Long passages of trembling guitar and deep drones, like the sounds of crying ghosts or freight trains in the deep distance, are interrupted by little blasts of electronic scrawl and metallic whisper. Tracks run into one another with little or no obvious…
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Puma is Oystein Moen on keyboards and electronics, Stian Westerhus on guitar and electronics, and Gard Nilssen (also of Bushman’s Revenge) on drums. Half Nelson Courtship, an often unsettling piece of work and one that refuses to be ignored, is the band’s third album, and their first for the excellent Rune Grammofon label.
Soon after raving over Fred Hersch’s new piano-trio album, Whirl, I learned that it was also available on 180-gram vinyl. I’ve since obtained a pressing and can report that, good as the CD sounded, the LP sounds considerably better.
Hersch’s piano sounds airier, a bit more extended in the highs. More striking, Eric McPherson’s drums, while still somewhat compressed (the only serious sonic complaint I had about the CD), come off much more detailed. His rhythmic subtleties are clearer, and the individual pieces of the drum kit are more distinctive. At the opening of the first track, you…
This morning we received our office copies of the October 2010 issue, which includes the latest installment of "Recommended Components."
Putting this one together was not easy, getting it out the door on time was stressful—there were all sorts of fiery e-mails and late-night phone calls, the waving of arms and the gnashing of teeth—but now the issue exists, and I can hardly remember any of the frustration involved in creating it.
It's alive, and it's beautiful.
The Cambridge Audio Topaz AM10 has a phono stage.
Today I’m working on the Integrated Amplifiers section of the Stereophile Buyer’s Guide. Have I ever told you that I love integrated amplifiers? I do. I love integrated amplifiers because they make my life easier—they add convenience, that is—without necessarily sacrificing quality.
I remember the day I walked into Jonathan Scull’s office—Jonathan was our senior editor at the time, and I was Ariel Bitran’s age, just starting out as editorial assistant—and I asked Jonathan what an integrated…
On the train this morning, deep into Aaron Copland’s classic, What to Listen for in Music, which Art Dudley discusses in our November issue, I read a bit about rhythms and polyrhythms. Copland is giving a brief history on the use and evolution of rhythm in modern Western composition, explaining how we got from basic two-four time marches to much more complex combinations of two or more independent rhythms in varying times. This is what I read:
Don’t imagine for an instant that such rhythmic complexities were unknown until our time. [Copland is writing in the 1930s.] On the…
John Zorn’s rep as the angry bad boy of the downtown avant-garde has always been a bit of a caricature. His music has long stressed wit and beauty as much as squeals and hollers. But in the last few years, he’s tapped into a buoyant, almost gentle lyricism while still sounding distinctively Zorn.
It may have started in 2005 with a new series of compositions that he called “Book of Angels: Masada Book Two.” Masada was the quartet he formed in the early ‘90s (one of that decade’s most exciting and signature jazz bands). More to the point here, it was a book of eventually over 300…
Photo: HeadRoom.
Fang Bian, designer of the Head-Direct HiFiMAN HM-801 portable music player, is a 31-year old audiophile, music lover, and student of Nanotechnology at Hunter College in the City University of New York. In the early 1990s, Fang bought his first CD player, and, with it, discovered his curious attraction to audio.
It was 1993, and a Sony ad running in a Chinese audio magazine caught Fang’s attention. The ad was for one of Sony’s portable music players. Fang was so impressed by the looks, obvious convenience, and promised performance of this thing that he…
A few thousand jazz fans are feeling lightheaded this morning. They saw Sonny Rollins’ 80th-birthday concert at the Beacon Theater in New York City last night, and they’re still marveling (especially those too young to have witnessed giants walking the earth in great number) that, finally, they’ve seen a concert that made them tremble and that people will be talking about years from now.
In the past decade or so, we’ve come to expect 10 or 15 magical minutes from a Rollins concert, a long passage, maybe two, of transcendence—when the saxophone colossus unlocks a new passageway into the…
The two Big Eye IPAs I had enjoyed with dinner were doing the trick. I was feeling weightless even before stepping onto the ferry. Beautiful people crowded the front, holding onto railings and each other, while some sat inside the old, wooden frame. Lower Manhattan was soft, quiet, and blue, and two towers of light shot high into the night sky. Suddenly, imperceptibly, the unreal city became smaller and more distant: I hadn’t noticed that the ferry had departed. We could just as easily have been riding a magic carpet. Robert Baird and I were on our way to see John Prine at…
Stereogum premiered the video for Neil Young’s “Angry World” from his upcoming solo album, Le Noise.
Interesting.
The song begins and ends with looping guitar and voice, creating a nice circular structure; the song is endless, perhaps. The thick, crunchy guitar tone, balanced as it is with fine high end light, is extremely cool and expertly handled by Young, and the video—especially the hot girl parts—is intriguing. But I’m less impressed by Young’s vocal delivery and the lyrical content, which strike me as being a bit weak and lazy. It’s an angry…