Author Archives: Vinyl Connection
STRUT REDUX
If you survive initial rock and roll success, what follows is very much like growing up in public. To be sure, survive is a potent word in this context. So many musicians have gone to join the choir invisible it’s a wonder that there are enough left to form a band. Yet numerous artists who […]
OF RINGS AND SWEDES
How to approach Bo Hansson’s Lord of the Rings? Having played it so often over many decades, the chances of this reviewer listening dispassionately are about the same as Gollum opening a secondhand jewellery store. It must be said that not everyone likes the Swedish keyboard player’s album. In its early days, MOJO: The Music Magazine […]
RETURN OF THE SILVER THING
By the time I found the resources—both personal and financial—for a first trip out of Australia, it was so long after most of my peers had ‘done Europe’ that my plans caused barely a wrinkle in the social fabric. Yet the very idea ruffled my feathers, furrowed my brow, and tended to turn my […]
THE TWO LIBRARIES
LORD OF THE RINGS — A BOOK AND MUSIC STORY PART II — THE TWO LIBRARIES Most of Australia’s population (then and now) cluster in the major cities, meaning that most of those aspiring to further education after secondary school do not, by necessity, need to live away from home. So I was a day-release patient, commuting from the south-eastern […]
THE FELLOWSHIP OF BOOKSELLERS
LORD OF THE RINGS — A BOOK AND MUSIC STORY PART I — THE FELLOWSHIP OF BOOKSELLERS After high school finished there was a clear message from the parental end of the dinner table that the young scion was not to be lazing around all summer relaxing and recovering from the stresses of exams, but […]
PROLOGUE: CONCERNING HOBBITS, AND OTHER MATTERS
Needing to choose a book to read and reflect upon for a literature project in his Grade 5 class, I was surprised and delighted when the boy asked to borrow The Hobbit. Other than some pathetic attempts to conquer Lego: Lord of the Rings on the Play Station, we haven’t really done much Tolkien in the family […]
10 SPACIER ALBUM COVERS
Space: The Vinyl Frontier This is the second voyage of the starship Vinyl Connection, its mission to collect space-themed album covers for your extra-terrestrial enjoyment. (The first voyage was here) Most of these are curated. That is, I’ve used the Connection tractor-beam to draw in covers to make a (hopefully) pleasing and aesthetically interesting constellation of covers. The […]
KEEP OR CRATE?
Record collectors know how there slowly accumulates, around the gems and the sparkling finds, a considerable meterage of albums having an unsteady foothold on the beachhead of the collection. Those LPs plucked from the bargain bin where they rightly languished; that gap-filling reunion album that should have stayed where it was; the so-called ‘supergroup’ that […]
10 SPACEY ALBUM COVERS
After the Tomita article, there was a quiver of interest in album covers featuring space (It’s the final frontier, don’t you know). A couple of fine suggestions were made, and I recalled one or two LPs posted a long time ago in a galaxy far far away. Well, that was enough to get me thinking… what else […]
CAST AWAY
“If you gotta kill people, kill them with love, you fuckers!” John Power bellows at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire audience where his post-La’s band Cast are performing as part of their Troubled Times tour in 2012. As analysis of that extraordinary exhortation would require a major thesis*, we’ll just skip over his muddled proselytising and […]
TOMITA – A TRIBUTE
Japanese synthesiser pioneer Isao Tomita died in the first week of May at the age of eight-four. Inspired by Robert Moog’s electronic instruments and the work of Wendy Carlos, Tomita produced a substantial catalogue of studio albums in addition to several live releases and a significant body of soundtrack work. In a previous post, I wrote briefly about […]
LIGHT RADIO
A new album by All India Radio was released on April 15th. The band has been around since the year 2000 and has produced more than a dozen albums. Having detected signs of well-crafted retro-electronica, I was pretty sure I’d enjoy The Slow Light, and so it proved. It is an album of two distinct […]
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