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

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.

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.

Massive new career retrospective on Athens, GA's college rock heroes from a former local scenester

One of there most successful and well-regarded producers in the music business delivers a Zen-like curveball of a memoir that reflects on decades of witnessing creativity.

Oh, Yoko! A more polarizing figure in music history is hard to find, but soldiering on in the face of criticism is part of what Yoko Ono has always done and continues to do - without apology or excuse - even as she enters her 90th year. Not only has Yoko persevered after witnessing the death of her husband at the hands of a madman over 40 years ago, but since that fateful day she has lived a second life and continued to create meaningful art while cultivating a... Read More

Veteran journalist Allan Kozinn and documentarian Adrian Sinclair set out to climb "Mount McCartney" over three massive volumes that place the ex-Beatles solo career under a new microscope.

Before black turns to picture; before you see anything at all onscreen, the first thing you get to experience when you settle in to watch “Apocalypse Now,” is the sound of a Moog synthesizer mimicking the rhythmic chop of a helicopter blade. As director Francis Ford Coppola recounts in the forward to Albert Glinsky’s weighty tome on the life of electronics pioneer Bob Moog, “The Moog gave us the ability to roll sound effects and music into one.”Switched On: Bob Moog... Read More

The year was 1976, long before "hot stampers" were even a thing. John Lennon presided over a good old-fashioned record pressing shoot-out-- in federal court, no less. The pressings played in the Southern District of New York's federal courthouse had songs familiar to lovers of Lennon's ROCK 'N' ROLL album, his beautiful homage to early rock and roll, but the two albums' quality couldn't have been farther apart. The first... Read More