This is Stefano Bertoncello's Blog (ステファノ・ベルトンチェッロ - トゥーグッドイアーズ − ブロガー、オーディオ＆ミュージック・コンサルタント) devoted to pacific topics like Music - live and reproduced - i.e. discs, audio, guitars and whatever musical: concerts, workshops, exhibitions, etc. Furthermore: travelling - as a mind-game and real globetrotting - and books, movies, photography... sharing all the above and everything which makes Life better and Earth a better place to stay, enjoying Life, in Peace. Proudly ads-free since 2007! Enjoy.💫
Class isn’t water.
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I loved Don Cherry most of my life… his records and disks occupy a considerable space in my discotheque, yet it’s a joy and a time-machine feeling finding new material from his Organic Music era in early ‘70s.
Two double-CDs boxes worth the attention of every Don’s scholar and appreciator.
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I’ve owned this CD player for 30+ years, it got two minor surgeries and always played like music.
Today, I gave it a spin and… I admit the TDA-1541-S2 “Double Crowns” DAC is always surprisingly good and smooth and natural sounding.
After weeks spent listening to SACDs’ on more “modern” (for my standards, they are ☺️) disk-players, the full bodied, no frills sound of the venerable Studer is as good as the memory of a favorite dish cooked by your mom that you taste again as an adult, immediately returning to being a happy child, again.
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… ssshhhhh…
I dedicate this picture to… everything Sanremo-related
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After a few months of disaffection with the purchase of new beloved vinyl records (probably due to the efforts of transporting and managing several thousand precious vinyl records caused by the closure and emptying of the old Studio and the subsequent move to the new place), I’ve been recently buying some really nice, impeccably manufactured reissues…
Kevin Gray’s remastering is - as I already appreciated - a labor of love.
Here are two more I got and they’re awesome and worth the expense.
Flawlessly pressed at RTI on very silent (i.e. - compared to other modern pressings) premium vinyl.
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Born on February 23rd, 1958
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I’ve been to countless record and book shops in my life across the planet, and thought I had seen it all. And then I arrived at Mckay's in Nashville today and my head exploded.
The scale of the two-level music, book, video game, and instrument store is unprecedented. It’s 35,000 square feet, or the size of 7-8 NBA basketball courts. Really. Seriously. You almost can’t get your head around it.
The selection of stuff is a real hodgepodge but there are major finds to be had and things are mostly very reasonably priced. I was particularly blown away by the music DVD/Blu-ray section which had many things I didn’t even know existed.
If you’re ever in Nashville, this is a serious destination physical media collectors need to make time for…
Thanks to Anil Prasad for sharing 🙏
These awesome disks are the peak of the two artists interplay and dueting art and improvisation.
Love this music and Lol was such a talented musician!
Henry Now – Then Again (2026)
Some reunions are nostalgia tours. This is not that. This is four men who helped blow up the blueprint in the ’70s walking back into the room, surveying the rubble, and deciding to build something stranger on top of it.
Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, John Greaves, and Tim Hodgkinson, yes, those four, don’t resurrect Henry Cow. They mutate it. One letter shifts and suddenly it’s Henry Now, a name that feels less like a pun and more like a manifesto: this is not then, this is now, and if you came looking for “Living in the Heart of the Beast – Part II,” you took the wrong exit.
Two apparently similar vinyl record and CD, but completely different in sound and content: I truly cherish the disc, very nicely recorded and pressed as a plus, for its concise, not over-wordy or redundant beauty.
Recorded live on November 18, 2022 in Piacenza, Italy and on November 19, 2022 in Palermo, Italy and later sculpted in the studio by Frith (with some support and advice by Tim Hodgkinson) into very distinct CD and LP mixes, Then Again is over an hour of improvisation carved into seven movements that feel less like “tracks” and more like tectonic plates softly grinding against each other. The sound is more spacious than the old days, less serrated frenzy, more air between the molecules, but don’t mistake space for comfort. This is chamber music for people who distrust chambers.
The music unfolds like a slow-breathing, multicellular organism. Rhythms align, then splinter into counterpoint. A bass line might murmur something almost tender before Hodgkinson’s reeds slice through it like a free jazz telegram from a parallel universe. Cutler doesn’t “keep time”; he interrogates it. Frith threads guitar lines that hover somewhere between classical poise and scrapyard poetry. It’s abstract, yes, but lucid in its own sideways logic.
There are no bombastic climaxes. No cheap crescendos engineered to make you feel like you’ve “arrived.” Instead, the band builds through accretion, ideas surfacing, mutating, dissolving, reappearing in altered form. At times it feels like a soundtrack to a David Lynch neo-noir film that doesn’t exist yet: low-tempo, episodic, cinematic, always in motion. The four communicate without glances, without theatrical cues. The empathy is surgical. The restraint is ferocious.
Cool and almost austere on the surface, but with a sly glint in the ragged machinery beneath, they’re not proving they still can, they’re proving they never stopped. Then Again is mature and occasionally forbidding, offering no explanations and no pandering, just the quiet demand that you listen closely and meet it halfway.
This one’s not for the dabblers or the playlist grazers, it’s for the obsessives, the sonic spelunkers willing to crawl through the caverns of clang and counterpoint until that strange, splintered beauty starts glowing back at them from inside the machinery. So don’t come here for hooks you can hum in the shower or riffs to blast from a passing Camaro. Come here if you’re willing to sit in the dark while four lifers redraw a surreal map in real time, chiseling fleeting, fragile, discordant beauty out of friction and air. Then Again doesn’t seduce you, it tests you, dares you, waits for you to lean in. And if you do, if you surrender to the crooked logic of their interplay, you might just hear something rare: not a comeback, not a victory lap, but the sound of restless minds still kicking against the edges of the possible.
Lineup:
Chris Cutler - drums, percussion
Fred Frith - guitar, piano
John Greaves - bass guitar, vocals
Tim Hodgkinson - clarinet, lap steel
The vinyl (I repeat: masterfully recorded) first-limited edition is pressed in 300 copies and the CD in 500 copies.
This is the one and only disc ever produced by Manfred Eicher outside his ECM.
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We both, brothers-in-C37, are celebrating 6th anniversary after the daring rescuing of our tape machines from the hands of a Swiss villain 😉
Thanks to Robert Shelton for all the laughs ☺️
In glorious mono, I’d better say: it’s like listening to this wonderful music for the first time!
A very good one… spinning now!
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It's not a matter of knowledge, it's a feeling deeper than the heart.
It's like a heart within a heart. A heart like a Russian doll, one of those dolls nested inside another.
We have a heart in our chest that allows us to make a lot of mistakes, that allows us to err joyfully, and then, inside this heart, we have another, much more solid, much more precious, into which those we love enter once and for all.
And, once they're in, they never leave, even when we die. Even when we die, there's something that continues, endlessly.
C. Bobin - "Illuminate what you love without touching its shadow."
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