Stephen Mejias

You can do it with Chuck">http://www.converse.com/index.asp?bhcp=1#home_red_2007">Chuck Taylors, you can do it with Mini">http://www.miniusa.com/#/build/configurator/mini-m">Mini Coopers, you can do it with Cob">http://www.cobworks.com/workshops.htm">Cob Houses, and now you can even do it with loudspeakershttp://www.stereophile.com/news/101507martinlogan/">loudspeakers;. MartinLogan, ever fashion conscious, has launched a Custom Shop, allowing music lovers to style their own loudspeakers.

The pairing has been likened to Mary Poppins and Satan. That's the easy and obvious way out, and it's a load of crap. It's much more difficult than that. They're much more similar than they are different, coming together to tell one story and filling in each other's blanks only when the reverb gets too thick. But I don't want to say any more about it. I'll now speak only of the differences I heard between listening in the office — through my computer's Dell speakers — and listening at home — with the Musical Fidelity A3.5 system and Totem Arro speakers.

Masaki Batoh’s Brain Pulse Music, available today from Drag City, is “a collection of seven prayers and requiems to the victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake.”

The album utilizes Batoh’s Brain Pulse Music (BPM) machine, a wildly futuristic device partnered with headgear, goggles, and a motherboard, said to be developed and built by MKC, Inc. The BPM machine, editions of which will also be available for sale from Drag City, monitors brain waves and transmits them via radio waves to the motherboard, which, in turn, converts the radio waves into pulses that are then outputted as sound.

This might be the hottest day of the year. It feels like a hundred degrees out there. It's really hot. On what might be the hottest day of the year, all of our bus and subway systems — connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and, of course, New Jersey — were absolutely crippled.

It’s been awhile since I last hooked up with Massive Attack. Heligoland is the unit’s fifth full-length studio release and, with collaborations from Damon Albarn, Hope Sandovol, Tunde Adebimpe, and Martina Topley-Bird, it has to be good. Right?

You know how sometimes you can't tell how wonderful an audio component is until after you've removed it from your system?

I will not pretend to understand the concept behind The Ganzfeld EP, electronic duo Matmos’ upcoming release, but I will simply say that I dig it, deeply. From the press release, because I can’t say it any better:

The EP and the album [The Marriage of True Minds, available early 2013] have the same conceptual basis: telepathy.

Telepathy!

For the past four years the band have been conducting parapsychological experiments based upon the classic Ganzfeld (“total field”) experiment, but with a twist: instead of sending and receiving simple graphic patterns, test subjects were put into a state of sensory deprivation by covering their eyes and listening to white noise on headphones, and then Matmos member Drew Daniel attempted to transmit “the concept of the new Matmos record” directly into their minds. During videotaped psychic experiments conducted at home in Baltimore and at Oxford University, test subjects were asked to describe out loud anything they saw or heard within their minds as Drew attempted transmission. The resulting transcripts became a kind of score that was then used by Matmos to generate music. If a subject hummed something, that became a melody; passing visual images suggested arrangement ideas, instruments, or raw materials for a collage; if a subject described an action, then the band members had to act that out and make music out of the noises generated in the process of the re-enactment.

The result, to which I am now listening and which is in turn driving me crazy, is perhaps the greatest work I’ve heard from Matmos&#151and that’s saying a lot, as Matmos generally blows my mind.