The AZ9345 is on right now. And it sounds pretty damn good to me. I’m listening to Smog’s latest album, <i>A River Ain’t Too Much to Love</i>, and god, I love it. I love it. I don’t even know exactly what it is. I keep wondering, “What is it? What’s so great about this album?”

Not how. I mean to say: I should tell you something about the circumstances surrounding my personal act of listening.

The music we made in Genie Boom was not unlike the music made by the pumps and steam lines and reactors of Firmenich. Michelle drummed on garbage cans, a red school bell, a gas tank, whatever banged. Todd pressed buttons on his Casio synthesizer and Roland drum machine. I plugged five cheap guitars&mdash;old Silvertones and Kays, before they became popular&mdash;into whatever amps I could find, turned the knobs on my effects pedals all the way up, and screamed the lines from my poems into the guitars’ pick-ups.

Back in the spring of 1986, I was visiting a hi-fi show in Lucerne, Switzerland. In the KEF/McIntosh/Perreaux room, I was engaged by a voluble American, who wanted to talk about the changes I was making with the English magazine <I>Hi-Fi News</I>. The conversation shifted to the hotel bar, then to a restaurant. The American was one Tony Federici, who at that time was distributing Perreaux gear in the US. With an education in the philosophy of science, Tony's comments were insightful and challenging. He was never at a loss for an opinion! After I moved to the US to take the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/352">editorial reins at <I>Stereophile</I></A>, Tony stayed in touch, and many were the conversations we had about audio magazines, the audio business, and music.

Mentioning the new <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias"><I>Stereophile</I&gt; blog</A> to folks this past week, I usually got two questions. First, "Cool, what will it be about?" Then, "What, in fact, is a blog?"

Throughout college, Michelle and I&mdash;along with our very good friend, Todd&mdash;played in a performance art/noise rock band called Genie Boom. We took the name from the sky-blue steel beast that you sometimes see at construction sites, or on highways, or&mdash;here in New York City&mdash;even on Madison Avenue; the same sky-blue steel beast that I once used to propel myself a hundred feet into the air to install all sorts of I-don’t-know-what along the tanks and pumps and whatever else that make up Firmenich, the chemical plant where I worked at the time. They make flavors and fragrances; much of what you taste and smell everyday comes from Firmenich. I spent four summers there, painting curbs and railings “emergency yellow,” watching flaming bits of iron fall from the welders’ gloved hands, finding beauty in how smooth a beveled pipe could be.