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Sonic Youth: Madness and Ecstasy

We have to thank 24 year-old music lover, uglypodcast, for this excellent footage from Sonic Youth's July 3rd performance at the grand, old United Palace Theater on 175th and Broadway. Amazingly, this is almost exactly as I saw it; the camera must have been very near where I stood. In fact, the handclaps you'll hear at about 2:00, along with the maniacal howl that erupts at 2:24, belong to me. The limp and weary hands that show up at around 4:13 are almost certainly mine, as well.

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They lived in that space where the deepest ecstasy mingles with danger and madness…

Steve Kuhn's <I>Mostly Coltrane</I>

Steve Kuhn’s new CD, Mostly Coltrane (on the ECM label), has no business working, but it does, for the most part really well.

Trane-tribute albums are risky enough; most of them inspire only the desire to spin the originals. Kuhn at least has some bona fides, having played piano in a quartet that Coltrane led in the first few months of 1960 before forming the “classic quartet” that consisted of McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones (or, as an occasional sub on drums, Roy Haynes).

The album’s most compelling tunes are those that Kuhn played with Coltrane himself, most of…

A House of Monkeys

The success of any party depends on just a few things: the venue, the guests, the food and drink, and (of course) the music. Evenings at John DeVore's factory at the Brooklyn Navy Yard are invariably successful. More than that, they are fun. You love the place. You enjoy the company. The food is delicious and the drinks do the trick. And (of course) the music is intoxicating. You want to be there.

Monkeyhaus is the name of the sound room&#151that golden, friendly place filled with vinyl and wood and tube amplifiers, where we sit and talk and listen and laugh&#151but it…

Flash

Photo: Michael Lavorgna

Guests are invited to bring their own LPs to every Monkeyhaus. For a recent gathering, I brought Flash's blistering 1972 self-titled debut. Find this album and get busy to "Children of the Universe."

Blackman

Special surprise guest at a recent Monkeyhaus: Blackman. Photo by Michael Lavorgna. (The camera had been drinking.)

<i>Lost + Found</i>

I've realized why the opening few moments of Tom Abbs & Frequency Response's "Lost" make me want to just stop and cry. I find those moments so painfully beautiful because they remind me of my grandmother (my mother's mother) singing to me when I was a child. At first, I thought it was "You Are My Sunshine," but now I realize that it's "All the Pretty Horses." Listening again, I wish now I had someone to sing it to, someone to play it for.

Hush a bye, don't you cry
Go to sleep little baby.
When you wake, you shall have
All the pretty little horses.

"My…

Real Sound for Real People

A happy family. The all-new PSB Image Series (from left to right): The B4, B5, and B6 monitors; the T6 and T5 towers; the C4 (top) and C5 center channels; the S5 surround.

In my July 2009 "As We See It," I talked about high end audio's need for more gateway products at gateway prices, components that could potentially attract a new and wide audience to the small but greatly rewarding pastime of listening to music on a hi-fi.

We should be thankful. PSB and designer Paul Barton have done it again; the company's revamped Image Series takes technology from the outstanding…

Monster Magnet

You know there are days and then there are DAYS. Yesterday I had one of the latter, but music in the end was what saved me.

First, came a meeting with Pierre Schwob, the founder and owner of Classicalarchives.com. A website that has been up in some form since 1994, Schwob’s numbers look like this: 620,000 recorded tracks, representing 7,800 composers, 27,000 artists from 110 plus record labels. The deal is $9.95 a month or $99.50 a year. For that you get unlimited streaming for free, and a ten percent discount on anything you download.

So how is this different from any of the…

AUDIO VERITY

If you can find some of the oldest issues of Stereophile, you'll see that several of the covers hold a short, sweet, often humorous "AUDIO VERITY." These nuggets of hi-fi wisdom were written by Stereophile founder, J. Gordon Holt.

Here are just a few:

AUDIO VERITY: High fidelity in an auto is like Arpege in a glue factory.

AUDIO VERITY: A music lover is someone whose disc of Also Sprach Zarathustra has as much wear on Side 2 as on Side 1.

AUDIO VERITY: Things that should be audible but aren't are more tolerable than things that shouldn't be but are.
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J. Gordon Holt

In 1962, J. Gordon Holt started a magazine based on the simple, beautiful idea that the quality of an audio component should be measured, first and foremost, by how it sounds. That magazine, of course, was Stereophile.

Though I never had the opportunity to meet Mr. Holt, I have heard some brilliant and incredible stories, stories of martinis and cigars and Hunter S. Thompson and more, stories that have led me to admire and fear the man, as if he wasn't a man at all, but a sort of inextinguishable blaze. I don't know what I would have said or done had I had that opportunity to meet…