VIA PRESS RELEASE | This Record Store Day, one of the most haunting and misunderstood soul albums of the 1970s returns as a limited-edition vinyl release: Changin’ Times by Ike White.

Recorded inside a California prison by a man serving a life sentence for murder, the album remains the only full-length studio release by the self-taught multi-instrumentalist. Fifty years after its original release, Changin’ Times is regarded as one of the most extraordinary and tragic albums ever made, and now returns in a special Record Store Day edition worthy of its singular legacy.

This 2026 reissue, arriving exclusively for Record Store Day on April 18, 2026, features audio cut directly from the original analog tapes by legendary mastering engineer Bernie Grundman. The release also includes brand-new liner notes by Cory Frye who sat down in conversation with the project’s music producer, Jerry Goldstein, the longtime producer of WAR and manager for Sly Stone, who first discovered White and oversaw the record’s original recording behind prison walls. Illuminating the album’s long-obscured legacy, this edition offers fans and collectors a rare opportunity to experience Changin’ Times in its fullest and most faithful form.

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Celebrating David Gilmour on his 80th birthday. —Ed.

I have a dream. It’s that someone will put out a LP of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here made out of sugar and heavily laced with LSD. That way you could lick it before turning it on, and hear the damn album the way it should be heard, while you’re peaking.

It would be appropriate; has any major band ever been as associated with acid as Pink Floyd? (Yeah. The Grateful Dead, dumbo.) But not even the Dead managed to put out LPs (like 1969’s Ummagumma) that I would ONLY listen to while I was on hallucinogens, because they were unlistenable to anyone on the uninitiated side of the doors of perception. That said, I’ve since put on Ummagumma and found its first side to be bearable and its second side to be complete and unadulterated bullshit (“Several Species of Small Furry Animals” or “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party (Entertainment),” anyone?). And while my recollections are hazy, I have come to the conclusion that the guy in the dorm who owned it was so far out there he’d only play side two while tripping balls.

The Pink Floyd story is a familiar one. The band was formed in London in 1965 by Syd Barrett, Nick Mason, Roger Waters, and Richard Wright, with David Gilmour coming aboard in 1967, destined to be the substitute for Barrett, who despite the band’s success and his status as the band’s chief songwriter was coming unhinged.

After numerous legendary on-stage fiascos involving increasingly odd behavior on the part of Barrett—he might stand in the hot stage lights, crushed ludes melting in his hair, looking off into the distance with his arms dangling down, declining to play his guitar for the entire set—the band more or less decided to not pick him up for a gig, and just like that he was gone, although his living specter (he showed up, bald and bloated, at the Wish You Were Here sessions, and his evident madness left several of his former band mates in tears) would haunt the band and indeed inspire some of their best work.

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I recently spoke with Martin Bisi, the founder of BC Studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn—one of the most storied independent recording spaces in New York history.

Martin engineered and produced records for Sonic Youth, Swans, John Zorn, Afrika Bambaataa, and countless others across the no-wave and post-punk underground. We got into Martin’s life views, the relevance of New York culture, and the perils of capitalism.

I encourage you to dive deep into Martin’s entire catalogue including his own work as an artist and find him on Instagram at @maritinbisibc to follow along with all his happenings.

Radar features discussions with artists and industry leaders who are creators and devotees of music and is produced by Dylan Hundley and The Vinyl District. Dylan Hundley is an artist and performer, and the co-creator and lead singer of Lulu Lewis and all things at Darling Black. She co-curates and hosts Salon Lulu which is a New York based multidisciplinary performance series. She is also a cast member of the iconic New York film Metropolitan.

Joe Jackson, one-time lounge pianist for the Portsmouth Playboy Club, lies somewhere on the New Wave Continuum between The Knack and Elvis Costello. He combines the intelligence of the former with the melodic and lyrical skills of, well, the former. Not that this has stopped him from selling records.

For me, Joe “I’m the Manque” Jackson has always come to mind when people say the words “New Wave.” Trouble is, I always hated the whole idea of New Wave. I would define New Wave as “The bunch of lame-O bands and artists who came along after punk croaked.” Dull and shallow artists who showed up with synthesizers or (in Joe’s case) without synthesizers, forcing the Minutemen to write “Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?”

Judging by record sales, very few people wanted the truth. On the positive side, Jackson is an activist on smoking bans. He’s against them. I may dislike Joe’s music, but when it comes to Smoking OPs, he’s on the side of the angels. I simply hope I don’t find out he smokes cigars. People who smoke cigars never want to hear the truth.

Jackson came out of the starting blocks with 1979’s successful Look Sharp! It included the pretty darn swell “Is She Really Going Out with Him.” He followed it the very same year with I’m the Man. On the cover, he dolls himself up as what the Brits call a “spiv,” or person who makes his dubiously legal living selling knock-off timepieces and the like, using the inside of his suit jacket as a kind of display window.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Hot on the heels of the Tokyo bliss and Funk Tide sets, Tokyo-based DJ Notoya delivers Tokyo Pulse a new juicy selection of Funk and Modern soul recorded in Tokyo in the ’70s and ’80s. Most tracks here are making their debut outside of Japan and the album, like its predecessors, has been designed by Manuel Sepulveda (Optigram) and is annotated by DJ Notoya. The audio has been newly mastered in Tokyo by Nippon Columbia Records and remastered for vinyl by Colorsound in Paris.

Tokyo Pulse’s lush funk selection opens with the nocturnal groove of Naomi Chiaki’s “Yoru E Isogu Hito,” recorded in 1978. The track perfectly sets the mood with its laid-back tempo and late-night atmosphere. From there, Yumi Murata’s “Ranhansha” (1979) brings a funkier touch, before the mellower funk of L-E-V-E-L’s “Bagdad No Atari Nite” signals the stylistic shift toward the early 1980s. Side one closes with GAM’s “Lake In The Forest,” an elegant reggae-inflected piece from 1980, played by several musicians from the cult Arakawa Band.

Side two opens with a leap into the late 1980s via Nami Shimada’s “Mitsumeteirunoni,” a superb mid-tempo electro-funk track. This is followed by the earthy folk-soul of Bread & Butter’s “Memory,” originally released in 1974 on Blow Up Records, and featuring a who’s who of Japanese music, including Haruomi Hosono, Ray Ohara, Tatsuo Hayashi, and Shigeru Suzuki.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Detroit’s legendary Westbound Records continues its partnership with Org Music to restore, reissue, and celebrate the label’s most vital recordings. Following the widely praised reissue of Funkadelic’s 1970 self-titled debut, Org Music now announces Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow, arriving May 1 on LP, CD, cassette, and digital formats.

Released in July 1970 amid political unrest, cultural fragmentation, and creative upheaval in America, Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow did not attempt to comfort its listeners. It confronted them. If Funkadelic’s debut introduced a new hybrid of psychedelic rock, gospel, blues, and heavy funk, this second album intensified the vision, pushing further into distortion, repetition, and spiritual confrontation.

The record’s origin story has become part of rock mythology, reportedly recorded during a single marathon session on LSD. The result was one of the most saturated and uncompromising sonic statements of its era. The album marked the official introduction of keyboardist Bernie Worrell, whose elastic harmonies and tonal experimentation would become central to the expanding P-Funk universe. Upon release, the record reached No. 92 on Billboard’s Pop chart, signaling that even its most radical impulses were finding an audience. More than five decades later, it stands as one of the boldest entries in the Westbound catalog and a defining document of Black psychedelic expression.

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Remembering Mark E. Smith, born on this day in 1957. —Ed.

The death of The Fall’s Mark E. Smith at age 60 has left me inconsolable; as a proud member of rock music’s most exclusive cult I find it hard to wrap my mind around the horrible fact that I have no more new Fall LPs to look forward to. Because the most telling thing I can say about rock’s most cantankerous, cranky, and iconoclastic artist is this: despite his age, Smith adamantly refused to rest on his laurels. He continued to produce difficult, angular, instantly recognizable, and ultimately brilliant music up until the very end.

By no means did the inimitable Mr. Smith end his days as a novelty act, reprising his greatest hits. Not that he had any greatest hits. Legendary DJ John Peel may have thought The Fall was the greatest thing since the watercress sandwich, but they never (in part because they remained a distinctly English phenomena) gained anything remotely resembling a mass following. Indeed, the title of 2004’s best-of compilation 50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong–borrowed, of course, from Elvis Presley’s LP 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong–is a self-mocking reference to this fact.

The first thing to be said about 50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong–which includes both album tracks and singles from 1978 to 2003–is that there’s no way it could do the work intended. Trying to sum up The Fall in 39 songs is like trying to sum up Winston Churchill by saying he enjoyed cigars. The Fall catalogue is a sprawling beast because Mark E. Smith was a prolix artist who wasn’t happy unless he was glutting the market with studio albums, singles, EPs, live LPs, and compilations of all sorts, some of highly uneven quality but many dead brilliant. By my admittedly sloppy count The Fall released 10 records in 2005 alone. I certainly haven’t listened to everything The Fall committed to record, and I almost certainly never will. I’ll leave that to the sorts of obsessives who would otherwise be dedicating themselves full-time to trainspotting.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Black Metal remains a most fascinating subject, and it is therefore hardly surprising that a host of books have already been written about this harsh musical genre. One might even be justified in asking the heretical question, if the world needs another one. The answer is a resounding “yes,” because Argentinian author Matías Gallardo adds a Southern American perspective and voice to the existing canon with his book debut, Born for Burning—The History of Black Metal.

The contribution of Southern American bands spearheaded by Sarcófago among many others to the style’s evolution has all too often been overlooked. Gallardo leaves the narrow Nordic perspective behind by interviewing black metal acts, classic icons, as well as young and wild, from all over the world for a more global view. This makes Born for Burning–The History of Black Metal essential reading for everyone interested in the genre. Matías Gallardo’s Born for Burning–The History of Black Metal will be published on April 17, 2026.

Born in Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires in 1988, Matías Gallardo currently works as a journalist, graphic designer, and university teacher. He has been writing for Argentina’s leading metal magazine, Jedbangers, which was founded in 1998, since 2006. He has also contributed to webzines such as Norskmetal and No Clean Singing. Gallardo is also the host and producer of the podcast Días Negros, which is dedicated to black metal—obviously the author’s favourite style of music.

Furthermore, Gallardo has translated Tony Iommi’s autobiography Iron Man: My Journey through Heaven and Hell with Black Sabbath into the Spanish language. Born for Burning–The History of Black Metal is his first book.

Born in Denmark and currently based in Oslo, Norway, saxophonist Amalie Dahl is a composer, improviser, and bandleader of distinction on the contemporary scene. Amongst numerous projects is the quintet Amalie Dahl’s Dafnie, which has released two albums, beginning with a self-titled effort in 2022. Now there is Amalie Dahl’s Dafnie EXTENDED, as the 5-piece expands to a 12-piece unit with a double rhythm section. Combining free jazz abstraction with compositions that sway and groove, this large band’s debut, the 2LP set Live at Moldejazz, is out March 6 through Sonic Transmissions.

In addition to Dafnie, Amalie Dahl has released two albums under her own name. First came Memories, a CD issued by Sonic Transmissions in 2022, and then Breaking / Building Habits followed, an LP/CD on the Sauajazz label from last year. Additionally, Dahl has played in a leaderless trio with drummer Jomar Jeppsson Søvik and bassist Henrik Sandstad Dalen; they released the 2CD Live in Europe on Nice Things Records in 2024.

Other projects with releases include Noize R Us, Treen, and Superspreder. A constant across all of Dahl’s work is a disinterest in trad predictability, an absence that’s particularly notable in Dafnie, and now especially shines through in the lineup’s expansion. The list of personnel and their instruments will provide a tip-off for the uninitiated.

Along with composer Dahl on alto sax, Live at Moldejazz features Henriette Eilertsen on flute and electronics, Oscar Andreas Haug on trumpet, Jørgen Bjelkerud on trombone, Sofía Salvo on baritone sax, Ida Løvli Hidle on accordion, Anna Ueland on synthesizers, Lisa Ullén on piano, Nicolas Leirtrø and Ingebrigt Håker Flaten on double basses, and Trym Saugstad Karlsen and Veslemøy Narvesen on drums.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Universal Pictures International (UPI) announces the official title, key artwork, and International theatrical plans for the upcoming Iron Maiden feature documentary, now titled Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition.

Documenting one of the most iconic journeys in music history, the film will be released in cinemas in the UK on May 7th 2026. Tickets will go on sale March 18th. Directed by Malcolm Venville (Churchill at War) and produced by Dominic Freeman (Spirits in the Forest—A Depeche Mode Film), the feature‑length documentary charts Iron Maiden’s remarkable five‑decade journey. Alongside the band, the documentary features on‑camera reflections from prominent admirers including Javier Bardem, Lars Ulrich, and Chuck D, each speaking about Iron Maiden’s influence on music, culture and generations of fans worldwide. The newly released key art by Albert “Akirant” Quirantes, offers the first visual look at the documentary.

Formed in East London in 1975, Iron Maiden have grown into one of the world’s most influential and enduring rock bands. Across 50 years they have released 17 studio albums, sold over 100 million records, and performed almost 2,500 concerts across 64 countries. The documentary arrives as the band continues its two year Run For Your Lives world tour, which included a triumphant homecoming performance at London Stadium a short distance from where it all began five decades ago.

A recently announced, one of a kind, celebration named EddFest in historic Knebworth Park, England, on July 11th forms part of over 50 shows worldwide in 2026.

The Sun Records label, based in Memphis, Tennessee, put rock ‘n’ roll on the map in the 1950s and launched a musical, artistic, and cultural explosion that resonated around the world and can still be felt today. While rock ‘n’ roll and its many permeations are virtually absent from popular music these days, their place in American culture remains.

The key artists of the Sun rock ‘n’ roll explosion—Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and others—arrived at their sound by a gradual and organic mixing of American roots music, primarily country and blues, but also R&B, jazz, and folk. Other Sun artists, while considered part of Sun’s seminal and groundbreaking rock ‘n’ roll stable, made a sound rooted in country. For Sam Phillips, who launched the company, labels meant very little.

Which brings us to two original and important Sun releases. One from Johnny Cash, Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar, which might be deemed strictly country, and one from Carl Perkins, Dance Album of Carl Perkins, which was a rock ‘n’ roll hybrid (rockabilly) that added a pinch of country to rock ‘n’ roll. The descriptions, categorizations, and assigning of labels are debatable and ultimately pointless.

Reissues of important recordings can serve many purposes, but often the big questions are: how do they sound and how faithful are they to the originals? Although these two Sun recordings from Cash and Perkins are revolutionary, the original pressings of the albums just don’t sound very good. Poor tape transfers, inferior vinyl record quality, and primitive means of producing records and getting them out to market in the mid- to late-’50s resulted in great music of historical significance.

However, given how quickly every step of the record-making process evolved through the late ’50s and particularly ’60s and ’70s, even mint copies of original and later vinyl pressings just didn’t sound very good. Of course, various CD reissues and deluxe packages of Sun recordings have been released over the years, preserving the music for generations and expanding on the knowledge, significance, and understanding of this important music. However, it would appear that these new Intervention Records releases are not only the best reissues of these albums, but maybe the best recordings of them to ever be released.

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