Stillness and Stars is the latest project from Canadian musician Erik Culp. In the past, Culp has been involved with the space rock band Mind of a Squid and the progressive duo Ambisonic, as well as releasing solo works under the name The Atomic Cosmonaut. For this effort, Culp’s band consists of himself (guitar, synths, vocals), Scott Bucsis (bass) and Brandon Munro (drums) with added support from Ashton Swinnerton on violin and Alex Unger and Sandra Fox providing vocals. Stillness and Stars’ first album was largely an instrumental effort of symphonic progressive music as filtered through the lens of post rock experimentalism. Stillness and Stars 2 is an altogether different beast, a weird,

I first became familiar with the music of Italy’s Unimother 27 when their debut CD arrived in my mailbox back in late 2006. And while I say ‘they’, it is really mostly only one person, the multi-instrumentalist Piero Ranelli. On that first album, Ranalli explored musical territory that lay at the crossroads between psychedelic rock, Krautrock and experimental music. And through the years, over the course of now seven albums, he’s continued his explorations, often moving towards the more psychedelic rock-oriented corner of the musical triad, but always with a very adventurous streak. Ranalli has forged his own unique sound and now continues that with his latest album, Chrysalis. Chrysalis rem