Category ODDS & SODS
4 x 4
To be honest, I’ve forgotten how many post series have been begun and abandoned after two or three articles. Sometimes the ideas have been good, but limited (Art on your Sleeve, for example). Others have driven a theme until it was out of gas (the ‘Car‘ series of album covers springs to mind). However most series […]
SPIRITS IN THE SKY
Having received polite encouragement to pursue the ‘Curiosity Corner’ series from indulgent readers, I rushed off to compile a list of candidates, pulling out LPs and CDs with butterfly abandon. I thought about the 1956 Folkways album, Folk Music of Jamaica, then jumped to the recent haul of library records and the battered Heavy Rock […]
CASSETTES COLLATED
A few years back I came across a seemingly serious new event: International Cassette Day. Apparently some misguided souls were entirely genuine in wanting to reenergize this obsolete and never-very-good-in-the-first-place medium on the back of the (then) nascent vinyl revival. Well, LPs are certainly going strong, but thankfully cassettes remain consigned to the back of the audio wardrobe in […]
THAT FUSION VIBE
Between 18th and 20th April 1967, while The Beatles were in Abbey Road mixing ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ and ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)’, influential young vibraphone player Gary Burton was in RCA Victor’s New York Studio B recording an album with his new quartet. Although only twenty-four years old, Burton was a […]
10 TERRIFIC RECORD LABELS
A visual post of some favourite record labels * Which of these do you like the most? What label would you add? *
FILE NOTES
If you have an awful lot of music, the question inevitably arises, ‘How should I file it?’ The debate has been raging forever, or at least since Thomas Edison kicked off music collecting. In fact these pages have recently seen some lively Commentary. That’s file as in ‘put a physical object somewhere where you stand a better-than-even chance […]
ANTISOCIAL IN THE INNER SANCTUM
Music Room full yet? Almost [smile] Can I check it out? Er… Sure [Are you lint free? Dandruff free? Dusted? Scrubbed? Fully prepped?] New shelves! Neat. All the better to file you in, my dears. Alphabetical order, of course. [covert sigh] A, top left. Z round there, low. No system, no find it. Compilations? You, […]
SOUNDTRACK
How do you file the soundtrack albums in your collection? The Vinyl Connection library has them alphabetically under ‘Soundtrack’, a nice little section sitting snugly between Sonic Youth and The Soup Dragons (the CDs) and a bigger vinyl section sandwiched comfortably twixt The Someloves and Joe South. If you browse any collection of soundtrack albums […]
THE BOURNE SYNTHESIS
Pianist / composer Matthew Bourne has been working in the area of improvised jazz for a number of years, but on acquiring an original Lintronics Advanced Memory Moog he became enamoured with the possibilities offered by this vintage analogue synthesiser. After having the device painstakingly restored, Bourne used the Memory Moog in performance and later […]
A MUCH NEEDED VOID
First up, apologies to those of you who have been awaiting this review for longer than you should have awaited it. The fault was mine entirely in that I was confused because I thought I had three different albums to listen to again but it seems that I sort of didn’t. More one-and-a-bit. Let me tell you […]
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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