The music, like summer, pulses with heat and haze; sounds bubble and fume from hot city streets, screech and cry like cicadas in trees, pierce like sunlight off of high rolling waves. Sommer startles like the invisible night and then soothes like the endless sky. The soundstage expands and contracts and expands until it can hardly hold, so full with warmth and promise you’ll want to dive in.
…
search
Sommer from German electronic duo Klangwart (Markus Detmer and Timo Reuber) includes rare compilation tracks, remixes for other artists, and previously unreleased studio recordings.
This sexy album cover, making glorious the embrace of sanctity and lust, belongs to Rene Hell’s Porcelain Opera. Rene Hell is the latest guise of noise artist Jeff Witscher, whose overwhelming mass of work, under names including Impregnable, Deep Jew, and Marble Sky, has been documented mostly to cassette, while utilizing high-quality production. The curious might take a chance on his latest Night People release.
The six cryptically titled songs of Hell’s Porcelain Opera pour over with lush analog electronics, alternately bouncing and lulling, but always haunting. There are…
The word in our forum is that 90 percent of today’s popular music is crap. Need a little proof that real talent still exists in the world of pop music? Check out Janelle Monae’s performance on last night’s Letterman show.
Via Prefix.
It may be nothing new, but this is an homage to past musical forms done with great style and skill. Awesome to see and hear. Janelle Monae's full-length debut, The Archandroid, joining large-scale classical, big-band jazz, R&B, hip-hop, rock, techno, and soul, is available now.
The June 2010 issue of Stereophile is now on newsstands. It opens with John Atkinson’s “iPad Daze,” an exploration of a print magazine’s inherent value in this digital age, and a piece that JA’s been thinking of writing for at least two years. He figured it’d be controversial, perhaps setting the entire World Wide Web against us, but I don’t think he expected to be criticized for his application of Sturgeon’s Law to today’s popular music:
More music is being made—and, thanks to the Apple iPod, listened to—by more people than at any time in history, yet most of…
This charming, classy commercial is from charming, classy 1977, the year I was born; and, somewhere in my psyche, the catch phrase, "Weekends were made for Michelob," will forever burn bright.
It's just about "beer o' clock," as JA would say. Remember to drink responsibly. Cheers.
John Atkinson is psyched about the new iPad version of Stereophile. “I LOVE it!!!!!” he said, with five exclamation points.
The latest Apple gadget made its way around our office, amid oohs and ahhs and whatevers, triggering comments ranging from, “It’s making me carsick” to “It’s really awesome.”
Zinio, the company that brings you the outstanding digital edition of Stereophile, is also responsible for bringing to life our iPad edition; and, while I’ll probably always prefer good, old-fashioned paper, the iPad offers some obvious advantages, such as its high-resolution,…
I’m late in coming to the drummer-composer John Hollenbeck. (These things happen: so many records, so little time…) It wasn’t until a few months ago that I stumbled upon Eternal Interlude (on the Sunnyside label), the latest CD by his 20-piece Large Ensemble, which, had I heard it earlier, would have made it on my 2009 Best 10 list. (Ditto, just to set the record straight, for Infernal Machines by Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, that other wondrous big band that escaped my attention.)
So I hasten to take note of The Royal Toast (on the Cuneiform label), the 5th and latest album by…
Let’s put the main point up front. The new duet album by Keith Jarrett and Charlie Haden, Jasmine (on ECM), is a gorgeous piece of work: all standards, mainly ballads, nothing fancy (not overtly anyway), but such poignance and quiet passion; it’s a glimpse into the intimacy of the act of making art.
That is to say, it’s one of the best piano-bass duet albums since the ones that Haden made in the ‘90s with Kenny Barron (Night and the City) and Hank Jones (Steal Away)—which begs the question: What is it about Charlie Haden’s bass playing that takes pianists to a different level?
…
Hey kid, you think that’s oil?
Man, that ain’t oil, that’s blood.
Man, that ain’t oil, that’s blood.
I didn’t make it down the shore this weekend, but I did manage to listen to lots of Bruce. I sat there on the orange couch with the sun coming through the windows, coffee and a newspaper at my side, listening to Greetings From Asbury Park, reading about the Gulf of Mexico and feeling a little helpless.
The hi-fi sounded great and the music made me feel better. But the music couldn’t do a thing about the oil.
The paper says the oil is spewing into our ocean at a rate of one Exxon Valdez…
Geri Allen’s new album, Flying Toward the Sound (Motema Music), is a stunner. She calls it “a solo piano excursion inspired by Cecil Taylor, McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock.” In jazz pianists’ lingo, this is like Babe Ruth pointing to a spot in right-center field. And she slugs the ball out of the park.
Lots of “free” pianists have copied Hancock’s Ravelian tone-clusters, pounded out Tyner’s block chords, or mad-dashed about the keyboard like Taylor. But few (any?) have captured the balletic limber—the acrobatic joy—of this music, much less transmuted it into his or her own voice and…