LATEST ADDITIONS

Recorded over the last four years in front man Adam Granduciel’s home studio in Philadelphia, Jeff Ziegler’s Uniform Recording, and Echo Mountain in Asheville, NC, the album is a drive to the ocean, windows down, head back, shades on. Acoustic and electric guitars, synthesizers, drums, and Granduciel’s voice, rambling and drifting and howling, together recalling heat waves, long days, Bruce Springsteen, Bryan Adams, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

At pretty much the same time (just around noon on Wednesday), five lovely women sent me pretty much the same e-mail:

“Have you seen these?” they asked. “I want them,” they said.

I had not seen them, but they are beautiful. We can learn from this. There must be a lesson hidden here. But what? Girls like concrete? Girls like it raw and rough?

Let’s read from the press materials. Perhaps we’ll find some clues. The designer, 29-year old Shmuel Linski, says:

"Love & Blessings"? "Questions for the Angels"? It seems that Paul Simon, who will turn 70 in October, has begun to ask life's Big Questions in preparation for his own exit. Yet in this case, seeming is not reality, and at 69, Simon has returned to his polyglot musical influences (that he may or may not have heisted...but that's an argument for another day) to fashion a startlingly powerful collection of songs that successfully mix the jaunty near-danceability of his world-music adventures with serious lyrics about impending death, the vagaries of love, and, especially, the many unknowables contained in the word God.

Its seemingly paradoxical name refers not to any inability of the Silent to create sound, but rather is intended by its maker to indicate two aspects of its performance. First is the ability of the loudspeaker boxes to "disappear" in the sense of not being readily apparent as sound sources. Well, okay, everyone wants that. The other intended sense of Silent is that the woofer and its loading arrangement were designed to minimize stray noises created by the woofer's excursion, or by the movements of air within, or in and out of, its vent or port.

There are two interrelated parameters which, in the absence of drop-outs or information gaps—we'll get to them shortly—can affect the ability of a player to track the CD "groove" (or "whorl," as the quaintly translated disc booklet calls it): linear "cutting velocity" and track pitch. The standards for the first establish a range of 1.2 to 1.4 meters/second (the rotation speed of the disc varies from 500 to 200rpm from the inside to the outside of the disc to maintain this linear velocity); for the second, the spacing between adjacent tracks, from 1.50 to 1.70 micrometers (µm).