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The Sennheiser Sound Tour

We're always asking the big questions: Are we really alive? Will we ever find true happiness? How can we be better human beings? What's love, but a secondhand emotion? Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken? How can the high end audio industry reach a wider audience?

Sennheiser, the popular manufacturer of high-quality headphones and microphones, has an answer for that last one.

This summer, the company is hitting the hot streets with their Sennheiser Sound Tour, a guerilla-marketing campaign designed to increase brand awareness among North American consumers…

One for Thursday

Been listening to the Bowerbirds a lot over the last few days, falling in love with the new album, Upper Air, so delicate and powerful with its sparse arrangements, gorgeous vocals, and dazzling images, all of an inherent sadness but with a sort of joy, too, and all beautifully recorded, with sometimes stunning, really frightening, dynamics. You should hear it.

"In Our Talons" is from their first album, Hymns for a Dark Horse. In the future, I'll write more about Upper Air.

Hegel Music Systems

Norway's Hegel Music Systems has made its way to the US market. I met Hegel and the company's charming founder, Bent Holter, at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show and then again in Las Vegas during the following year. On both occasions, I had a lot of fun listening to music and learning about Holter's designs. As I wrote last year, I was instantly attracted to the designer's combination of tech-talk and passion for music. The guy is at once serious and totally wacky.

Every time we meet, Holter tries to explain his patented SoundEngine technology. He draws diagrams and talks…

Fiery Furnaces Friday

Hey everybody! As we like to say around here in the office, it's "Happy Friday!" For alliterative purposes, let's call it "Fiery Furnaces Friday." The Fiery Furnaces have something up their sleeve, and I don't know what it's all about, but I'm betting that's it's good. I bet there are a lot of words involved. But, perhaps, no sound. A lot of alliteration, too. The Fiery Furnaces are good at that.

There will be a silent record.

Because file-sharing, or downloading, or whatever, has notoriously, or supposedly, made the production of the conventional "with-audio"…

Santa Monica of the East

New York’s outdoor concert season is in full swing and I happened to catch a couple pretty wonderful shows, one free and just the opposite the other night.

The free one was King Sunny Ade and his 12 piece band. For those who’ve never seen him. Ade, born Sunday Adeniyi, is quite a performer; his Nigerian grooves, which make use of talking drums, electric guitars and synthesizers are long and build momentum as they go along. Needless to say long grooves that build draw multicultural white folks like flies. They were all there dancing, such as it is, along with a lot of Africans who…

Wye Oak

Wye Oak is a sort of American folk duo. Andy Stack plays drums and keys (at the same time), while Jenn Wasner sings and absolutely wails on the guitar. This is a video for their song, "Please Concrete," from their 2008 debut If Children.

If Children is great, but the new album, The Knot, writhes and burns and delights. You can read more about it in the October issue of Stereophile. I hope you will. For now, you can go to Merge and stream the entire album. I think you should. If The Knot isn't released on vinyl, I might have to kill someone. Or buy the compact…

Morning

I woke up this morning with the sun in my face and Heather Duby's "Places Shape Lives" churning through my mind. I heard the old moan of cello and the aching melody, the hypnotic precision of the just-tuned drums, the constant trembling of the strangled guitar, and I knew it would be a good day.

Heather Duby will be performing new and old songs at Piano's (158 Ludlow Street, NYC) on August 17.

Floods: <i>Transmission</i>

I think it's time to talk about Floods' Transmission, as the album is now almost a year old. It was released on August 8, 2008. I know this album very well because I'm one of Floods' two band members. I played a lot of guitar for Transmission and even sang a little bit, while my good friend, Brother Todd, handled the synths, programming, and editing. We shared arrangement duties and we never fought about anything, I swear.

It's sort of an interesting story, and it begins in the winter of 2002. I don't want to tell you the whole story&#151what fun would that be?&#…

Freakin' at the Beacon

They were quite a couple. Like a pair of Octopi in heat. First, he was grabbing her ass. Then he had his hands up the back of her shirt. Then, up the front. Then he had his hands down the back of her pants. Then, down the front. Both hands and about half of his forearms. Her only reaction was to smile, swoon and stick her tongue in his mouth. I'm damned impressed that she was able to keep her clothes on during this determined assault upon her New Jersey virtue. Best of all, during this entire spectacle, they were simultaneously kissing and falling down at the same time. Groping does…

Nine Years

Me, in the old cubicle at 110 Fifth Avenue, just eight months into the new job. I was thinner then, and had more hair.

I began working with Stereophile exactly nine years ago, on August 10, 2000. I was 22 years old, I was living in my uncle's basement, and I didn't even know that "high end audio" existed. I had never heard the word "audiophile." I was in a band. I listened to all of my music through a simple Magnavox boombox.

My life has changed considerably since then, thank goodness.

I live on my own in a small apartment, and I know a little more about hi-fi…