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The October 2010 issue of Stereophile is now on newsstands. On the cover, you’ll see a pretty much life-sized image of Logitech’s Squeezebox Touch, a real dandy of a hi-fi product that costs just $300 and seems to captivate everyone who comes into contact with it. The normally unflappable Kal Rubinson ends his review (page 118) by advising, “Get a Squeezebox Touch right now. You’ll never look back.” Even our cover photographer, Eric Swanson, fell in love with the little thing. He bought his sample. We chose the Mobile Fidelity version of Beck’s Sea Change for the cover art…
Seeing John Prine the other night on Governor’s Island with Stereophile's Stephen Mejias was a fairly profound experience, owing to Prine’s strange, elegiac tone. It may be that he wasn’t down with the venue (a windy island at night) or that he was simply tired (he looked it), but almost everything he sung, even the fun ones like, “Please Don’t Bury Me,” had an odd sadness clinging to it. I tried not to think about how Prine beat cancer back in 1998. The first time I saw him backstage after the cancer had been cut and radiated out of his throat, he cracked a smile and chirped, “Well…
Today, “Elements of Our Enthusiasm” turns five years old, which, in blog years, is older than the universe. I thank you, dear readers, for sticking around and making this blog one of the most visited pages on our entire website. “Elements” is more popular than Justin Bieber.
“Elements” is way more popular than CD Players. “Elements” even gains more views than Budget Components. In fact, by the end of next year, "Elements" hopes to be more popular than Floorstanding Loudspeakers—no small task since Floorstanding Loudspeakers is crazy popular.
Today is also my…
The Ugly American: stalking the streets of Paris’ Latin Quarter, tongue wagging, wrists dragging along the pavement like Quasimodo, desperately searching out record stores in which to spend my rapidly depreciating (Go!) Euros.
Yes, that sad image is a slightly exaggerated portrait of yours truly, trying to hold together a marriage while also getting in as much record shopping during a trip to Paris and Berlin as is humanly possible. After many forays into the wonderous side streets of the French capital, I settled on Crocodisc as my favorite. Two stores side by side, one filled…
Berlin was a much smaller market yet there were some interesting music stores, headed by Mr. Dead & Mrs Free which sells only new vinyl. Nearby was Rock Steady Records (pictured above) which had a decent selection of used vintage vinyl. I hear the flea market by the Brandenburg Gate has a number of vinyl dealers but somehow I never made it there.
So call me a wild colonial boy, but while I found European record stores fun and all—and being in huge Virgin megastores stuffed full of jazz and classical records made me long for the days when they were still in the U.S.—one visit to Jerry’s Records in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania made me realize what that rock and roll immortal Chuck Berry said best— “Anything you want, we got right here in the U.S.A.” Jerry’s is easily, I mean EASILY! one of the top five record stores here on Starship Earth. The man is a mensch, the store is a huge, rambling barn of a place, and my God does he have…
Sony/Legacy’s 40th anniversary, deluxe reissue of Bitches Brew, Miles Davis’ landmark fusion double-album, is everything that the company’s 50th anniversary reissue of Kind of Blue tried to be but wasn’t: a fitting commemoration, handsomely packaged, with liner notes by a scribe (Greg Tate) who fully grasps the music and its cultural significance, and—a remarkable achievement—a boxed set that warrants tossing the original out.
The box includes a lavish booklet, archive-quality session photos, three CDs (two containing the album and studio outtakes, the other a live concert, of an enlarged…
Stian Westerhus plays guitar in a band called Puma. Having enjoyed Puma’s latest album, Half Nelson Courtship, a powerful assault on the senses, I was anxious to hear Westerhus’s solo work. I expected something brutal—even something frightening, something perhaps verging on the unlistenable—but Westerhus’s second solo LP, Pitch Black Star Spangled (Rune Grammofon RCD 2099/RLP 3099), is something else, something more.
Having listened to Pitch Black Star Spangled several times now and having noted that Westerhus’s debut solo work, Galore, was printed exclusively to…
Returnal (Editions Mego EMEGO 104), the fourth full-length release from Oneohtrix Point Never, explodes into the listening room (or out from the speakers or out from the headphones) with real violence and penetrating force. We are thrust into a heavy storm, a maelstrom; we find ourselves standing beneath an ocean of falling glass, falling sky, falling electronic haze. If instruments could scream, their screams might sound like this, like the opening few moments of Returnal, moments that don’t seem like an opening at all, but someplace else, some other time that escaped us, that started…