Paul Simon: So Beautiful or So What
Hear Music HRM-32814 (CD; the LP comes with a voucher for hi-rez downloads). 2011. Paul Simon, Phil Ramone, prods.; Andy Smith, eng. AAD? TT: 38:15
Performance ****½
Sonics ***½
"Love & Blessings"? "Questions for the Angels"? It seems that Paul Simon, who will turn 70 in October, has begun to ask life's Big Questions in preparation for his own exit. Yet in this case, seeming is not reality, and at 69, Simon has returned to his polyglot musical influences (that he may or may not have heisted...but that's an argument for another day) to…
Ladies love the Linkski Design Exposed loudspeakers.
At pretty much the same time (just around noon on Wednesday), five lovely women sent me pretty much the same e-mail:
“Have you seen these?” they asked. “I want them,” they said.
I had not seen them, but they are beautiful. We can learn from this. There must be a lesson hidden here. But what? Girls like concrete? Girls like it raw and rough?
Let’s read from the press materials. Perhaps we’ll find some clues. The designer, 29-year old Shmuel Linski, says:
In my work I tried to give, in addition… Lately, when I’ve been hungry for some good, uncomplicated, headshaking, soul-lifting songwriting, the kind that drops from the summer sky like a sudden shower and leaves a rainbow in its wake, I’ve turned to Slave Ambient, the sophomore release from The War On Drugs.
Recorded over the last four years in front man Adam Granduciel’s home studio in Philadelphia, Jeff Ziegler’s Uniform Recording, and Echo Mountain in Asheville, NC, the album is a drive to the ocean, windows down, head back, shades on. Acoustic and electric guitars, synthesizers, drums, and Granduciel’s voice, rambling and…
It was just a matter of time, I suppose. Almost exactly a year after Rega replaced their popular P1 record player with the upgraded RP1, the British company has introduced the new RP3.
I don’t know anything about it—Rega doesn’t tell me anything—but Rega’s website informs the world that the RP3 is fitted with the new, hand-assembled RB303 tonearm and uses a low-vibration, low-noise 24V motor assembly, hand-tuned to its circuit. (Like the P3, the RP3 can be factory fitted with Rega's Elys 2 phono cartridge.)
Also employed is something Rega calls “Double Brace…
"Sometimes I can evoke the breathless rush of feeling that I experienced the first time that I ever really heard Robert Johnson's music. Sometimes a note will suggest just a hint of the realms of emotion that opened up to me in that moment, the sense of utter wonder, the shattering revelation."—Peter Guralnick, from Searching for Robert Johnson (New York: Dutton Obelisk, 1989)
It's an experience that all true blues fans need to savor. Fly into Memphis, drive south on US 61, into Coahoma County, Mississippi, down to the Delta, down to Robert Johnson country. There, on one of those steamy…
The second Johnson anthology, The Complete Original Masters: Centennial Edition, available only at www.thecompleterobertjohnson.com, is a far more ornate affair—"deluxe" is the word Sony's marketing department uses—whose centerpiece is a dozen vinyl replicas of 10" 78rpm shellac discs, to be played at 45rpm, on which are pressed the 12 singles released on 78s in Johnson's lifetime. Also included in this package, which is limited to 1000 copies and retails for $349, is the above-mentioned two-CD set of Johnson's music, as well as two intriguing collections on CD of related recordings. The…
As mind-boggling as it now sounds, the first obstacle Johnson's recordings had to clear just to survive were the pressures of capitalism and fascism run amok.
"There were two big bloodbaths in the vault at RCA, and probably Decca and Columbia," Brooks says. "In the Depression, they melted stuff down just to get some money in. And then WWII, for the scrap drive. What they did in WWII, they looked at sales figures—so blues, country, and a lot of jazz, it only sold 500 copies, who the hell's gonna want these? Out. How some of these survived, I don't know. It's arbitrary. I think what…
The second Capital AudioFest, sponsored by Carnegie Acoustics, takes place this weekend at the Rockville, Maryland Crowne Plaza, pictured here in Friday evening's rainstorm. On show are 61 brands in 28 rooms and I will be reporting live—well, as live as possible considering that when I am in a room listening to a system, I am not blogging and vice versa—from the show.
Hours are 11am–7pm, Saturday July 9, and 11am–6pm, Sunday July 10. A raffle is being held at 6pm on both days, and every attendee receives a free sampler CD from MA Recordings. There will also be a swapmeet on Sunday…
One of the first rooms I went into was that featuring products from The Signal Collection, the distribution company run by the affable Chris Sommovigo (right). Also in the room was Todd Garfinkel of MA Recordings (left), who was using Chris's system to play the masters of some of his excellent-sounding recordings. (I mentioned below that MA had made a sampler CD to be given ever attendee.) The speaker featured in the photo is the M3 Mk3 ($6499/pair) from Swedish manufacturer Transmission Audio, a floorstanding sibling of the standmounted M1i Ribbon Mini I had auditioned at the Atlanta…
Listening to the Philharmonic speakers, I couldn't see a source. There was an AVA CD player but its display said "No Disc." There was a turntable but no LP playing. Then I saw an iPad in someone's hand. It was controlling Jim Salk's new StreamPlayer ($1295), the rightmost of the two small red-line-fronted boxes on top of the preamp in the photo. This is similar in concept to the Bryston BDP-1 we reviewed in June, in that it is a PC running Linux that is optimized for streaming audio from an external source, in this case Salk's own NAS drive (the left-most box), connected by Ethernet cable.…
