We played Scrabble and listened to Brian Eno's Another Green World. The synthesizers were raw, saw-toothed, and gripping, and Eno's volume swells had never been truly appreciated till that night.
Even though he's heard me play the record about a million times, Kyle kept asking, "Who is this playing?"
I think it caught him by surprise this time around.
It was a certain sunless Sunday afternoon and we were listening to some records at the Brooklyn Navy Yard's <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/112206custom/">DeVore Fidelity factory</a>. Something had just come to an end, and I decided to take a look through a box of LPs to find something new. I found an album that was still sealed in its plastic wrapper. It was the seventh installment of Sonic Youth's SYR series, the album that <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/040808immediately/">started it all for me</a>. I was shocked. <i>Shocked</i>. I was all exclamation points and italics.
She stands in the long and winding Election Day line, a wonder in her cream-colored cotton sweater, black tights, and two-inch heels. Her head is down in Milan Kundera, and somewhere in her mind she sings.
For Halloween, I dressed up as myself: rigid and morose. My costume was a smash at all the parties. However, the Best Costume Award goes to <a href="http://snowghostmusic.com/">SnowGhost Music</a>'s Greg McGrath. Greg dressed up as an MP3. He explained:
I can't think of a product that was as eagerly anticipated as was Ayre's KX-R preamplifier ($18,500). Following in the footsteps of Ayre's <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/solidpoweramps/407ayre">MX-R monoblock amplifier</A>, a <I>Stereophile</I> <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/features/1207poty/index9.html">2007 Product of the Year</A>, and milled, like the MX-R, from a 75-lb billet of aluminum, the KX-R also shares with its monoblock stablemate the Ayre ethos of zero feedback and fully balanced operation. But what really caused the buzz was the declaration by Ayre founder and chief designer <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/610">Charles Hansen</A> that the KX-R, with its use of a technology he calls Variable Gain Transconductance (VGT) to control the volume, would set new standards for signal/noise ratio.
Can audiences tell the difference between a computer-generated orchestra and the real thing? Just how far have digital sampling and loudspeaker technologies advanced?
One of my favorite jazz bands, Ben Allison’s Medicine Wheel, is playing at the Jazz Standard Nov. 4. Allison is an enticing bassist and composer, agile and inventive, flitting from Herbie Nichols to film noir to raga, ska, funky blues, and straight-ahead jazz without showing a seam, loosening his wit, or abandoning the melody or the swing. The band is first-rate (regular readers will recognize most of them): Frank Kimbrough, piano; Jenny Scheinman, violin; Ted Nash and Michael Blake, reeds; and Michael Sarin, drums.
Based in the Czech Republic, KR Enterprise is headed by an occasionally gruff Dr. Riccardo Kron and his American-born wife, Eunice, who operate the company out of a partially abandoned factory that was once part of the state-owned Tesla High Vacuum Technology facility in Prague. The Swiss-funded company is unique in that it manufactures both amplifiers <I>and</I> the tubes that power them. KR's tubes have found favor with other amplifier makers as well—especially the 300BXS, electrically identical to a <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/features/229">standard 300B</A> but rated at 25W in class-A.
Andrew Hill, the knotty avant-garde pianist, and Chico Hamilton, the boisterous polyrhythmic drummer, seem an unlikely pair at first (or second) glance. But they set off fascinating fireworks, and carved out sinuous jags of common ground, in a duet recording, <I>Dreams Come True</I>, just released on Joyous Shout!, an Indiana-based label that I’ve never heard of. (Its website seems to be a sort of shrine to Chico Hamilton merchandise.)