Wow And Flutter

Long and short pieces on music you should listen to; audio gear; and pop culture.

Category: Uncategorized (Page 2 of 2)

Strange Days

March 28, 2020 /

Hi, everyone.  I know, I know.  It’s been too long between blog posts.  Between gearing up for the spring record shows, the WFMU Record Fair in Brooklyn, picking up (and listening to) new vinyl – and you, know, working – it’s been tough to squeeze in some good writing.

You know what comes next.

The COVID-19 pandemic – aside from cutting a wide swath of human and financial destruction that is at the time of this writing, sadly only beginning* – wiped out all of my spring vinyl plans, one by one.  The record stores are closed, social distancing is preventing even meeting up to look at potential collections to buy, and the late spring and early summer does not look promising, either.

We’ve got to all do our part to stop this pandemic, and so I’m at home 24/7, working remotely, cooking, sleeping, writing, and listening of course.  The weather has been more favorable than a couple of weeks ago, so it has been less claustrophobic, and I’m able to get out, run and take the dog on walks.  Many, many walks.  And we have (re)discovered our wonderful neighbors and friends, albeit six feet or more away from each other, and found kindness in the most unexpected places.

One bright, shining, silver lining to this new, hopefully temporary life has been in discovering new music and rediscovering treasured recordings.  I have not bought a new piece of physical media in over a month (shocking, I know!) but thanks to the wonders of TIDAL and HDTracks, have been able to voraciously tear through a slew of new or underexposed music.  I’ll be writing about that in the coming days and weeks. 

Until then, stay safe, stay home, stay six feet away, and wash your hands! See you soon.

*mind you, this is not a minor aside.  I do not wish to minimize or make light of what is happening to our world; I am positively horrified at what is happening right now, and hope that all of you are doing well, or at least as well as can be expected.

Wow And Flutter LIVE! at Mill No. 5 in Lowell, MA, October 12th, 2019

August 27, 2019 /

So, you’re probably wondering where I’ve been? Well, getting ready for my first record show! Make your way to Mill No. 5 in Lowell, MA on October 12th, 2019 from noon to 4PM for Wow And Flutter LIVE! I’ll have my table there as part of A Little Bazaar‘s That Hole Thing record show.

Stop by for all your essential vinyl needs as well as some tasty doughnuts from the locals. I’ll have a good selection of clean, vintage vinyl and hot music takes. (The takes are free, the vinyl costs $.) You may not get what you want, but you’ll get what you NEED.

PS I’m always buying vinyl – hit me up at the contact link if you want me to check out your goods for a fair price.

Oh, the humanity!

August 3, 2019 /

I should have known. Everything was going great musically. Great new discs were coming out, like Hot Chip’s AMAZING A Bathfull Of Ecstasy and Bill Callahan’s Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest, and more to come, like the remastered Running On Empty and Eno’s Apollo: Extended Edition. I was finding GREAT used vinyl everywhere. (like a VG+ condition original Mobile Fidelity pressing of Supertramp’s Crime Of The Century for SIX bucks! SIX!)

And then, the cruel, cruel hand of fate struck my stereo: my beloved amplifier got sick. The powerful, sweet beast that is my Harman/Kardon HK990 started shutting itself down occasionally, then more frequently. I found this amp about two years ago on eBay for quite a bargain considering its original $2500 price. It’s a very musical dual-mono Class AB stereo amplifier with room correction and a killer digital-to-audio converter (DAC), and until about a month ago, was very happily driving my NHT Classic Three speakers and CS-10 subwoofer.

Alas, poor amp, we hardly knew ye

And then, the music died. Just the ominous words “Protection Mode”, then silence. Craaaaaaaaaap. I took it to two local places, who threw up their hands and told me to send it to the very reputable United Radio in Syracuse, they’d know what to do. They did – they’d have to do pretty much a complete teardown of the unit to isolate and fix the problem for almost as much as much as I paid for it.

So, for almost a month and a half I was without my Wow-And-Flutter engine to listen to my physical media. Like Joni said, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. So I had United send the unit back to me, and I set to looking for a replacement. The only other amp I’d consider the Harman’s equal is the Anthem STR integrated amplifier, but that would set me back a cool $4500. Sad horns. So, I’m saving my pennies for that.

As luck would have it, my diligent research turned up an almost perfect replacement: plenty of power, an fantastic onboard DAC, analog and digital inputs for all of my stuff, a subwoofer output, outputs that would let me keep recording my vinyl finds (a must) and – bonus points – solid retro good looks. It’s the Yamaha A-S801:

Yamaha to the rescue!

It’s not perfect – I’d prefer that it had a display showing me the current volume/selected input, it’s missing a Pre Out/In so I can connect my headphone amp, but damn, this is a fantastic sounding amplifier – more than satisfying. Best of all, I got an open-box model at the wonderful Crutchfield and saved almost $200 off the sticker price!

If anyone wants a beautiful amp and is willing to put several hundred dollars into it to get at least another ten years out of it, it’s up on eBay for the next couple of days. Bid away while I reacquaint myself with Little Feat’s Waiting For Columbus.

New release: Bill Evans Trio on MoFi

May 12, 2019 /

I’ve been a big fan of Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab‘s half-speed mastered releases since they opened everyone’s ears in the early 80’s as to how GREAT vinyl could sound (and, how crappy the major label pressings were.) They’ve been on a roll lately, tearing off a new bunch of Miles Davis discs, and they’ve started to dip into the Stevie Ray Vaughn catalog, remastering his first two classic discs.

[Mobile Fidelity]

For about three years now the company has been issuing select releases, at a higher price point, that have been pressed using the company’s “Ultradisc One-Step” (UD1S) pressing process. Single albums are spread over two discs, at 45RPM, leaving more room for the grooves and higher fidelity. They come in a fancy box and super heavy-duty packaging, with reproductions of the original artwork and liner notes. Recent releases have been pressed on the company’s “Supervinyl,” which is a new version of the really pure vinyl compound used in the company’s earlier JVC Japanese-pressed discs. Bottom line: this is the best sounding vinyl you’ll find – super silent where it’s supposed to be, and clear as a bell. They’re pricey ($125!) but well worth it.

The latest release is the landmark 1960 release by the Bill Evans Trio, Portrait In Jazz. This is one of my favorite jazz records, and it features the groundbreaking trio of Evans, Paul Motian on drums, and the transcendant bass playing of Scott LaFaro. Up until this time (if you can believe it) the full melodic potential of the bass had never really been explored the way that LaFaro did on this and the subsequent Trio releases. His solos here are just astonishing.Orrin Keepnews’ production is incredibly crisp and clear, one of the best engineered and “real” recordings you’ll hear. Of all the MoFi discs I’ve listened to, I’ve never been as blown away with the sound quality as I was with this release. It really does justice to the source material. These are limited releases (6000 in total) – if you already love this record, order one now before they’re gone.

Record Store Day!

April 13, 2019 /

It’s 6:30 in the morning at in Buffalo, New York. Where else would I be?

Revolver Records, Buffalo NY

It’s the happiest day of the year! It’s Record Store Day, the day where music lovers everywhere get to celebrate the great culture that is the record store, and get the chance to score some great new, often previously unavailable music from, well, everyone. Often the list includes a lot of limited edition, just-for-Record-Store-Day discs, but the real attraction is in the music itself.

This year’s list was really rich and diverse. Each of the past couple of years have offered one or two discs I was really interested in, but this year’s list was an absolute treasure trove of great stuff. Best yet, I managed to get everything I was looking for – I can’t wait to get these home and get them on the turntable!

This year’s RSD haul

Top to bottom, left to right:

  • Bingo Hand Job (a/k/a REM), Live at The Borderline 1991: an oft-bootlegged set from REM, now (presumably) sonically tidied up for the masses
  • Fleetwood Mac, The Alternate Fleetwood Mac: same track order as the classic first album of the pre-Rumours lineup, but all alternate versions/takes
  • Mission of Burma, Peking Spring: first vinyl release of the influential Boston band’s 1998 compilation/rarities disc
  • Courtney Barnett, Everybody Here Hates You: 12″ single B/W “Small Talk”
  • Elvis Costello & The Imposters, Purse EP: four track disc with Elvis collaborating on the songs with Burt Bacharach, Paul McCartney, Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan
  • Bob Dylan, Blood On The Tracks (NY “test pressing” version): do I need another version of this record? No! But the record we all know wasn’t the one Dylan originally recorded in NYC in 1974. Right before Columbia was going to release the record, Dylan decided to re-record a bunch of it in Minneapolis. This is the complete NYC version.
  • Lou Reed, Ecstasy: one of Lou’s last albums first time on vinyl, from 2000, featuring the great Fernando Saunders on bass (limited edition, this one.)

By the way, Buffalo is a GREAT vinyl town, and Revolver is an amazing story. The owner, a great guy named Phil Machemer, got his start selling vinyl for a couple of years in popup locations around Buffalo before opening Revolver in another part of the city a couple of years ago. In December, he opened a second (!) location in Elmwood Village (the college-y part of town, where I went this weekend.) I can’t think of a better example of the strength of the vinyl resurgence than this! A must-visit if you’re up this way.

I Can’t Believe You Don’t Own This Record – When I Was Born For The Seventh Time

February 3, 2019 /

When I Was Born For The Seventh Time is one of those “place” records.  You know: when you hear it, you can place yourself precisely where you were in your life (who/what/where you were doing.)  Not so much that it “brings you back” – which is a tired old nostalgic trope – but that when you hear it now brings you back to the context of when you first listened to it.  Sometimes it doesn’t work well; there are certain contexts I decidedly don’t want to revisit.  But for great records like this, you kind of get to be in two places at once.

I’d gotten it within a couple years of its 1997 release.  Brimful Of Asha was the monster hit, and the gateway into this intoxicating brew of hip hop scratching, straight out rock, Floyd-era synthesizers, and sitars, sitars, sitars.  It found its way into steady rotation in my car for quite a while, then dropped back to one I’d revisit every once in a while.

The odd thing was the place wouldn’t happen until about six years ago.  I was at Bar San Paolo in Siena with my wife and the little TV over the bar was playing music videos.  (only in Italy.)  And the video for the Norman Cook (Fat Boy Slim) remix of Brimful of Asha came on, and I pretty much stopped what I was doing for three minutes and fifty seven seconds.

So, here I am in Italy getting pulled into a version of one of my favorite songs that I’d (inexplicably) never heard before, as happy as the girl in the video listening to her 45s.  The thing about the Cook remix is that it doesn’t deconstruct the song (like so many others) to “show off”.  It takes it into a more exuberant orbit as the original, yes, but it still makes you want to listen to the original.  Lots of other remixes shout “look how clever I am” in an attempt to “better” the original.  This doesn’t.  (You can find it on the highly recommended greatest hits comp Why Try Harder.)  I seem to remember reading a couple of years ago that Cornershop leader Tjinder Singh kind of hated this after a while because it was the version more people listened to, but he needn’t worry.

And a week later, I’m pulling When I Was Born back out and rediscovering it.  This is one of those discs that are great front-to-back, even the little interstitial numbers like “Butter The Soul.”  There are, legit, six great songs on here beyond Brimful.  The track that brings it all home (literally) is the closer, a cover/deconstruction of Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown.)  It’s easy/lazy/dangerous to cover a Lennon/McCartney song and try to put your “spin” on it.  But Cornershop – in their own way – reclaim this as their own, Indian music.

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