Category e) Naughts [2000 – 2009]

REGA-L AFFIRMATION

Imagine the excitement. First turntable purchase in over twenty years. Frown at the brain-bending decision: what to get? Stagger under the swirling weight of unanswerable questions. What will suit the rest of the system best? How does a Hi-Fi shop audition translate to a suburban lounge-room? Quiver at the realisation this is the biggest purchase—after […]

COMET, CACTUS, CAFE

Decade Diving Number #4 2006 Though I tend not to loiter at the heavier end of the music spectrum here in Vinyl Connection land, there is a goodly chunk of noisy stuff in the collection. Avatar by US West Coast band Comets On Fire is an album I’ve had for a while and really like, despite an aversion […]

DECADE DIVING #1

Several ‘Album Anniversary’ posts have appeared here at Vinyl Connection. We have cruised to Köln with Keith (Jarrett), raved about Relayer and hung out with the Minstrel In The Gallery forty years on. Sometimes it’s just too hard to resist the lure of the decade-driven ‘It was twenty (thirty, forty) years ago, today…’. Yet I’ve […]

THANKS FOR DROPPING BY

For some blogs, fifty-five thousand page views is an average week. For Vinyl Connection it is the culmination of over two-and-a-half years of posts. That’s OK; a mass audience was neither the goal nor expectation. Still, it is a little milestone worth marking, so I dipped into the VC catalogue and pulled out spreadsheet entries […]

LISTENER’S DIGEST #2: YOUNG, FOCUS, SEA AND CAKE, TPOTUSA, SCHOENBERG

Having been doing the single parent thing for well over a day now, our appreciation of Ms Connection’s contribution to the good life at chez Vinyl Connection is shooting up the charts with a bullet. Amongst the chores, errands, boy-wrangling and general infrastructure maintenance there has, nevertheless, been space for spinning a few discs. Here are […]

FIELD TESTING THE THEORY

It is a funny thing, the vinyl hunter-gathering lifestyle. Although I have a number of tasty records in transit from exotic locations world-wide (all right, you got me; from the US and UK), the prospect of a record fair last Sunday was too good to miss. A leave pass negotiated, off I trotted, returning home a […]

EARTH AND MOON

Sometimes reading blogs can be expensive: you read, you like, you must have… the purchase is a direct result of reading a particular post. Other times, I’ve noted indirect references to an artist rated highly by the writer and somehow added a pencil note to the old cerebral cortex. An example is the band Earth, alluded […]

FLOYDITTIES

What do you do when you have the entire catalogue of an artist, the ‘Best of’ albums, most titles on at least two formats, plus a goodly selection of bootlegs? If you answered, ‘See your therapist’, you get points plus that special superior feeling that attends the suspicion a fellow music lover may just be […]

ALMANAC PLAYLIST – 21 JULY

Today I employed the Almanac Strategy © for my ‘work at home’ playlist. This is what it yielded for the 21st of July. The information in italics is sourced from various internet sites. There are links to youtube videos for most featured songs. 1947 Born on this day, Cat Stevens, singer, songwriter. 1967 UK No.2 single ‘Matthew And Son’, […]

KOMPUTER WORLDS

“Beam myself into the future” Needing to choose a CD for an album-length child-accompanied drive across the Melbourne suburbs, I pulled out Kraftwerk’s Computer World. There wasn’t much risk as the boy really likes Man-Machine. When he saw what I’d pulled out, he gave it the thumbs up and even an endorsing, ‘Good choice Daddy’, so […]