The Musik Lounge

  Subscription services are the rage these days. No need to leave your house, trust us to curate whatever product you love. These “influencers” of a sort get it right in a matter of degrees to how invested you are in the product. Now Again , the label masterminded by Egon - a crate digger respected by Madlib, joined the fray with NA Reserve in 2017. Unlike most vinyl subscription services and in true Now Again fashion they do nothing normal. Delivering truly lost sounds to the ears of obsessive record collectors it is the only subscription service this vinyl fanatic will stick with after being involved with multiple of them for the last couple years.

  The best music captures a feeling, regardless of the style, sound, era, or instrumentation; it's all about the energy. Of course to each of our ears those things become incredibly subjective and dependent upon our upbringing, our cultural surroundings, our education and something else intangible that is most easily summed up by one word: feeling. These qualities manifest what we fill our ears with and point us in the direction of where to dig and what to dig for as we explore the vast array of sonic frequencies available to us in these days of streaming audio and more musical options than anyone could ever sift through. Rock music, generically defined by me as guitar focused, has many levels and sub genres that all aim to pin things down to a finite box. But these finite definitions don’t serve us as we venture down the rabbit whole of deeper exploration. As a style that has existed for a very long time there is much to ignore and much that just isn’t for everyone. Thus the power...

Creative outlets shine when the world burns. There is no doubt that whatever the new normal turns out to be (news flash: we are already living it), as a society we will look back on the art created AC (After COVID) as a transition into new realms. Genius minds paid to stay home and cook up whatever inspiration they could muster. If you have been able to walk through this wild ride and not entirely succumb to the detrimental effects that isolation, fear and chaos all around can have on the mind, an applause is warranted. These last eighteen months have been hard. But they also have been an opportunity to explore different paths, change careers, reinvest in spiritual practices and connect once more with what it means to be productive for yourself. If we flashback into time to look at the world post Y2K as the towers fell, war erupted and banks collapsed there was a distinct feeling in the air that times had changed. Out of that chaos musicians around the world were concocting evolved sou...