If you read Fred Kaplan's review of Jason Moran's From the Dancehall to the Battlefield you may have been sufficiently intrigued to order the Bandcamp download Moran uploaded for purchase this past New Year's Day. I was and I did and glad to have done it. Moran just announced a limited to 300 copies double LP $39.99 vinyl edition available now for pre-order, to be shipped early September. ● 2 LPs ● 180 Gram Vinyl Pressing ● Direct Metal Mastering ● Full... Read More

Every few years, it seems, someone discovers another stack of long-lost tapes from a long-forgotten John Coltrane session and puts them out on CD, LP, or both. The resulting albums garner lavish praise and sell very well, but, really, they’re deep disappointments, textbook cases of hype—the allure of the new, the unknown, the never-before-heard-until-now! The first of the recent excavations, in 2018, was Both Directions at Once, a 1963 date at Rudy Van Gelder’s... Read More

I used to have major ground noise issues and other problems with my electrical service that I tried to solve as most audio enthusiasts do, with power conditioners and dedicated lines. Those produced some improvements, but there still were issues. The proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back" was the installation of an auxiliary whole house generator and its transfer switch, that when power goes out, removes the house from the grid and connects it... Read More

Here are notes on a selection from my favorite books on the history of recording technology, the history of the record business, and the interactions between recording technology, the record business, and the art of music. One example of what I mean by all that is, in the late 1920s, piezoelectric “crystal” microphones supplanted carbon microphones for radio broadcasting. Crystal microphones had a better signal-to-noise ratio than carbon microphones. Therefore, the... Read More

After almost a decade under its belt, Bestial Mouths is still a shape-shifting collective. What started as a group with numerous lineup changes became a vehicle for vocalist Lynette Cerezo to express her lyrics of personal trauma and tribulations. Alongside instrumentalists Brant Showers and Matthew Tucker, Bestial Mouths displays a sound that brings together the gothic elements of post-punk giants Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, and Depeche Mode with some... Read More

Rhino's next two releases in the "High Fidelity" series were announced yesterday. They are Van Morrison's "His Band and the Street Choir" and Jaco Pastorius's "Word of Mouth". Both are available today exclusively at Rhino.com and internationally at select WMG stores. Each release is limited to 5,000 individually numbered copies and priced at $39.98.As with the previous two superb sounding reissues from The Cars and John... Read More

Online used record seller AudioPhileUSA offers a few accessories on its website including Mobile Fidelity Original Master Sleeve, but until now, the company, which was founded in the U.K. decades ago by online record selling pioneer John Turton, who brought it to America before selling it to the current owner Mark Hoover, didn't offer record cleaning accessories. That's now changed with the introduction of the GrooveWasher record cleaner line.While the basic... Read More

The comment feature is back up. For now, it's the slower format we attempted to replace with something faster, which created a problem. So please post comments. However, hit the button once and wait for it to post rather than hitting it repeatedly, which will repeatedly post your comment. Thanks! The photo shows the first Mobile Fidelity reissue of Music From Big Pink (MFSL 1-039) mastered 1/2 speed by the late Stan Ricker on the Ortofon cutting system, released... Read More

Top shelf U.K. journalist Allan Jones second collection of pieces from Rock's front lines

What is pop music? A never-ending cycle of repackaging the past? Or a portal to infinite possibilities? High art, or insipid, assembly-line bubblegum confections? What if it’s all of the above?Charli XCX’s 2017 mixtape Pop 2 decides that pop music can be anything and everything—or at least, that’s the meaning that many have assigned to it. After her prospective third studio album proved too much a logistical hurdle to release (only for all the tracks to leak), within... Read More

Tracking Angle's exclusive visit to Universal Music Group's Iron Mountain tape vault outside of Pittsburgh includes a tour of Iron Mountain Entertainment Services' facilities. The two companies work together. You'll get to go deep within the former limestone mine where Universal Music Group has one of its worldwide tape storage facilities and see how, with the help of Iron Mountain Entertainment Services, the company catalogues and keeps track of... Read More

“Funky” is not a word routinely linked to the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the pioneering avant-garde jazz group of the mid-1960s and beyond whose music tends more toward the cryptic and tangled. But put the needle on “Theme de Yoyo,” the first track of their 1970 album, Les Stances à Sophie, and you’ll be dancing in your head and on your feet in no time.The album was produced as the soundtrack to a French film of that title, and “Theme de Yoyo”—which has vocals by the... Read More

In 2019, Acora Acoustics burst onto the audio landscape with a line of granite enclosure-based loudspeakers and quickly gained a reputation as a top-performing brand, receiving positive reviews and winning "Best of Show" at various audio events. The company seemed like an overnight success, but like so many "overnight success" stories the journey took years of hard work and dedication. Valerio Cora, the co-owner and designer of Acora Acoustics,... Read More

(Below is the press release from UMe regarding the "Aja" release and subsequent Steely Dan reissues. While the second paragraph is forthcoming about the source—"analog non-EQ'd tape copy" (the master tape is MIA)— you have to get to paragraph four to read that the Geffen edition is from Grundman mastered high resolution digital files. While paragraph five lauds the UHQR edition it doesn't reference its "cut from tape" source).... Read More

Sparks, the duo of brothers Russell and Ron Mael is a true chameleons in the world of art-pop. Over decades, Sparks has musically shape-shifted through the realms of glam rock, disco, new wave, electronic music and chamber pop. Refusing to stick to one singular musical identity, Sparks kept a brave artistic face as music trends came and went. Thanks to Edgar Wright's documentary, a fresh demographic exposed to The Sparks Brothers are now beginning to appreciate... Read More

Back in June, Michael Fremer and I discussed my next Tracking Angle piece, and we agreed that I should do something I hadn’t done in a while and review a new album. I did some research and decided that Lucinda Williams’ Stories From A Rock n Roll Heart would be a good choice. Michael agreed, and so it was decided.I hadn’t heard the album, but I’d admired Williams’ music dating back to the time before her 1998 breakthrough Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. Her... Read More

If you want to talk about musicians who embodied the very best in quality, originality, versatility, craft, and sheer showbiz pizzazz, then you have to talk about Carl Davis, the great British composer and conductor, who just passed away at the age of 86.  Born and raised in America, Carl spent most of his life living and working in Britain, and there he was something of a national treasure on the music scene. Several of the TV shows he wrote music for were amongst the most popular of their time and are now acknowledged classics.  Equally at home conducting James Bond or unusual classical Pops repertoire, his greatest contribution was in the revival of interest in silent films.  Here I offer a personal appreciation and remembrance of a musician who resides in the pantheon of film composer greats, along with his American contemporaries John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, and Elmer Bernstein.