LATEST ADDITIONS

"Let be."

Those two words, from Shakespeare's Hamlet, express an entire philosophy of life in one of the shortest sentences possible. The quotation may not be familiar, but the concept certainly is—contemporary equivalents, each with its own inflections of meaning, include: Shit happens. Let the game come to you. Keep calm and carry on. (I hate that one.) Paul McCartney wrote something similar, and only slightly less concise, in a late Beatles song.

E.S.P., recorded over three sessions in January 1965, marked a major turning point in the music of Miles Davis...Mobile Fidelity's 45rpm two-disc vinyl reissue—mastered from the original ¼-inch, 15ips, two-track tapes by Krieg Wunderlich—captures the sound's bloom and detail with more warmth and detail than any previous pressing, including Columbia's original.

Twenty-four years after The Hilliard Ensemble and saxophonist Jan Garbarek recorded Officium, the first of their three haunting, century-crossing collaborations for ECM New Series, Trio Mediaeval has done something similar with trumpeter Arve Henriksen. On their latest ECM New Series album, Rímur, the vocal trio of Anna Maria Friman, Linn Andrea Fugiseth, and Berit Opheim teams up with Henriksen to produce timeless versions of chants, hymns, folk songs and improvisations based on Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish sources from earlier times.

He's made a career out of being hard to describe, impossible to pigeonhole.

Was just listening to the deluxe edition of Singles: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, which is to be released tomorrow, May 19, when the news of Chris Cornell's unexpected death was announced. Very sad news and our sympathies go out to his family and all who loved his music in Soundgarden and Audioslave, and on the solo records.

Fifteen years? Has it really been 15 years since I reviewed what was then the flagship D/A processor from English company Chord Electronics? In the July 2002 issue, here's how I summed up my review of the Chord DAC64: "While the Chord Electronics DAC64 is undoubtedly expensive, it is eye-poppingly gorgeous. . . . many listeners should find its silky-smooth highs seductive, as well as its slightly larger-than-life lows." How times and prices change—the "undoubtedly expensive" DAC64 cost only $3040! I did make a couple of criticisms of the DAC64 in my review, but according to Wes Phillips, in his August 2007 review of Chord's revised DAC64, "the Choral Blu [CD transport] and Choral DAC64 are, together, the CD player we music lovers have long prayed for"—even if, five years after my own review, the DAC64's price had risen to $5000.