Stephen Mejias

There is a pile of boxes in my office. Nothing unusual. Boxes are a fundamental aspect of our lives here at Stereophile, a fundamental aspect of the lives of most audiophiles, I imagine. Inside these boxes, however, there are no amplifiers, no loudspeakers, no turntables. These boxes hold the packaging materials for our Attention Screen release, Live">http://www.stereophile.com/musicrecordings/907att/">Live at Merkin Hall.

If I could attend just one music festival each year, it would be Iceland Airwaves, held October 12–16, in downtown Reykjavik, Iceland. Launched in 1999 (in an airplane hangar!), Iceland Airwaves holds parties and performances in a handful of the city’s best venues and sets exciting local talent alongside outstanding international acts&#151all within a landscape of stunning beauty.

This is what my life will be like starting this Thursday and ending next Tuesday. I should’ve been in this video, though. I mean, seriously: Thao, give me a call next time. What’s up?

Bruce Springsteen's The Promise is fascinating not only because of the high quality of each of its 21 "lost" tracks, but because of the way it bridges 1975's Born to Run and 1978's Darkness on the Edge of Town.

Buddha said:

JA, the industrious, is home today, working on his review of the Slim">http://www.slimdevices.com/index.html">Slim Devices Squeezebox, which will appear in our next eNewsletterhttp://www.stereophile.com/enewsletters/">eNewsletter;. This makes me happy. Happy, not because JA, the boss, is home, but happy because he's working on his review of the Squeezebox. And, the Squeezebox, as">http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=21628">as we know, with all of its delicious features and its oh-so-sleek-and-simple lines that fit snugly in the tiniest of corners to broadcast your Editors and Jimmy Edgars and Pink Martinis and Sonic Youth-slash-Fugazis from your office to your kitchen to your bedside window ledge to your broom closet and back into your sweetly pitter-pattering music-loving heart,

For me, and many people like me, the 365 days that comprise a calendar year are more than just a tidy representation of a brief period of life. Those 365 days mark a period of music discovery, filled with disappointments, surprises, and, if we’re lucky, one or two completely life-altering revelations.

If discovering a new artist is great, even better is discovering an entire record label of exciting new artists. It happens for me with increasing reliability: