He plays concerts throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. He’s recorded 14 CDs, the Martin Guitar company has honored him with his own OMC-JS signature model, and his album CATCH THE SPIRIT stayed in the Belgian charts for 41 weeks.

Jacques Stotzem has been a part of the guitar scene for more than 40 years, and for the last 25, he’s been with our label, Acoustic Music Records. Reasons enough to dedicate this CD to the likable fingerstyle master, and to say “Thank You” to a man who, thanks to his sensible melodies, playful temperament, and immediately recognizable signature sound, is among the leading European acoustic guitarists.

With Falkenflug (Falcon’s Flight), Falk Zenker has produced his fourth solo album. The title is a perfect fit. Because Zenker’s music is like the flight of a falcon. Playfully, he explores all the possibilities of the guitar, he stalks, watches, and strikes suddenly with great speed, dynamically and with skillful turns.

This experienced guitar player creates his own sounds not only with his technical and deeply emotional performance. He also expands his aural spectrum by using various additional sound effects, generating percussive elements with his guitar, sampling them, and skillfully using live looping and to weave them back into a steadily densifying sound fabric.

When you decide to take off with the Falcon's Flight, Zenker will whisk you away to heavenly sounds, open new perspectives and expand your musical vistas. 

“Retablo”, the latest album by the Italian fingerstylist Giovanni Palombo, certainly lives up to its name.

A retablo – retable in English – refers to a painting that often serves as a backdrop to altars. It is usually composed of different motives that are loosely connected to each other and form a visual unity. A retablo fuses artistic ornamentations, small relics and philosophical images. Apply that to Palombo's music, and you get a more than fitting image. With his own compositions, the Italian guitarist blends heartwarming and imaginative, timelessly beautiful instrumental music with a Mediterranean touch, improvisational, jazzy elements, as well as solos and duos. Palombo works with musically renowned guest performers, like Peter Finger, Claus Boesser-Ferrari, Luis Borda and Michael Manring to produce a collage of variegated and musical images, which he shapes into music with enduring quality.

Giving the moment more time, helping it expand to eternity, endowing the mood with sound …  this is what the guitar artistry of Carlos Dorado does. 

The compositions of this Argentinean master of the strings flow lightly and melodically, shuttling between folk and jazz, between tradition and modernity. The melodies are of delicate beauty and sound so simple. Each note appears to be endlessly valuable and is modulated with great expressiveness and feeling. It’s a gentle album, smooth and beautiful. Sonorous space filled with melancholy. Carlos Dorado has so far recorded six CDs with his own compositions. On Aqua Blue, he really succeeds in creating a special atmosphere. Well worth hearing!
 

"Smoke On The Water" - played by Ian Melrose

Only available as high quality MP3 file (high quality: 320 kbps CBR)

"Bending Air" is Australian acoustic guitarist Michael Fix's fifteenth CD release, and emphatically shows why he has become such an in-demand concert artist, touring internationally every year, and winning fans from all over the world.   
A true artist, each successive album follows new paths, and he is not afraid to try new ideas, or take risks. By sharing universal emotions and experiences, Michael has been able to touch listeners on a very deep and personal level.  
The album starts in a fashion familiar to fans of Michael - the first 4 tracks are bright, bouncy, and very much in the Chet Atkins influenced sunny fingerstyle that Michael is known for...but then the album turns decidedly darker with the track 'Guernica'. Inspired by the Picasso 1937 painting of the same name, it was written in response to the atrocities happening in the world today.   
The following tracks stay in a sombre mode, but things start to cheer up with a medley of 3 traditional tunes performed regularly by Australia's most-loved bush band 'The Bushwackers' (Michael was a member of the band in the 1980's, and again briefly in the '90's).

As a reflection of his live set, Michael always adds some cover arrangements into the mix. The Beatles epic 'A Day in the Life' - very familiar, but not often covered - features the guitar group from the 2016 Winterbreak Music Camp re-creating the orchestral cacophany that is such a feature of the original.

Some special guests feature too: gorgeous harmonies on 'Poetic Justice' by Christine Collister, (long time backing singer for Richard Thompson, now performing with Michael in Australia, 2017), and flute played by Brisbane's own Sarah Calderwood. Two of Michael's sons - Adrian, and Joshua - also feature on Cajon, and Bongos. 
 

He was one of the influential figures on the acoustic music scene. With his technique and performance style, Marcel Dadi inspired an entire generation of musicians. What could make more sense, then, than paying musical tribute to this artist posthumously, twenty years after his death in July 1996, by devoting a special album to him.

Thirteen musically unimpeachable giants give an impressive interpretation of Dadi’s most beautiful works and breathe new life into them. Richard Smith, Martin Taylor, Michel Haumont, Jacques Stotzem, Peter Finger, Muriel Anderson, Albert Lee, Pierre Bensusan several others perform musical and technical highlights from Dadi’s repertoire and show how remarkable, and lively, modern and virtuosic this music still sounds to this day.
 

First and foremost: fourteen own compositions, one more beautiful than the next. Ulrich Uhland Warnecke uses his steelstring guitar to sketch out melodies and sound tableaux of great lightness and touching perceptivity. Warnecke, however, never uses his skill for its own purpose. Rather, he puts his technical perfection in the service of his compositions rather than lose himself in endless guitaristic tinkering. With Schattenspiele, he has created an album filled with wonderful melodies, music that invites us to immerse, or even drown, ourselves in its sheer beauty.
 

The Dutch guitar duo Karlijn Langendijk (born in 1995) and Tim Urbanus (born in 1989) grab our attention thanks to the youthful freshness in their smart compositions.

The two have been playing guitar since early childhood. Their first strong influence was idols such as Tommy Emmanuel or Andy McKee. Ever since the two met up to form a duo in 2013, they have increasingly developed their own style, one that connects elements from minimal music, or even country-style picking and folk/jazz, and they have created an irresistible musical mix that way.

Karlijn & Tim have already had some very successful gigs in German and Dutch clubs. They are showing their skill to a larger German audience for the first time with their debut album as part of the Acoustic Guitar Night.