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Record Store Day

"Ariel?"

"Yes, Stephen?"

"You know what tomorrow is, don't you?"

Ariel hesitates, thinks. "Uh…" And then his entire being is illuminated and a youthful smile blooms across his face and he happily announces: "Tomorrow is Record Store Day."

"Yes! That's why you're our intern!"

"Was that a test?"

"Well, I didn't know it was a test until you passed, but yes."

Tomorrow, April 18, is my second favorite holiday of the year: Record Store Day! (I'm a sucker for Thanksgiving.)

This is the one day that all of the…

It was a glorious day. The Good Lord smiled upon our little blue world with clear skies, warm sunshine, and limited edition 7" singles. I strolled into Tunes at 11:30am, just a half-hour after the store had opened. A large crowd of happy shoppers was already huddled round the main display shelves. Radiohead singles from every era of the band's brilliant career and so many colorful 7" discs and samplers and posters and platter mats and they have already run out of the Sonic Youth/Beck splits. What? Figures! Oh well. I am not disappointed&#151not too terribly. Instead, I am…

Boris Isn't Smiling

After sticking my copy of Boris' Smile in the freezer for a few hours, Jenna thought it'd be a good idea to thaw it out in the microwave. Thanks, Jenna!

Etched in Vinyl

Grails' Interpretations of Three Psychedelic Rock Songs from around the World, part of Southern Records' incredibly dope, limited-edition Latitudes series, was a gift from Michael Lavorgna. Note the radical etching of the white vinyl. Only 700 copies are/were available.

My copy came back home safe and sound, thank god!

(I know: I used the words "dope" and "radical" in the same post. But, c'mon, man: White freaking etched vinyl totally deserves it.)

Under the Soft Blue Light

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.

Now On Newsstands: <i>Stereophile</i>, Vol.32 No.5

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…

Last Night I Listened To The Flying Burrito Brothers

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…

Goodbye to the Revel Salon2

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,…

Warhol Album Covers

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…

Fly-ing

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…