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Under the soft blue light: Grails' most awesome Interpretations of Three Psychedelic Rock Songs from around the World goes for the ride of its life on the massive SME 20/12 turntable.
The May 2009 issue is now on newsstands. The cover's so bright, you gotta wear shades. See that orange LP sitting on the SME 20/12 turntable? That's my copy of Boris's awesome Smile.
Cover photographer, Eric Swanson, originally asked if I could send him a white LP to decorate the 'table, but I sent him several colorful options: translucent red and blue, mint green, orange, etched white, and a Thurston Moore picture disc.
Eric and his assistant, Jenna Gersbach, were well aware that I was uncomfortable with sending my own precious vinyl across the country for a photo shoot…
I really don't know anything about the Flying Burrito Bros. I know that Gram Parsons was in the band, and that makes them cool. Michelle, the first girl I ever loved, wore a Flying Burrito Brothers t-shirt (baby blue with a metallic gold logo, purchased from some old train station thrift shop in Hackensack-ack-ack-ack-ack), but she was from San Francisco and talked about Haight-Ashbury and rearranged her furniture twice a week and received phone calls from Pauline Oliveros and Marian Zazeela (in her dorm room!), and I figured the t-shirt was just another one of her crazy things. It was…
At around this time last week, John Atkinson and I left the office and headed out to Bay Ridge to pack up the large and lovely Revel Ultima Salon2, voted our "Joint Loudspeaker of the Year" for 2008 and a speaker that JA absolutely adores. He selected it as his overall product of the year:
I was won over by the Salon2's combination of superb speaker engineering, top-to-bottom balance and sonic coherence, and apparently unlimited dynamic range, with nary a trace of compression or distortion.
If you read between the lines, you can actually hear JA's heart beating like mad,…
I have an article in the Arts & Leisure section of today’s New York Times about Andy Warhol’s album covers. Everyone’s seen the covers he designed for The Velvet Underground & Nico, with the banana that peels, and the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, with the zipper that unzips. But who knew that the pioneer of Pop art designed over 50 covers over the entire span of his career, and not just for pop albums but also for jazz, classical, and opera? His work, often signed, appeared on Blue Note, RCA, Columbia—all the giants—and echoed, or often anticipated, the style that he would…
Sky & Country (on the ECM label), the new CD by Fly—the trio that consists of saxophonist Mark Turner, bassist Larry Grenadier, and drummer Jeff Ballard—is a deeply pleasurable album. It’s a tricky thing to improvise sinuous, crisscrossing lines over the span of an hour-long record, with neither a piano to lay down harmonic signposts nor a second horn to pick things up when the pace slacks off, yet still manage to keep a listener’s attention. Some have done it, and brilliantly: Sonny Rollins (A Night at the Vanguard and Way out West), Lee Konitz (Motion), Ornette Coleman (At the Golden…
Now compare the exquisite packaging of the Revel Ultima Salon2 with this pathetic excuse for a shipping carton. I mean, seriously. Come on, now.
God damn. I said, god damn.
These broken bits of board and fluff were holding on to the Audio Valve Conductor preamplifier—desperately, tentatively, gingerly, hopelessly grasping for life around a chassis made of clear glass and so much generously lacquered stainless steel. You'd think someone would care enough about the thing to protect it properly. The Audio Valve Conductor preamplifier costs $14,000. It comes from…
We've been talking about this in the forum, but I think it's worth posting here, too. Jonathan Scull sent out this video yesterday, in an e-mail that read:
You'll feel better after you watch this. Let it develop, and have a beautiful day.
So many things race through my mind as I watch this and the chills sweep over my skin. Thinking, first: God, this is so beautiful. And then: How is it that music, in its simplest form, is always so similar, no, the same, all over the world? And: Why do we—people, humans—make music at all? What does it do for us?…
I hope all you dudes are enjoying the same sort of sweaty sweet record-breaking weather we're experiencing here in NYC this week (until tomorrow when it gets cold again).
And I also hope you've taken advantage of Matador's Buy Early Get Now plan, and have begun your love affair with Sonic Youth's latest mind-melter, The Eternal. It's the perfect music for this summery heat.
It should be called The Fucking Eternal. I am streaming the hell out of it right now, and it's tossing my flabby body all around the suffocatingly hot office.
It's always so easy to say that…
Yesterday's New York Post ran a brief story on Best Buy's decision to stock vinyl LPs.
The consumer-electronics giant, which happens also to be the third-largest music seller behind Apple's iTunes and Wal-Mart, is considering devoting eight square feet of merchandising space in all of its 1,020 stores solely to vinyl, which would equate to just under 200 albums, after a test in 100 of its stores around the country proved successful.
Not bad, considering that a typical Best Buy carries just between 16-20 square feet of music merchandise.