search

The genesis of Art Of Noise
"Music has always been a passion of mine," Becker told me weeks before I journeyed to San Francisco. "I'm motivated by music that can be transformative. That led me to want to provide a transformative listening space. I am also a curator of architecture and design. Pulling out the connection between design and music was a natural evolution of my interests."

Close to 18 years ago, when Becker began working at the museum, he learned of its "incredible" collection of nearly 500 psychedelic rock posters that was gifted to SFMOMA by Jim Chanin in the…

The new-look Jimi Hendrix Experience (Billy Cox on bass; Mitch Mitchell on drums) recorded a remarkable amount of material between June and August of 1970 at Electric Lady Studios in New York City. The sessions were intended to become First Rays of the New Rising Sun, a double album follow-up to 1968's Electric Ladyland. Hendrix would never…

As an inveterate lover of period instruments with the timbral tang of authority, it's hard to imagine that any Mozart aficionado, even those who might initially turn to Khatia Buniatishvili's contemporaneous, modern-instrument recording of Mozart's Piano Concertos Nos.20 & 23 with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, will not develop a special…

It's easy to hear why performers of all stripes are drawn to Christmas music: The tunes are irresistible. The challenge lies in how every known Christmas tune has been played live and recorded umpteen times. Yet hope springs eternal and every artist who dives in thinks they can bring something new to these…

By the mid-1980s, Elvis Costello was in dire need of a change in musical direction. As he recounts in the extensive new liner notes, he was "playing in a band that suddenly sounded like four strangers." Seeking inspiration, he decided the path forward was to use his own name, Declan…

In my review of the T+A R 2500 R receiver in the August 2024 issue, I covered many of its features and took as deep a dive as time and column inches allowed. Suffice to say, it's a very complex device, a near-complete system minus speakers (and a turntable/cartridge system, if you're into vinyl). It's a radio (FM and FM-HD), CD player, networked streamer-computer, DAC, analog preamplifier (including analog tone controls), class-AB power amplifier, and power supply, all in one relatively compact and mid-weight, well-finished metal chassis. It is…

Jeff Buckley: Mystery White Boy: Live '95-'96

Jeff Buckley (vocals, guitar), Michael Tighe (guitar), Mick Grondahl (bass), Matt Johnson (drums)
Columbia 4979722 (CD, 16/44.1 FLAC, Qobuz/Tidal). 2000. Mary Guibert, Michael Tighe, prods.

I was late to Jeff Buckley's music, not becoming aware of his enormous talent as a songwriter/guitarist/singer until long after his premature death in 1997. His album Grace was one of my 2007 Records to Die For, and soon after that I bought Mystery White Boy: Live '95-'96 . It took me a while to warm up to…

The Jam: All Mod Cons
Polydor Records. 0602537459100. Vic Coppersmith-Heaven, prod.; Peter Schierwade, eng.

Paul Weller was running out of ideas, so he turned to his hero Ray Davies for song-writing inspiration. The immediate result was a vibrant cover of The Kinks' "David Watts." "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight" followed—an epic story on 45rpm. Both are included on All Mod Cons, an album that retains the punk edge and attitude, but it's articulate, it has breadth—harmonies even! Each song is a vignette of British life. But what really shocked…