Tales of a GrassWidow, CocoRosie’s fifth full-length album and first since 2010’s excellent Grey Oceans, is scheduled to be released on May 28th. The album is being self-released, features appearances by Antony Hegarty, and was produced by CocoRosie with extraordinary Icelandic composer Valgeir Sigurdssonso I expect greatness in sound and music.
Back in September, I told you a bit about Matmos’s The Ganzfeld EP, which blew my mind and promised many more great things to come.
It’s been a long wait, but The Marriage of True Minds, Matmos’s eighth full-length album, will be released by Thrill Jockey on February 19th. My complete review will appear in our April issue, but you can stream the entire album right now through Pitchfork Advance.
Interested in new cassette releases, but don't know where to start? Cassettivity is a cassette-only distribution site, founded by music lover Dave Sandifer. In 2013, a cassette-only distro might seem like an odd venture, but I was delighted to see it: I’ve had a difficult time keeping up with the many new and exciting cassette-only labelsthey’re often extremely obscure and titles are often extremely limitedso an intelligent distribution channel makes good sense.
Even though my own band has recorded and released a handful of CDs and EPs, the act of making music remains mysterious and awesome. I love it. I’ll never get tired of watching musicians create.
Here, we get a behind-the-scenes look into the making of Dawn McCarthy and Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s upcoming album, What the Brothers Sang, inspired by the music of the Everly Brothers.
I couldn't have known it at the time, but Swans' "Lunacy" (see last month's column) would be the very last song I'd ever enjoy in my cozy listening room. Last timeswhether with things, people, places, or, I suppose, especially with ideascan be difficult to accept, tending to overshadow all other times, their lingering memories leading to remorse and games of "what if."
In our November 2012 issue, Michael Fremer reviewed the Spiral Groove SG1.1 turntable ($25,000) with its complementary Centroid tonearm ($6000), an interesting unipivot design that places the pivot point and stylus in the same plane to increase the system’s overall stability. At CES, Spiral Groove showed the new universal version of the Centroid tonearm, a 10” arm with a standard mount. With the supplied setup jig and the Centroid’s easily accessible pivot point, users should be able to determine the correct spindle-to-pivot distance and “accurately set the geometry for overhang and offset angle,” said Immedia’s Stirling Trayle. The universal version of the Centroid tonearm is available now; price remains $6000.
While the sound and music in Philip O’Hanlon’s On A Higher Note systems is uniformly excellent, I had an especially good time listening to his smaller desktop system: MacBook running Audirvana, a pair of passive Eclipse desktop speakers, and Luxman’s new DA-200 USB DAC/preamp and M-200 stereo amp ($2790 each).