Music and Recording Features

If there's one word that best describes the sound of the Boston-bred alt-rock quartet known as Pixies, it has to be "dynamics." It's a musical milieu Pixies have deftly presented for 37 years and counting, right from the outset of the sinister janglefest known as "Caribou," the opening track on their inaugural September 1987 EP on 4AD, Come On Pilgrim.

From there, short, sanguine, sweet, succinctly titled songs like "Debaser," "Velouria," "Monkey Gone to Heaven," "Gigantic," "Here Comes Your Man," "Gouge Away," and "Where Is My Mind?" have all served to cement the bedrock of Pixies' planet of sound. Chief Pixies songwriter and vocalist/guitarist Black Francis—born Charles Thompson—recently described it in an interview for Stereophile as this: "Let's be quiet. Now, let's be loud. Let's be whispering. Now, let's be explosive." That's a precise four-sentence descriptor not only of their entire prior CV but also of Pixies' latest, and ninth studio album, the forebodingly titled The Night the Zombies Came, which was released by BMG in October 2024.

Why had a high-end hi-fi magazine felt the need to produce a classical LP when the thrust of real record companies in 1989 is almost exclusively toward CD and cassette? Why did the magazine's editors think they had a better chance than most experienced professional engineers in making a record with audiophile sound quality? Were they guilty of hubris in thinking that the many years between them spent practicing the profession of critic would qualify them as record producers?

"That's pretty odious," Andy Summers says to me. "An odious comparison." His blueish eyes darken. Roughly an hour into our 90-minute face-to-face interview, I'd asked if it bothers him that in terms of reach and staying power, his solo oeuvre will never match his work with The Police.

To me, the observation seemed factual and uncontroversial, like saying that the sun rises in the east. The Police sold more than 75 million records and played some of the largest venues in the world. The night before our interview, I'd watched Summers perform a show in a 400-seat theater in rural Waldoboro, Maine.

So, what's this all about? Most of you already know—after all, we've been doing it since 1991, and it's one of our most popular features. But if you're new to Stereophile, here it is: Originally, the light-hearted conceit was, these are the records you'd be willing to lay down your life for. (This foie gras is to die for!) But, let's be real: That ain't gonna happen, or so I hope.

As Vilray Bolles marched down Manhattan's Second Avenue on a rainy afternoon late in 2014, participating in a demonstration against police brutality, he slipped on the wet pavement, fell hard on his right hand, and broke his pinky. For a guitarist, a broken finger can be a major, if not catastrophic, setback. But the gods were smiling on Bolles. He was, in fact, a lapsed guitarist, having all but abandoned hopes of a musical career, and the universe was giving him a nudge, not just back into music but into a collaboration with Rachael Price, one of contemporary pop's great vocalists, who, when she isn't singing cabaret jazz with Bolles, fronts the headlining rock band Lake Street Dive.

1996 was a banner year for Ray Davies—one of the most talented writers and conceptualists rock has ever produced. After more than 30 years with The Kinks, the group he has led off and on along with his younger brother Dave, Ray was enjoying a new career as a solo artist. His keen wit and storytelling ability enabled him to take his remarkable one-man play, 20th Century Man, to packed houses and critical acclaim all over the United States. The play, based loosely on his equally remarkable fictionalized autobiography, X-Ray, provided a unique insight into the forces that have shaped Ray Davies's long, prolific career as a rock songwriter.

In the Fall of 1989, Stereophile magazine released its first recording, of Gary Woodward and Brooks Smith playing flute sonatas by Prokofiev and Reinecke, and a work by American composer Griffes that gave the LP its title: Poem (footnote 1). The full">http://www.stereophile.com//interviews/527/">full story was published in the September 1989 issue (p.66). We wanted to offer our readers an LP of acoustic music made with the minimum of electronics and processing—the sounds of the instruments would be as true to reality as possible. The images of the instruments were also captured with a purist microphone technique so that, with even a halfway decent system, a true soundstage would be created between and behind the loudspeakers when the recording was played back.