LATEST ADDITIONS

And Huck will stare at you for hours attempting to convince you it's kibble time.

Audiophiles well know the glories of a 12-inch slab of 180-gram virgin vinyl cut for 45-rpm playback. Compared with a normal LP’s 33-1/3 revolutions per minute, the grooves on a 45 are stretched out over a wider space, allowing the stylus to track them more accurately and to give voice to the music’s minutest details. The non-‘philes among you may be shaking your heads (<I>Oh, no, Is this guy a nutball?</I>) but, believe me, it’s true. A few years back, Classic Records, Mike Hobson’s L.A.-based audiophile label, put out a series of limited-edition <I>single-sided</I> 45 rpm LPs, one album stretched out on four slabs of vinyl, each of which had grooves on one side but <I>nothing</I>, just plain black vinyl, on the other. The theory was that a perfectly flat bottom surface would couple more firmly to the turntable’s mat, eliminating the distortion of vinyl resonances. That may sound nuttier still, but, believe me, it’s true, too. (I’ve compared single-sided and double-sided 45 rpms of several albums that Hobson released in both formats—especially Sonny Rollins’ <I>Our Man in Jazz</I> and the Chicago Symphony’s performance of Prokofiev’s <I>Lt. Kije</I>, conducted by Fritz Reiner. The differences were not subtle. I value those albums as much as any in my collection, for musical and sonic reasons.)

Greg Stepanich ponders the 25<SUP>th</SUP> anniversary of Glenn Gould's death, commenting that "1982 was an unpropitious year to die for a man who found such a great creative outlet in technology."

Michael Church writes an incendiary review of Anne Sofie von Otter's newest CD, which won't be released here until spring.

Music patron, writer, wife and biographer of Ralph Vaughan Williams.

"Pools and pools and pools of chocolate—fifty-thousand-pound, ninety-thousand-pound, Olympic-length pools of chocolate—in the conching rooms in the chocolate factory in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Big, aromatic rooms. Chocolate, far as the eye can see. Viscous, undulating, lukewarm chocolate, viscidized, undulated by the slurping friction of granite rollers rolling through the chocolate over crenellated granite beds at the bottoms of the pools. The chocolate moves. It stands up in brown creamy dunes. Chocolate eddies. Chocolate currents. Gulfs of chocolate. Chocolate deeps. Mares’ tails on the deeps. The world record for the fifty-yard free-style would be two hours and ten minutes."

I was happily reading Sasha Frere-Jones' <A HREF="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones">blog</A&gt; about CMJ, when he dropped this linkbomb on me, asking, "If you do not think there is any drumming in this cover of 'Satisfaction,' watch Bj&#246;rk’s hips. Also, a question for physicists, audio engineers, and clerics: how can Bj&#246;rk sing so loudly and not drown out Polly Jean Harvey, even though Harvey never raises her voice particularly high? And a question for music lovers everywhere: why has this song inspired so many good covers?"