MoonJune Year In Review 2013

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Dear MoonJune Friends! 2013 was great for MoonJune Records, and I would like to remind You about 10 label's releases that came out past year. MoonJune is about friendship and personal relationship with all musicians involved. It's a label – a labor of love – releasing progressive music that explores boundaries of jazz, rock, avant-garde, ethno & the unknown. That philosophy will continue in 2014, and my next newsletter will reveal MoonJune's upcoming highlights. For those who are still into buying physical cds, MoonJune has a special cd sale until January 15: If You purchase 3-5 albums, You can receive additional album of Your choice for free. If You purchase 6-10 albums, You can receive additional 2 albums of Your choice for free. If You order more than 10 albums, the shipping is free and You can get additionally 3 albums of Your choice for free.
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Yours in Music
Happy New Year
Leonardo/MoonJune

DEWA BUDJANA "Joged Kahyangan"

Boasting a stellar lineup of modern jazz icons (Larry Goldings, Bob Mintzer, Jimmy Johnson, Peter Erskine, Janis Siegel), Indonesian guitar icon Dewa Budjana's sixth solo album is a progressive jazz gem.

"There are whole passages where Dewa is notable by his absence, letting the rest of the guys take his music on a journey and he joins in with wonderfully fluid Metheny/McLaughlin style at just the right moment. It is a wonderfully restful album, one where time and space disappears and is replaced instead by a world filled with harmony, delicacy, and restrained power. Every piece is a classic in it's own right, while the restraint of everyone involved in the vocal "As You Leave My Nest" is superb." - Kev Rowland, Jazz Music Archives (5 stars)

"From start to finish, the album is arrayed with beautiful compositions and arrangements. Each musician is the perfect fit and Budjana shows himself equal to his company." - Travis Rogers, Jazz Times

"All those guys can really play, and Budjana is quite impressive!" - Thierry Giard, Culture Jazz (France)

"While the jazz-rock often lacks in melody, that's not the case with Dewa Budjana." – Harry De Vries, Proglog Afterglow (Holland)

DUSAN JEVTOVIC "Am I Walking Wrong?"

The international debut of Serbian guitarist based in Barcelona, Spain, is an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride: full of twists & turns you never see coming.

"Jevtovic is a guitar hero for those with little patience for the cliché histrionics that have come to define the field. While most ultra practitioners continually punctuate bold statements with speed and excess, Dusan tickles the ears with an overabundance of surprises and restraint." - Rob Hudson, ModMove (Australia)

"Revelation! Totally undefined genre, trio's music alternates contemplative atmospheres ethereal sonorities and meticulous overtones, furious odd rhythms with sharp dissonances and unleashed riffs." - Felix Marciano, Jazz Magazine (France)

"Jevtović's snarly tones and abrasive textures combined with his amazing fretwork are often reminiscent of the late Jimi Hendrix, perhaps without as much blues grounding, but still without being derivative in any way. His free-wheeling approach to guitar is intentionally thrashy and seemingly cavalier, but he nonetheless presents ten convincing instrumental compositions that cover a variety of styles that will have the listener hooked after the very first listen – guaranteed." - Peter Thelen, Exposé Magazine (USA)

"With a sense for building dynamics, of rising from quiet to raising the roof, guitarist Dusan Jevtovic leads a trio around the paths blazed by Robert Fripp. … "...The sonic paths lead into the zone where dark metallic rock scrapes against jazz in a fusion more combustible than most of the music once marketed as fusion…" – Morton Shlabotnik, Shepherd Express(USA)

I KNOW YOU WELL MISS CLARA "Chapter One"

The adventurous young quartet from Indonesia: an unpretentious exploration into the nature of music & musical expression.

"It's another nascent progressive jazz-rock band from Indonesia—with the idiosyncratic moniker—brought to us by Moonjune Records. The group sound and makeup tenders yet another slant from this region that to varying degrees, impart ethnocentric folk with Western musical concepts. With its debut, the young quartet's rite of passage is largely centered on climactic buildups, spiced with dense and haunting phraseology, where they entwine an aggregation of moody passages and breezy interludes before zooming in for the kill." - Glenn Astarita, All About Jazz

"..quartet led by guitarist Reza Ryan distills the influences of the UK Canterbury Scene, American fusion, and surprisingly so for a rock-jazz band, posseses a whole lot of straight jazz sensibility. Even more astonishing that these guys are mastering the most perplexing, sophisticated corners of prog-fusion with this debut release. The unity and melodiousness of this group throughout the unprectible turns they take is startling. Moreover, the music has real emotion and organic flow. Chapter One is the beginning of some fantastic sonic book." - Victor Aaron, Something Else Reviews (USA)

"..intelligent, layered jazz rock…melodic, rhythmic ingenious, melancholic and exciting. Beautiful!" - Holly Moors, Moors Magazine (Holland)

"Chapter One discloses the type of child-like wonderment that pushes a grouping of musicians to deliver themselves from the "constriction of belonging", for they easily survive tough tests most everywhere as far as multiple genres are concerned. Technically speaking, the guys are good-to-brilliant; and if a few imperfections are detectable here and there, they enrich the formula with a measure of healthy non-pretentiousness. " - Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes (Italy)

simakDIALOG "The 6th Story"

The Indonesian psychedelic progressive gamelan-jazz legends deliver their most powerful tale yet: an exquisite master-class rendering of equal parts elegance and intrigue. Riza Arshad drives the music on his magic Fender Rhodes followed by one of the most talented fusion guitarists today, Tohpati.

What a great album this is. If you like Canterburyesque jazz rock but with a twist proceed with haste!" – Sid Smith, Sid Smith's Postcards From The Yellow Room (UK)

"...the Sundanese kendangs are the real stars of the show. They don't merely mold the rhythms, they're very much involved in the harmonies, too, often playing along to the entangled sequence of notes that Arshad devises. The 6th Story is world-class world fusion because of the potent unifying of rhythm with harmony, composition with improvisation, and East with West." - Victor Aaron, Something Else Reviews (USA)

"..exploratory solos from Arshad and Tohpati, the latter's effects-laden axe breathing fire one moment and spacy the next. But even when the keys, guitar, bass, and metallic percussion accents knot up or jab outward, those complementary kendangs (which Afro-Caribbean and Latin jazz fans would likely find akin to congas), hard right and left in the stereo field, drive the music forward more understatedly than a conventional jazz or rock drum set, giving simakDialog's fusion an utterly unique, intimate flavor. - Dave Lynch, All Music (4.5 stars review)

"..each of simakDialog’s members is a virtuoso of his own instrument, the band emphasize ensemble playing at its finest rather than technical flash, with individual skills put at the service of the composition rather than the other way round. (…) band features a trio of percussionists in the style of the traditional gamelan ensembles. The result is a uniquely warm sound with a remarkably natural flow, capable of flashes of angularity and even brief forays into noise, yet never overwrought. In addition, though each of simakDialog’s members is a virtuoso of his own instrument, the band emphasize ensemble playing at its finest rather than technical flash, with individual skills put at the service of the composition rather than the other way round." – Raffaella Benvenuto Berry, Fire Of Unknown Origin (USA)

"Marvellous stuff! (…) some stellar individual playing and a lot of tight ensemble interplay, and it seems that here is yet another must-buy jazz fusion album." – Roger Trenwith. DPRP (UK)

"Throughout the disc the musicianship is scintillating. The interplay between guitar and Rhodes piano is often quite riveting as the complex fills of both instruments compete for space usually with the percussion providing a steady backdrop. Often the band explores their improvisational side which contrasts nicely with their compositional form." - Jon Neudorf, Sea of Tranquility (USA)

THE WRONG OBJECT "After The Exhibition"

The Belgian prog heavyweights return triumphantly to center stage, shattering the progressive jazz template and dancing madly on its remains.

"The sonic spectrum will be filled by devices that make sounds, bold sounds. Musical notes from vibrating steel and fibrous material. Notes from zeroes and ones and tangible forces being applied to all manner of receptive surfaces. It will redefine the term elasticity and the physical phenomena associated with the presence and flow of an electric charge. It will also groove. The groove just mentioned with keep you rapt with counts not always divisible by even numbers and detours to unexpected realms of both wild and wilful origin. Through all this there will be a logic that will emerge and then settle in a previously unknown region of your mind. When all this is done and the change has been absorbed by both direct report and osmosis there will be the opportunity to live what you have learned. The next time you pick up that plank that you are so enamoured with, the one that you spend days with to the exclusion of all else, it will s

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