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My love for the Vivian Girls only grows and grows: I love them more today than I did yesterday, but not as much as I’ll love them tomorrow. Their 2009 album, Everything Goes Wrong, continues to sound fresh and exciting with each play on my turntable. And they’ve got a new 7-inch single available from their own Wild World Records. Perfect for a sunny Cinco de Mayo like this one, the A-side has Cassie confessing, “I can hardly wait until the summer comes,” while Katy and Ali echo the feeling with handclaps and angelic backing vocals. The B-side is a cover of the Chantels’ “He’s Gone…
When asked how to create a good recording, John Atkinson will tell you to use good musicians in a good room. The people behind Benchmark Media Systems, makers of some of today’s most highly regarded digital audio converters, headphone amps, and mic preamps, agree.
Listening to music from the legendary catalogs of Decca, Atlantic, Stax, Sun, Parlophone, etc, it’s hard to believe that several of those immortal recordings were made in a single session. How could any of those revered recordings have been made in one day? Simple... They had a killer studio, great gear, an…
Beautiful plus beautiful equals more beautiful. Phoenix pairs Grizzly Bear’s “Foreground” with Brian Eno’s “Discreet Music” and offers instructions for mixing in some chance operations. Click here and make magic.
Some risky business is going on at the Blue Note, the posh jazz club on West 3rd Street in Manhattan.
The gig is called “Further Explorations of Bill Evans” and features a trio of Chick Corea on piano, Eddie Gomez on bass, and Paul Motian on drums. The title is a play on Evans’ 1959 album Explorations, which also featured Motian on drums (as did his much-celebrated Village Vanguard sessions, recorded two years later). Gomez was Evans’ bassist from the mid-1960s through mid-‘70s. Corea’s a wilder card, capable of fusing or altering some of Evans’ lyricism with a Latin edge and a free-jazz…
I…uh, I…I just don’t know what to say, but I’m definitely making this my new theme song.
I am the Audiophile Vagabond.
On Thursday, May 20th, Seattle’s Resolution Audio Video (5459 Leary Avenue NW) will host an evening with renowned amplifier designer and DIY advocate, the long-haired and white-bearded Nelson Pass. This event should be really cool and interesting; Nelson Pass doesn’t make many big public appearances.
Founder and chief engineer of the successful Pass Labs, Pass’s influence on the world of hi-fi spans three decades and has resulted in several audio circuitry patents. His innovative designs are centered around the ideals of simplicity, low distortion, and low noise, resulting in a…
It was late last year, when the leaves and the temperatures started to fall, that I first became interested in Effi Briest, the hypnotic and alluring all-female band performing out of Brooklyn, NY. Their video for “Mirror Eye” was a dizzying, hallucinogenic trip that matched their sound and their sense of style.
Back in October, May seemed so far away, but here we now are and Effi Briest’s debut full-length, Rhizomes, is available, as promised, from Sacred Bones. The deluxe, limited-edition version is hand-numbered and housed in a letter-pressed leather sleeve, with…
Sometimes wandering the streets of New York I hear whining about how “far from nature’ someone is; or how there’s too much concrete; or how the exhaust–filled air is hurting their lungs. Well, boo hoo. If it’s purple mountains majesties you seek, NYC ain’t the place. You come here for the human culture not the natural beauty—although now that I think of it, there are other, very compelling forms of natural beauty in NYC, if you catch my drift, wink, wink, nod, nod, say no more, but I digress.
In any case, this is a town for museums and clubs and shopping, not hiking above the tree line.…
When you think of his name on phrase comes to mind:
I told you so.
Walter Sear, one of the great analogue advocates, died last week after sustaining injuries in a fall. He was 80 years old. Since the 60’s, he’d been telling anyone who would listen that recorded sound was getting worse. Not until the recent LP resurgence, as well as the current yet belated backlash against excessive loudness in recorded music, did Sear come to be thought of in larger and larger circles of music fans as a prophet of sorts, an apostle for dynamic analogue sound.
Sear Sound, his studio which…
I’ve been infatuated with Damien Jurado’s new album, Saint Bartlett, due to be released on May 25th from Secretly Canadian. Its twelve songs take us on an emotionally powerful trip, from the drunken sway of “Arkansas” to the jaunty swagger of “Wallingford” to the heavyhearted confessions of “Kansas City.” Altogether, Saint Bartlett is deep and beautiful and addictive.
Saint Bartlett doesn’t sound anything at all like this:
Alright, maybe Saint Bartlett does, way down deep at its core, sound something like that. But, on the outside, on its face, it sounds much…