Stephen Mejias

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The East Village Radio Music Festival

You can walk by 21 First Avenue on any given day to see some of our city's most beautiful and talented DJs spinning rare and wonderful vinyl. It's true! It's East">http://www.eastvillageradio.com/">East Village Radio. There's a big glass window. Look in and you might see Queen Majesty or Melody Nelson or Mark Ronson or a few of the colorfully dressed peeps from The Fader, those taste-makers. In fact, East Village Radio provides more than 70 unique, and often excellent, two-hour shows, covering musical genres from rock and electronic to jazz and folk to roots and reggae. Lots of good stuff.

Numbers, Percentages, and Cold Fact

The music industry is responding to our recent enthusiasm for vinyl, reports">http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/business/la-et-vinyl18-2008au… the Los Angeles Times. Original Recordings Group, a small vinyl-only label, needed only 24 hours to sell 4000 copies of TV on the Radio's excellent Return To Cookie Mountain. The label is on the way to grossing their first million dollars, and expects to double its vinyl output in 2009. Meanwhile, Warner Bros. has increased their vinyl production from 2000 copies per title to up to 15,000 copies. Such increases, of course, have a dramatic impact on pressing plants. Record Technology Inc's average pressing per title has doubled to 3000 units over the last few years.

Remember?

Fans of the Fiery Furnaces will be happy to know that the band is releasing a collection of live material. Charmingly titled Remember, the album brings together songs from the entire Fiery Furnaces catalog, digging way back to 2005 and even including tracks from last year's Widow City. With 51 tracks in all, Remember will be available as a triple-LP gatefold, and will include a coupon for free MP3 download. Pretty artwork, too.

News from Sonos

Uncle Isaac is building a new house. When he asked me how he might go about getting music to play throughout several different rooms of his home, the first thing that came to mind was Sonoshttp://www.stereophile.com/budgetcomponents/1006sonos/index.html">Sonos…;. (Of course, if it was my house, I'd have a">http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/the_rega_p3-24_iin_colouri/">a different-colored turntable in each room: Colonel Mustard in the library, Professor Plum in the study, Mr. Green in the billiards room, Miss Scarlet in the kitchen (wink wink)….)

As Lovely and Troubling As

Which brings me to my latest recommendation: Xiu Xiu's Women As Lovers takes its alluring title from a novel by Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek. The album, Xiu Xiu's sixth full-length, was released much earlier this year, but I only got around to it this weekend, during a trip to Vintage">http://www.vvinyl.com/">Vintage Vinyl in good ol' Fords, NJ, along rich and wild Route 1.

Blood, Looms, and Blooms

Tighten the laces on your Vans and jump on your skateboard, strap on your helmet and hop on your scooter, pump some air into the tires of your cruiser, do whatever you have to do, dudes; Dash, sprint, leap, fly like Olympians to your nearest record shop and lay down the $19.99 for the new Leila Arab album.

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