Though it was shown at last Spring's Chicago AXPONA show and has been available overseas for awhile, Luxman America last month began distribution of its now PD-151 MKII turntable, which replaces the well-regarded 151A. The new model features a new, original LTA-309 tonearm featuring a knife-edge bearing originally developed by the classic Japanese brand SAEC. The new static-balanced arm features a machined aluminum arm base and VTA/SRA adjustability.The 3 speed... Read More

(This piece originally appeared in slightly different form in Issue 73, the September/October 1991 issue of The Absolute Sound. It has been edited and updated for Issue 5/6 of The Tracking Angle, Winter 1995/96.)Beginning with his eponymous 1970 debut, and continuing throughout 11 Warner Brothers solo albums, Ry Cooder has demonstrated that in addition to being an extraordinary folk/blues guitarist—particularly on bottleneck—and a serviceable though hardly... Read More

U-Turn’s most ambitious and sophisticated turntable yet offers an impressive package of performance-enhancing features starting with a new one piece molded tapered magnesium 220 millimeter effective length, gimbal-bearing tonearm fitted with a pre-installed and aligned nude elliptical stylus Ortofon 2M Blue MM cartridge. The Theory adds electronic speed control that at the turn of a knob lets you change from 33 1/3 to 45rpm . More important than the convenience of it,... Read More

The mystery of Bladee increases yet again. Never slowing down for anyone, the 28-year-old Swedish artist and Drain Gang leader returns with Spiderr, his second album this year after March’s Ecco2k collaboration, Crest. Bladee (Benjamin Reichwald) is this era’s most prolific and enigmatic cult icon, constantly evolving his aesthetic as legions of terminally online teenagers rush to copy his every move (and horrifically fail). Since his 2018 mixtape Icedancer, Bladee’s... Read More

This week, Temporal Drift announced the first official CD and vinyl reissues of Japanese psychedelic rock band Les Rallizes Dénudés' three-album discography. Originally released on limited edition CDs in 1991, this series marks the first official vinyl and digital releases of these seminal recordings.The three albums—’67-'69 Studio et Live, Mizutani / Les Rallizes Dénudés, and ’77 Live—capture the band from their formation to their artistic height, and were... Read More

Creed Taylor produced records are no doubt among your most treasured, whether on CTI, which he founded in 1967, or Verve or other labels in which he was involved. Taylor passed away Augusts 22nd, 2022 at age 93. The recently released documentary "Creed Taylor, The Music Came First" is now available as a free, high resolution stream on the Snapshots Music and Arts Foundation website. If you click on "Vimeo" from that site you can watch full screen... Read More

(Revised Sept 17, 2022)Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking: “What’s this now, another audiophile reissue of Kind of fu*king Blue?!” But here’s the thing: not only is this new one—pressed by Acoustic Sounds at 45rpm across two slabs of 200-gram UHQR Clarity vinyl—the best of the bunch; there almost certainly won’t be a better one for the foreseeable future.Not much need be said at this point about the 1959 Miles Davis classic: the best-selling jazz album of all time;... Read More

Dear Tracking Angle reader: the site has been live for a few weeks now with both new and "vintage" content. We hope you are enjoying both. However, as we post more "vintage" content and new readers arrive, they have to "dig" to find the new content, so, I've decided to move all of the new content to the front of the line and push the old (but equally interesting and useful) content to the back. This is a onetime move but for now... 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

Ry Cooder, in 1959, when he was 12 bought a copy of a ten inch record on an odd label with an amateurish paste-on cover and mimeographed liner notes tucked inside. The record was Get On Board by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, two middle aged Black men who had been playing blues for Black audiences for more than two decades, but now, probably to their own surprise, were becoming popular with young white people. Cooder began listening and woodshedding and we know the... Read More

In 1960, often referred to as “The Year of Africa,” seventeen former French and British colonies in Africa became free, independent nations. In the U.S., in February 1960, the struggle of Black Americans to attain the civil rights which had been promised them by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, entered a more aggressive, confrontational phase when in Greenville, North Carolina Black students, frustrated and angered by the slow progress in ending segregation,... Read More

As I paid $25 for an original US copy of Lou Reed’s 1978 live album Take No Prisoners, my local record shop owner said, “Enjoy it, man, I’ve never seen this record before. Plus it’s a promo.” Indeed it is: not only is there a sticker from Arista denoting it a DJ copy originally loaned for promotional use only, but there’s also a bold red hype sticker reading “SPECIALLY PRICED TWO-RECORD SET—All the raw excitement of Lou Reed-Live,” with quotes from the Chicago... Read More

Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema, the duo that formed Royal Trux in the late '80s, don't look or sound like one of the smartest bands of all time. I saw them open for Pavement at the Roxy Theater in Atlanta in 1997. The two looked like they had escaped from the pages of an R. Crumb comic book. Singer Jennifer Herrema 's long pale arm was wrapped with black leather straps like some kind of profane arm-tefillah. Neal Hagerty had his back toward the... Read More

Charles Lloyd is a force of nature. At 84, he’s not only active but very nearly at the top of his game, blowing blues, ballads, and up-tempo rousers—holding whole notes and raining sheets of sound—with grace, verve, and beauty. He has also been a superb gatherer of talent over the decades. His breakthrough album as a leader, Dream Weaver, featured Keith Jarrett, Cecil McBee, and Jack DeJohnette, in 1966, before any of them were known. In the past decade, unlike some... Read More

Readers on this website might be most familiar with me for my classical music reviews, but the breadth of music I enjoy and collect spans far beyond the purview of Bartok and Brahms. Japanese popular music has long been one of my particular interests. I tracked down my first Dir en grey CDs way back in middle school, and since that time over the last 15 or so years, I’ve been steadily importing physical media from the land of the rising sun. My journey has been long... Read More

Blue Train is old enough to be on Social Security, yet this reissue (with an additional album of alternative takes) seems to have created a stir probably greater than when it was first released January, 1958. Rudy Van Gelder recorded it in his Hackensack, New Jersey home studio, September, 15th 1957, 65 years ago to the day I’m writing this.Blue Train is the only album Coltrane recorded for Blue Note. He’d signed with Prestige and did this “one off” built upon a... Read More