David Bowie sez…

 

I dedicate this picture to…

🫣

Tone Poets’ marvels

 

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.

This masterpiece was engineered by Rudy Van Gelder in 1965 and it’s a truly killer sounding disc!

Flawlessly pressed at RTI on very silent (i.e. - compared to other modern pressings) premium vinyl.

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Aktuala - Tappeto Volante

 

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Happy birthday to David Sylvian

 

Born on February 23rd, 1958

💫💫💫

Mc Kay’s in Nashville 💫

 

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 🙏

Lol Coxhill & G.F Fitz-Gerald’s duets

 

These awesome disks are the peak of the two artists interplay and dueting art and improvisation.

Reel Recordings label, quite aptly… a VERY audiophile edition 💫

One of the 500 copies issued: two CDs and one DVD, proudly recorded on a ReVox A-77 at 7 1/2 IPs… and music sounds amazing 💫

Love this music and Lol was such a talented musician!

Henry Cow… aehm: Now - Then Again (2026)

 

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.

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 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 first-limited edition is pressed in 300 copies and the CD in 500 copies.

Graphite mat for Garrardzilla 💫

 

This 96% purity high-density Japanese isostatic graphite mat sounds awesome on trusty Garrardzilla.

Nipples

 

This is the one and only disc ever produced by Manfred Eicher outside his ECM.

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My friend Ken Perry 💫🍀💫

 

We both, brothers-in-C37, are celebrating 6th anniversary after the daring rescuing of our tape machines from the hands of a Swiss villain 😉

A disillusioned Nipper 🫣

 

☺️😉☺️

Emission Labs EML 300B XLS - a rare X-Ray image.

 

After, forever and ever ✅

 

Thanks to Robert Shelton for all the laughs ☺️

Buffalo Springfield in Mono 💫

 

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."

Worst turntable name, ever 😉

 

A kind of blue

 

Garrardzilla with Shindo mat 💫

A Panoramic True Hi-Fi Recording - Illinois Jacquet - Swing’s the Thing (Verve 1956)

 

Traditional jazz? Naaaah: Pure Energy!

Analog Production 45 rpm 2 x 200 grams discs, mono limited edition

 

Acoustic Sounds 33 rpm 180 gr mono

… or Japanese CDR?

Which sounds better?

Well, the awesome recording is the true winner, but the 45 rpm edition is insane in terms of explosive dynamics and lifelike size and weight of the instruments… the mono is also an experience in itself, as the soundstage is ultra-wide, center to out L & R speakers… and the “Panoramic” hype on cover is quite appropriate and not out of place.

A masterpiece and a must-have in any edition.

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Capt. Beefheart in the studio 💫

 

TTG Studios is where "The Mirror Man Sessions" ( officially the second album recorded, though it wasn't released until after TMR).  I forgot just how massively large that room was!  There was a vocal booth, which Don used on certain cuts where he interacted with the band ( Tarotplane, Mirror Man, Gimme Dat Harp...etc).  They turned it sideways and set up a small amp for him to play harp and Simran Horn through.  It was a 16 channel recorder -- one of the first.  Even Sunset Sound ( where "Sho Nuff" was recorded) was 8-track, and we moved to RCA for the rest of SAM was recorded, which was a 4-Track studio.  Suddenly, we walked into a control room that had an IMMENSE sound that was so impressive.  Ami Hadani ( which I mis-pronounced for years as "Ami Andante") was our engineer (although I often felt that he should have been "co-producer" as his knowledge of the board and outboard gear is what got the sound).  I remember Don mentioning to me that he was a member of the Israeli Army and sometimes was called to battle.  Don had a 7 1/2 inch rough mix of the masters and he loved playing it, because the sound was so good.  Although the internet  information states the recording as "April 1971," Mirror Man Sessions was actually recorded in November of 1967 for Buddah Records -- about six months after Safe As Milk.  It was a giant leap in structure for the band, of course.  The idea was to split the group into two personas- "Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band," and "Twenty-Fifth Century Quaker."  The latter would be the warmup act- coming out dressed in Quaker costumes; playing the more improvised blues jams, and the latter would follow in more colorful costumes; playing the more "arranged" compositions ( On Tomorrow, Trust Us, Safe as Milk).  The album was supposed to be called "It Comes to you in a Plain Brown Wrapper" ( as a satire on how pornography used to be sent through the mail ) with the words "Strictly Personal" stamped on the front, along with the addresses of "both bands."  Krasnow kind of achieved this later on, with the release of the later-recorded "Strictly Personal;" a re-recording of some of the same material hastily done at Sunset Sound Studios the following year, just before a major U.K. tour.  My head was spinning by this time, as Don has already walked off stage at Mt. Tamalpais "Fantasy Fair," then recorded an album ( Mirror Man ) that Buddah seemed to view as "unfit for release," then we re-recorded it and took off for a six week tour right after two intense weeks in the studio, and then, Krasnow flew over to the U.K. and took all our earnings from the tour to start Blue Thumb Records and release "Strictly Personal" without our knowledge, leaving us with no money to pay hotel and tour expenses.  After the tour, the final solution was to sign with Zappa.  The first intention was to re-record the material from "The Mirror Man Sessions" once again, but then Krasnow released "Strictly Personal" and a "Plan B" was created.  Don decided to write an entire album with the use of a piano (having seen FZ composed all his music thusly) and, suddenly, I was transcribing music like a poor man's Ian Underwood.  Ian, of course, was a schooled musician with TONS of training, and I was but a former marching band player, so my skills were seriously limited, which Don didn't probably realize.   

Long Story short, TMR was a vast and risky experiment that paid off by being critically - acclaimed, but still put the majority of people off who heard it.  I like to brag that I helped arrange an album that could clear out a room in minutes, so it was great as a "The Party's Over" album.  My only regret in this post is that I couldn't find a photo of us dressed in our Quaker outfits.  They came from "Western Costume Company," along with the Simran Horn, the "Man from Planet X" mask, and the other strange attire which we wore on the foldout of "Strictly Personal," which, for the record, came from the photo shoot for "Mirror Man."  Confused yet?  My first three years with Beefheart seemed like ten turbulent years.

Ken Perry or Brothers in C37 💫

 

I asked AI who mastered and cut lacquer for the Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors album:

The mastering and lacquer cutting for the original 1977 release of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours was handled by Ken Perry at Capitol Mastering (often identified by the "KP" etching and "MASTERED BY CAPITOL" stamp in the dead wax of original pressings).

Because Rumours is one of the best-selling albums of all time, it has been remastered and recut many times. Depending on which version you own, the credits may differ:

Original 1977 Mastering

 * Engineer: Ken Perry

 * Studio: Capitol Mastering

 * Identification: Look for "KP" and "Mastered by Capitol" in the runout groove.

Notable Audiophile Remasters

If you have a modern high-fidelity reissue, it was likely cut by one of these industry legends:

 * **Steve Hoffman & Kevin Gray (2011): Widely considered the "definitive" sounding version. They cut the 45 RPM and 33 1/3 RPM versions at AcousTech Mastering using the original 30ips master tapes.

 * Chris Bellman: Cut the lacquer for the 2009/2011 33 1/3 RPM Warner Bros. reissue and the more recent Rumours Live (2023) at Bernie Grundman Mastering. (Look for "CB" in the dead wax).

Production Background

While Perry handled the final "cut" for the vinyl, the album's iconic sound was shaped during the recording and mixing process by:

 * Ken Caillat (Engineering/Production)

 * Richard Dashut (Engineering/Production)

 * Lindsey Buckingham (Production/Arrangement)

Would you like me to help you identify a specific pressing you have based on the etchings in your record's runout groove?