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Cast in Chaos is the culmination of a journey by Peekay that began last year with the singles Hyperspace and Bleed. Now, the full EP adds three more tracks: Deliverance, The Devil Within, and the title track, Cast in Chaos, which arrives with a powerful music video. Each song explores themes of self- identity, inner […]

When Shane MacGowan passed away in November 2023, this world became significantly duller, for not a lot of performers could be as funny and poetic at the same time as this Irish artists was. Thankfully, the legacy he left behind … Continue reading →

The post Springsteen, U2 And Tom Waits Join Shane MacGowan Tribute appeared first on DMME.net.

When it comes to figures in pop music, few have lived as an extraordinary life as Peter Asher. He was born into a well-to-do family — his father a doctor, his mother a musician. His sister Jane, a successful actress and model, dated Paul McCartney, who moved into the idyllic family home. Peter, a burgeoning musician himself, formed the British pop duo Peter & Gordon with schoolfriend Gordon Waller. After a handful of hits, Peter moved to behind the scenes, first doing A&R for Apple Records, then producing records and managing the careers of James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt. There is little doubt Peter Asher: Everywhere Man, the documentary about the man and everywhere he’s been, lives up to its title.

The film, produced and directed by Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine,  starts out with Peter and Steve Martin luxuriating on a white sofa set in a posh (presumably) Hollywood Hills home. They jam a little on guitar and banjo before Martin praises Asher, who smiles and blushes as we’re transported to a place called Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco with “Peter Asher” on the lighted marquee. Eric Idle makes his introductions followed by a litany of famous faces uttering the name “Peter Asher”. The stage is set as the man himself takes the audience sitting before him and the one watching the film on a journey of his life.

As we learn, he started out as a child actor, along with his sister Jane and Clare — three redheaded Ashers or, as local oboe student and Beatles producer George Martin affectionately called them, “The Carrots of Wimpole Street”. Once Paul McCartney moved in, Peter’s musical ambitions were inspired. McCartney and John Lennon apparently spent time writing songs in the music room of the Asher household. This led to one fortuitous opportunity for Peter to hear an early version of “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” among others. One of the others called “A World Without Love” caught Peter’s ear. It turns out the song was incomplete and more or less rejected by Lennon. Hearing Asher tell the story of what happened next is the stuff of legend. In short, “A World Without Love” would go on to become Peter and Gordon’s first and only Number One single.

For the next four years, Peter and Gordon rode the British Invasion wave right into the London underground and the Indica art gallery. It’s after Peter and Gordon “drifted apart,” as the film’s subject puts it, that a major shift occured and Peter Asher’s affluence, intellect, and business acumen were put to the test. It took a phone call from singer Paul Jones to put him in the producer’s chair. “I’m very grateful to him for that,” Asher says. From there, we find out why. In the meantime, the opportunity of heading up A&R for Apple, the Beatles’ record label, presented a wealth of possibilities. One of those was a young, unknown singer from America named James Taylor. The association between Taylor and Asher, as it is revealed, would change the course of both men’s lives.

The Beatles’ breakup and the end of Apple, along with the suicide of Asher’s father, might have altered a lesser man’s plans, but the ever-resourceful Peter Asher overcame business and personal loss by going to Los Angeles and building James Taylor’s career. Signing with Warner Brothers and putting a band together, Asher and Taylor molded what would become the Grammy-nominated Sweet Baby James, a defining record for the producer-manager, the singer-songwriter, and even all the musicians who played on it.

The film isn’t bashful in suggesting a new kind of rock, in which Asher was a major player, emerged at the dawn of the early 70s. Once Taylor made the cover of Time magazine, citing this new direction, Asher started scouting out new talent. One was Kate Taylor, James’ younger sister. Another one was Linda Ronstadt. Asher initially felt that because both singers were on similar paths, Taylor was the one he would back. As we find out, Kate Taylor’s musical career was short-lived (though she would revisit music years later), which lead to Asher becoming Ronstadt’s manager and producer. This is when Peter Asher truly became the Everywhere Man.

According to longtime friend and musician Daniel Kortchmar (the man responsible for connecting James Taylor with Peter), “everything changed” when Asher started producing records and tapping into numerous songwriters and musicians to support Ronstadt. As a musician, singer, songwriter, and performer himself, Asher’s instincts, coupled with the trust he earned from all the artists he worked with, placed him in a distinguishable and powerful place among the music elite. When Linda Ronstadt won a Grammy for “Blue Bayou” in 1977, she thanked only one person: Peter Asher.

Ronstadt, who suffers from progressive supranuclear palsy, was able to participate in the film, as well as most everyone still around who, at one point or another, played a part in the Peter Asher story, including his two sisters, Taylor, Kortchmar, Carole King, Patti Boyd, and many others (with only a couple of old sound-bytes from Paul McCartney) . At various intervals, Peter is either talking with Martin or Idle, continuing his story  at Bimbo’s, or showing his daughter Victoria around his old haunts of London.

Not everyone in Asher’s life shared in the accolades. His beloved first wife Betsy Doster, who passed away in 2018, struggled with depression and drugs — the latter something Ronstadt and Asher both admit was “fun” at the time. Divorcing in 1977, Asher carried on unabated, winning Grammys, remarrying, having a daughter, and producing records for Diana Ross, Cher, Neil Diamond, and Elton John.

What may serve as the most poignant part of the film is the reunion Asher had with Gordon Waller, another one deprived of the fame and glory his one-time partner enjoys. In archival interview clips, Waller freely takes the blame for ending the group due to ego and lifestyle differences. Apparently, the music was never an issue. Still, it took a benefit concert in 2005 to bring Waller and Asher back together on stage for the first time in over 35 years. More shows followed until Waller died in 2009. After seeing the short segments of their performances — with one being an incredible simulation — those famous harmonies stood up to the ravenous threat of age and decades passed.

As we see toward toward the film’s end, Asher, now in his 80s, has little problem looking back and paying tribute to his past, especially in the 1960s when Peter and Gordon were part of the hit parade. As the camera leaves San Francisco and the beatific sounds of  “A World Without Love” fade away, you can take refuge in knowing that one man’s life often resonates with rich and positive results beyond the bounds of his own inner circle. Such is the life we see and experience in Peter Asher: Everywhere Man.

~ Shawn Perry

The .

The post The Cruel Intentions drop video for new single “Triple Threat” first appeared on Sleaze Roxx.

The new version of Comfortably Numb finds Roger Waters singing alongside acclaimed Palestinian singer Mona Miari

False Messiah unveiled Seven (19th June), a cinematic metal album built as a narrative progression, not a collection of songs. Blending orchestral depth, heavy guitars, and dark electronic textures, the project explores collapse, resistance, and survival in a system-driven world. Break the Silence (feat. Stéphane Buriez of Loudblast/Sinsaenum) marks a turning point in False Messiah’s […]

Esplanada is an alternative pop-rock band with a cinematic, melodic and emotionally driven identity. Built around carefully crafted songwriting, atmospheric arrangements and a collective creative approach, the band blends organic instrumentation with modern textures and a strong sense of narrative. Check out Back To The Way It Was below.

Ethan Gold is a Los Angeles and Berlin-based singer-songwriter and composer known for cinematic songwriting and genre-blending albums. After producing Elvis Perkins’ acclaimed debut Ash Wednesday, he released his own praised debut Songs From a Toxic Apartment, and scored films Don’t Let Go (Blumhouse) and his brother Ari Gold’s Adventures of Power and The Song […]

Soulbird are an emerging alt-rock band from Adelaide, South Australia, creating a distinctive and dynamic sound that seamlessly blends groovy, hard-hitting rock with ethereal melodic rhythms. The band released their debut EP Mesmerise on all streaming platforms on April 21, and you can check out the title track below.

“The minimal revolution is coming!” 

Stanze Fredde Records, an independent Italian label founded in Turin and active since 2024, has released the third edition of its annual compilation. Issued June 19, Stanze Fredde Vol. 3 is available now on vinyl, CD, and digital formats.

The label was born, in its own words, “in the thermal shock of Turin.” Stanze Fredde moves through the harsh temperature shifts of the international minimal synth scene: the body in the club and the body alone at home, the cheap machine and the private wound, the young artist with no budget and too much feeling to leave dormant. Its stated mission is simple enough to sound almost severe: bring minimal, synth-driven music to a desolate cultural landscape, gather those cold young voices who translate emotion into synthesizers, and make space for work built from limited means rather than market logic.

Rather than treating minimal synth and synthpunk as museum material, Stanze Fredde looks backward with bright eyes and a clenched sense of purpose, pulling old forms through the machinery of the present. Throughout the compilation, artists from across the current international underground occupy a shared room of brittle basslines, stark rhythms, and private signals, all of them drawn to music that can feel severe on the surface while carrying a strange emotional heat beneath.

There is also a political texture to the label’s philosophy, even when no slogan is being raised. Stanze Fredde places growth over profit, curiosity over polish, and communal instinct over industry ladder-climbing. In a scene often reduced to fetish objects and genre shorthand, the label treats cold music as a living language: direct, wounded, mechanical, funny, austere, erotic, and occasionally cruel in the way a good synth line can be cruel when it knows exactly where to press.

The third edition of the compilation continues that yearly project with another international survey of minimal synth, synthpunk, and related electronic mutations. It is a dispatch from a label still learning by doing, building with what is available, and trusting that small rooms, small runs, and small machines can still carry large emotional voltage.

The roster gives that philosophy a geography. Bogotá’s Climas Interiores opens the set with “Ventanas”; the project’s own shorthand—drum machines, synthesizers, sequencers, and the urge to shout—could double as a miniature manifesto for the compilation. New York duo Intolerable Life, formed by Jean Lorenzo (Silent Em) and Melanie Giselle and carrying Uruguayan and Dominican roots, follows with “Today’s Specials,” bringing punk and jazz instincts into minimal synthpop. Mexico City’s Neue Strassen turns its engagement with post-punk, new wave, and Neue Deutsche Welle toward “Nostalgia del Futuro,” while Berlin’s Oberst Panizza, a founding member and co-composer of UFO Shadow and Velvet Condom, supplies “Novembre” from the robotic lineage of early electronic pop.

That international traffic continues through Douce Angoisse, whose route from France through London, Montréal, and Buenos Aires has fed a provocative strain of electro-cabaret, and Bucharest’s Andrei Rublev, self-described as goth techno from Transylvania drenched in unorthodox melancholy. NAAKKA’s “Antifasisti” makes the politics explicit: the Tampere project identifies as anti-fascist, non-binary EBM, darkwave, and synthpunk, built from secondhand hardware rather than pristine technological abundance. Der Bürokrat’s “Crepa” brings together Jules and Ben—the respective forces behind Zug and Hammershøi—in a stripped Italian-French electro-minimal collision, while Vision Nebulosa follows with “Despojo,” extending the compilation’s Spanish-titled thread.

The compilation’s German-Dutch machinery is equally deep. DerPolier, active since 2025, joins minimalist electronics to direct German-language writing on “Ausbildung ’89.” Utrecht’s Staatseinde, operating since 2006, brings its unruly meeting point of wave, EBM, NDW, and punk to “Cold Room,” while Amsterdam producer Willem Stinissen’s Raderkraft answers with “Das zimmer ist zu klein,” drawing on vintage machines and the freedom hidden inside their limitations. AvonRim’s “Too Much” and Stuttgart veteran Der Mussikant’s “Repulsina” extend that stubborn electronic lineage; the latter’s one-man project reaches back to 1980, when minimal electronics were still a rupture rather than a revival. Mørna’s “Titivisma tou Tipota” and Eye Desire’s “Techniques Warsaw” then pull the compilation’s linguistic map outward once again.

Near the close, Manchester’s Chrysalid Homo offers “Prison Phone” from a group that calls its work post-nuclear electronic music, assembling synthesizers, sequencers, drum machines, voices, and spoken word in the city’s industrial heartlands. Fukuoka’s Mojo Beatnik follows with “Furthest Reaches,” self-styled “primitive mutant wave” animated by a devotion to vintage Korg machines. At-risk’s “Faulty Units” leads into Mexican project Fiesta de Disfraces and “Club Pesadilla,” a fitting final title for a compilation that repeatedly treats the club as refuge, laboratory, and nightmare. Taken together, these twenty tracks do not argue for one fixed definition of minimal music. They show how far a few machines, a voice, and an obstinate idea can travel.

Stanze Fredde Vol. 3 is out now on vinyl, CD, and digital formats.

Listen to the album below, and order it here.

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The post “The Minimal Revolution is Coming!” — Stanze Fredde Releases International Synth Compilation Vol. 3 appeared first on Post-Punk.com.