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The Yardbirds' version of "Train Kept A-Rollin'" has been sharing space in my mind with Outkast's "Ms. Jackson." Makes no sense. It's like the train keeps rolling right into Ms. Jackson. Only my subconscious knows why.
When John Atkinson reviewed Sonos's original ZP80 Bundle, he fell in love with the company's CR100 controller which uses a full-color, 3.5" LCD screen to provide easy navigation of music files on up to 16 network devices and displays all the metadata associated with each track, including album art. JA wrote:
This controller is one of the neatest consumer-electronics products I have encountered: it is sealed to prevent damage from liquid splashes; it has modes for both deep and shallow sleep, from which it can roused by being picked up; and as well as a motion sensor, it…
George Russell died today, at the age of 86, after a long bout with Alzheimer’s, and if you’ve never heard of him, all the deeper pity.
Russell was one of the great unsung heroes of modern jazz. In this summer when many are celebrating the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, it is worth noting that there would have been no such album—the art of jazz might have languished in post-Parker malaise for a few years longer—had there been no George Russell.
Born in Cincinnati, a prodigy on piano and drums, he moved to New York in the late 1940s, wrote “Cubano Be, Cubano Bop” (…
On the train this morning, a pretty girl sitting directly in front of me, with a large purse in her lap, and connected to it, an iPod. Earbuds to her pretty, little ears letting loose the music, the most appalling of all songs ever to hit the Top 40: The Beach Boys' "Kokomo."
We'll get there fast and then we'll take it slow. That's where we wanna go. Way down to Kokomo.
Over and over again, she played it. Was I going insane, or was this really happening to me? I searched the expressions of nearby passengers to see if they were in on this. The woman sitting directly…
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…
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.
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…
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"…
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 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…