A beginner's guide.

Michael Chabon on <I>The Yiddish Policemen's Union</I>, Yiddish, and being exiled from exile.

I don't know about you, but I got a little bit bored with the wall-to-wall coverage of the 40<SUP>th</SUP> anniversary of <I>Sgt. Pepper's</I> last week. So why am I linking to Jody Rosen's article on the subject? Because it actually has something to say and says it well.

Keith "tha missile" Bailey played bass for Gong, many years ago. After that, for his sins, he served as Gong's booking agent. He tells the tale of what happened one night in Hamburg when famed drummer Pierre Moerlen went AWOL, Daevid Allen went into a wizardly rage, and Bailey went on as the band's drummer.

In his <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/061107compression">primer</A&gt; this week on compression, Wes Phillips mentions the now-ubiquitous use of "louderization" in CD production, which fills in the musical valleys and flattens the expressionistic hills to make a recording sound uniformly loud. <I>Stereophile</I> editor John Atkinson has long railed against this practice, so when Bob Reina asked John to record his new jazz quartet, Attention Screen, John felt that this would be the opportunity to put his money where his mouth was. He would record the band, which mixes electric instruments&mdash;guitar and bass guitar&mdash;with acoustic&mdash;piano and drums&mdash;as though it was a classical acoustic ensemble, with no equalization and no compression. By doing so, he would demonstrate that even so, the sound would still have dynamics and impact, that making an honest recording does not have to be an obstacle to powerful sound quality.

Scott Bahneman, CEO of MusicGiants, called earlier this week to announce what he called big news. "Actually," Bahneman said, "we're not going to issue an official press release&mdash;yet&mdash;but MusicGiants is going to offer Windows Media Audio (WMA) lossless music downloads without DRM.