surface noise that has periodically enthralled Eno since his 1973 collaboration with Robert Fripp on ('No Pussyfooting'). But there's a broader range of material here, with the album turning from the great plumes of irascible noise... to the dewy plinks of piano." drownedinsound.com

Album: Brian Eno, Small Craft on a Milk Sea (Warp)

Eno's first for Warp begins with some predictably ethereal Eno-esque chords informing us we are in yet another green world.

Album: Brian Eno with Jon Hopkins & Leo Abrahams, Small Craft on a Milk Sea (Warp)

Brian Eno's first album for Warp finds him collaborating with the guitarist Leo Abrahams and the keyboardist Jon Hopkins on a series of drifting, improvised pieces intended to produce landscapes of sound, rather than songs.

Exclusive album stream: James, 'The Night Before'

With a career that includes 10 studio albums, twenty UK Top 40 singles and 12 million album sales so far, James have stepped into the digital age with their new mini-album 'The Night Before', released on Monday and exclusively available to stream in full in conjunction with The Independent, below.

On Some Faraway Beach, By David Sheppard

This is a peculiar book about an interesting man. Over the decades, Brian Eno has switched from effete rock star to restless artist, pundit and pop intellectual, but this bulky account scarcely moves with him.

Album: Tony Allen, Secret Agent (World Circuit)

Secret Agent finds the man regarded by Brian Eno as "perhaps the greatest drummer ever" back on the Afrobeat territory he helped establish nearly half a century ago alongside Fela Kuti.

Album: Fredo Viola, The Turn (Because Music)

An artist for our times, Fredo Viola's "cluster" videos went viral and led to an as-yet-unreleased collaboration with Massive Attack.

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Hugh Montgomery profiles the faces to watch, from the sitcom star to the surrealist
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