Just so good.
Parkway nailing it
Just picked up a copy of Soup and Other Stories, the albumn that Screaming Trees songwriter Van Conner released with his side band Solomon Grundy way back when.
Really solid, some good songs and a bit catchier and upbeat than his Screaming Trees work.
New Deströyer666 (Australian). I think itâs their best release so far, and itâs been a long time between albums:
Best Thrash album so far this year:
SMJ that is a remarkable website. Thanks.
A Gift for Music Lovers Who Have It All: A Personal Utility Pole
Japanâs music fanatics want personal grid connection; âelectricity is like bloodâ
The Wall Street Journal
By Juro Osawa
TOKYOâ Takeo Morita wanted absolutely the best fidelity possible from his audio system, so he bought a utility pole.
The 82-year-old lawyer already had a $60,000 American-made amplifier, 1960s German loudspeakers that once belonged to a theater, Japanese audio cables threaded with gold and silver, and other pricey equipment.
Normal electricity just wouldnât do anymore. To tap into what Mr. Morita calls âpureâ power, he paid $10,000 to plant a 40-foot-tall concrete pole in his front yard. On it perches his own personal transformerâthat thing shaped like a cylindrical metal garbage canâwhich feeds power more directly from the grid.
âElectricity is like blood. If it is tainted, the whole body will get sick,â says Mr. Morita. âNo matter how expensive the audio equipment is, it will be no good if the blood is bad.â
Demonstrating his powerâs purity, he mounts a turntable with a vinyl record of Queenâs âIâm in Love With My Car,â settles into his sofa and beams. Pre-pole, he says, the vocals didnât sound as lively as this.
âNow, it feels like Queen is in this room, just for me.â
Audiophiles everywhere are an obsessive breed, but few exhibit such perfectionism as Japanese stereo fanatics. They not only spend fortunes on amps and speakers but also insist an exclusive power supply is a crucial upgrade.
A private line, they say, eliminates electrical interference that comes from sharing a public pole with neighbors whose gadgets can create ânoiseâ that make subtle notes inaudible and the overall sound flatter.
Once one has a personal tower of power, âthe music melts into the air of the room,â says Sumio Shimamoto, president of Izumi Denki Corp., which installed Mr. Moritaâs pole and has erected about 40 more across Japan over the past decade.
A Japanese magazine, âPower Sources & Accessories,â specializes in power sourcing for audio equipment, including the deployment of private poles.
âJapanese audiophiles pursue it with a great deal of diligence,â says Joe Cohen, president of Lotus Group, a California-based distributor of high-end audio equipment. âThey adopt the cause and sacrifice everything for it.â
Thereâs a debate among audio enthusiasts about whether personal poles make any meaningful difference. Audiophiles, though, âlive in a kind of no-compromises world,â says Mark Bocko, director of the audio and music engineering program at the University of Rochester.
âElectromagnetic interference from appliances being used by neighbors could propagate through a shared transformer and have an audible effect. Thatâs not an unreasonable thing.â
Yukio Yoshihara, 62, always thought his audio system sounded better late at night, concluding there was less interference when neighbors werenât using appliances. The former banker asked electricians to assess the quality of power in his Tokyo home with an oscilloscope.
âI found out just how polluted the power supply was,â he says. Some appliances have inverters that switch power on and off to save energy, he says, creating interference that caused inconsistencies in his audio equipmentâs performance.
Mr. Yoshihara had a pole and transformer installed five years ago, along with a new circuit-breaker panel and wiring. Makeover cost: $40,000.
A performance of a Mozart violin sonata by violinist Arthur Grumiaux and pianist Clara Haskil after installing the pole and accessories brought tears to his eyes, he says. âIt sounded so fresh and vivid, like they were playing in front of my eyes.â
âItâs completely beyond my understanding,â says his wife, Reiko, 57. âBut if I take it away from him, he will lose the motivation to live.â
Yukio Yoshihara, a former banker who has erected his own utility pole, sits in his basement audio room.
Yukio Yoshihara, a former banker who has erected his own utility pole, sits in his basement audio room. Photo: Reiko Yoshihara
A scholar of audiophile culture, professor Tsutomu Nakano at Tokyoâs Aoyama Gakuin University, posits that the beauty of sound is in the ear of the listener.
âWe donât decide whether a wine is good based on an analysis of its chemical composition. Sound is similar,â he says. âIt involves the power of imagination, something sacred.â
Japanese audiophiles are pretty much stuck with standardized poles approved by power companies, although in Tokyo some utility-pole makers offer colors such as green and brown.
Katsuhiro Hirano had only the option of gray. The 60-year-old construction-company president in southern Japan had a system including two amplifiers of roughly $40,000 each and $40,000 speakers. âIâd already spent so much money on audio equipment, so why not take one more step?â
Getting a private pole took two months of negotiation with the local power company, which initially objected because there was no precedent in the region. He wanted a brown pole to match his house; the utility had only the conventional concrete hue.
A truck brought his pole last summer, and workers spent three days digging a hole in his yard and erecting it. Neighbors pried, already curious about the windowless building he had put up earlier as his audio room.
âI told all the neighbors that the building was a warehouse and I needed the pole for its air-conditioning system,â he says. âMaybe they thought I was doing something illegal.â
The pole, he says, makes a big difference when listening to vinyl records such as of jazz pianist Keith Jarrettâs âThe Köln Concert.â
He could now hear the piano, the pianistâs breaths and the sound from the audienceâall separately. âIt feels like you are at the concert and you know exactly where Keith Jarrett is.â
Mr. Morita, the Queen fan, decided to get his own pole after visiting a Tokyo audiophile who had one. âWe listened to rock and vocals sounded dramatically better.â
He met a utility-company engineer who disputed the notion that a pole would make any difference. âHe was so adamant,â he says, âand that actually made me want to install it more.â
Mr. Morita permanently removed the gate outside his front yard so a truck could install the pole.
âAt first, it felt strange to have a concrete pole in my yard,â he says. âBut now itâs part of my home and I feel attached to it.â
This is greatâTheo Bleckmann is a gun. Thatâs Kurt Elling on back up vocals and plastic bottle.
I love this
Very cool Video put together by Dave Loader with some of the worlds best guitar talents who all donated their time for a very very good cause. Get around it People!!
Bobby Hutcherson died a couple of days ago, heâs been sampled and re-worked by many producers. Legendary jazz player of the vibraphone, very smooth and easy to listen to.
Bobby was great and could play anything but he wasnât always âeasy to listen toâ and played with lots of avant garde and free jazz artists and he certainly left his mark on Eric Dolphyâs âOut To Lunchâ, one of the truly classic avant garde Blue Note albums.
PS The stuff he did with Andrew Hill was âout thereâ as well.
Iâm currently ensnared in Alex Rossâs lengthy and staggeringly brilliant work on 20th Century classical music, âThe Rest is Noiseâ and consequently Iâm listening to a lot of modern classical composers(Donât worry, Iâm not going to post any Schoenberg or Berg). Last night I discovered that not only was Aaron Copland (the United Statesâ greatest composer?) gay and a left wing activist of sorts but that the most popularly familiar of modern classical pieces (thanks to Queen allegedly ,according to Ross, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer), âFanfare For The Common Manâ, was inspired by a 1942 speech by the left wing Democrat Henry Wallace in which he railed against the emerging nationalist obsession with an âAmerican Centuryâ and called instead for âthe century of the common man. The peopleâs revolution is on the march.âŠâ words, Iâd venture, that were clearly influenced by the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto. Made me listen to it in a whole new way.
PS Percussionists must love Copland, and not just for this, I now realise they feature heavily in lots of his work.
Anyway whilst Iâve been scouring the web for modern classical I still clicked on this clip, at first, I admit, because of the dress and the shapely leg (I am an unreconstructed pig) and then to see if she was going to slip into sensible shoes when, and if, she reached the piano (She didnât, plays the whole thing in killer stilettos. Wow!) In the end however itâs her hands that are enthralling, supernatural speed, accuracy and touch.
And this is her âFlight of the Bumblebeeâ. Donât blink.
I mentioned 2 posts ago that Alex Ross, The New Yorker music critic, said two rock bands had covered Coplandâs âFanfare for the Common Manâ. Of course like anyone of my advanced age I knew of the Emerson, Lake and Palmer version but Iâve never really listened to Queen so I just passed on the info. But I looked it up later and it wasnât easy to find. Seems Ross, a respected music critic, is the only one to push this line, at least publicly. He published his assertion in 2007 in his book âThe Rest Is Noiseâ and no-one, it appears, has followed it upâŠbut no-one has sued him either. On his blog, which I have linked, he asserts the evidence that Queen âsampledâ Copland for the chorus of âWe will rock youâ is âincontrovertibleâ and he includes the samples as evidence. The song is attributed to Brian May but Ross is suggesting he got a bit of help.
Iâm not a Queen fan but even I havenât been able to avoid âWe will rock youâ. I have to say I can hear what Ross is referring to, albeit at a slower tempo. Copland was 77 and alive and active when the Queen song came out but as far as I know he never commented on any similarity.
Hereâs the link to the Ross blog with the relevant excerpts.