Musings?

Alchemy - Momix and (modern) dance music

Last Sunday evening I attended to a performance by Momix, the amazing dance group founded 30 years ago by Moses Pendleton in the USA... members changed several times, of course, but the group kept a very free-form dancing attitude, moving, always poetic, dreamy and music plays a BIG role in their performances, beautifully blending with coreographies, amazing video-art and overall mood.

Cleverly, before the performance, an A3 sized program is gladly given where, with some historical infos about Momix, ALL the music pieces are carefully quoted, with group name, disk title, track used and record label...

Very appreciated, folks;-)

Among Yo-Yo Ma's cello and Morricone's music, other more exotic and seldom heard groups and music are quoted...

Two among the many intrigued me a lot... "Oreobambo" - "Tollan" on EM Productions and "Skin to Skin" - "Temenos" on Waveform Records... on both: SUUUUPEEER low notes 2die4!

Music is far from being an ethnic/New Age pastiche... it's lively, intriguing, dynamic and, sure, while listening on my Gotorama, memory will return to Momix' performance.

I just ordered both disks at respective sites...

Puritas - Repetita Juvant!

... more Garrardzilla and Puritas exposure, today... a little VTA further tuning on Schick arm and Puritas sings more, audibly better at EVERY disc... maybe at every side I spin on 301!

I guess this ALLNIC's additive... a sticker saying:  "Beware! Puritas give addiction! Avoid more than 2 (two) hours listening sessions" or something... could do.

I wished to give a quick listen and ended listening for three more hours, this early morning... a sunny Sunday morning without enough walking in the park... grrrrrrr!

WOW!

Audio Tourism

In the years I went everywhere I could... Germany, Switzerland, USA, France, UK, Japan... and Italy, of course.

Yet, I wasn't prepared to what I saw yesterday, at 150 km from home: a mix between an audio and studio gears museum and an house stuffed with classy electronic masterpieces.

Several Studer A80: 1/4, 1/2 and 1 inches (!!!), several C 37, several Telefunken M15A, M15, M10, M5, a Nagra T, a JBL Paragon (my first time, ever...), several EMT 930, 950, a Garrard 301 Grey grease bearing, baffles with PHYs wide band, handmade speakers from France and tapes, MASTER tapes everywhere and discs, discs...

Your truly as Pat "Maurice" Ieraci, in Jefferson Airplane's "Crown of Creation" cover insert;-)))

Look at the almost moving colours matching of the capstan flywheel and motor of the above Telefunken M10... Germans do it better!

The owner of this... THIS... is a very knowledged gentleman who in about ten years of search and swapping gears made IT.... after changing his hobby from motorbikes collecting!

IMPRESSIVE...  will let iPhone pixes - at least - to hint what I experienced.

Bravo!

ALLNIC's Puritas - Exultate Justi in Domino! Jubilate!!!

Puritas is now juicy enough to describe its very sound... beautiful... exceptionally beautiful and SO clever in tracking and detailing.

Also if Allnic's papers suggest at least 40 hours breaking in are necessary to obtain best sonic results, after two 4 + 5 hours listening sessions, I CANNOT BELIEVE to how much more this still so young:-))) cartridge is already now giving to yours truly... my musical enjoyment is at its Zenith.

Garrardzilla with Shindo grey mat,  Schick arm and Yamamoto HS-3 boxwood headshell and Her Majesty The Puritas.

... here tuning the VTF, at 2,30 grams first setting... after some discs, I changed VTF to 2,20 grams... just perfect and a VERY audible improvement!




... sssshhhh... a (short) preview: Puritas MC cartridge - ALLNIC's top of the line - is an handmade masterpiece!

Music NEVER sounded so right, guts and sweetness, cojones and velvet gloves, CRAZY dynamics and subtleties... TONS of subtleties...  an anticipation: as I always do, when evaluating a new piece of gear, I began with a couple of MUCH beloved solo lute discs on EMI Reflexe... yes, please forgive me... always maestro Anthony Bailes'... I probably listened to these vinyls one hundred times... and, yes, Puritas, only a few hours "old" showed its great, GREAT merits with something I know so well!

I heard some pre-fretting left hand preparing next notes noises I NEVER previously noticed...

AMAZING!

Some outside the recording venue - a church in Sion, Switzerland - noises - i.e. -  kids playing and laughing outside the church which I already "captured" with Lumiere DST as these kids appearing, screaming and disappearing, suddenly,  are - now, with Puritas' - clearly audible as moving from L to R, maybe walking.

Some young male voices are higher in volume and pitch than others... and so clear and real.

Superb resolution... I tried it with some MC trannies from my collection: Peerless 4685, first (nice), then Tango MC 999, a little cold-sounding and WE 618B... WOW!

Nirvana... perfect... incredible... right... THE heavenly matching!

I could talk about Ludwig Streicher's double bass and piano accompaniment... looooow end and piano are so natural... undistorted, limitless, growling and powerful and airy, strings and wooden body and ambient. A superb rendition.... the best ever.

... or, I could say, when I listened to beloved Popol Vuh's "Das Hohelied Salomos" on German United Artists label... I owned this disk for decades, now... on first side, piano, cymbals and Yong Yu's voice - also singing on seminal Hosianna Mantra on Pilz - at the very beginning of some tracks there is a blurred "sound"... a sort of echo... it WAS (someway) blurred... when I yesterday listened to this disc, I almost fell from my  lounge chair:-)

Bells, folk... church bells, two different bells, actually... I was able to incredibly hear this... the bells are someway electronically filtered and manipulated, BUT their nature is now still audible, in all its pureness...  aehm,  Puritas:-)))!

I suspect I could annoy you with more and more examples, now and in the near future...

... blah, blah, blah... that's enough!

Puritas is a perfect cartridge, folks... find NO defects, period... well, if you do not tune the VTA carefully, the coils could rub on vinyl surface... BUT why not carefully tuning the VTA on such a nice, exotic cartridge?!?!?

Lazyness? To loose!

... more later and soon...

... hey, it's Saturday:-)

Steppin' out!

Hemiolia Tape Project - "Telefunken porn"

Giorgio Foschi, tape-head extraordinaire, allowed me to post more "porn" of Hemiolia's warehouse, laboratory and dubbing studio.

It's a tape recorder dream... here follow some pixes and some YouTube live footage... when has been the last time you saw 18,  eighteen,  yes, 18... Telefunken's M-15A in a row?

... and when Giorgio is working on those sought-after Telefunken M15-As old dinosaurs... THE doctor is  -  definitely - "in"!

The Breathing Nose Recording of the Month - Elvis Costello's "Let Me Tell You About Her" from 'North" (2003)

This 2003 disk, "North" by great Elvis Costello on Deutsche Gramophone... I got it when it was issued as a limited edition with DVD and bonus tracks... is a beauty, laid back, classy, relaxed disk... I enjoyed it a lot, this late afternoon, after an awful day of assorted job hassles...

Elvis' voice is soooo easy and truly healing my soul.

On track # 8 - i.e. "Let Me Tell You About Her" - a piano begins, elegant and smooth and, suddenly, you hear "it"!

Elvis stands in front of the mike, in the dimmed lights studio... and, before singing, he takes a deep breath... with his nose (see here below for details:-))... and you hear it with AMAZING clarity and trueness.

Then comes the voice.

Call me a lunatic, folks... BUT I repeated the listening in a friends (nice) system and... ZUT! nothing...

... or my Gotorama TRULY is performing in a seldom heard way or other system doesn't...

Biased or not... my friend looked at me like I was sick... nose breathing?

FOOL I am!

... but Deutsche Gramophone ton-meisters recorded "this" as well... and I heard, so "it" DOES exist...

So what?

As usual, nothing, dear Miles:-)))

I hear it... ergo sum.

Try it, pals... track # 8...

WJAAS - The Headshells Survey (re-reprised) - Yamamoto HS-3 "Tsuge" Boxwood and BT-1 titanium screws

This little unassuming, yet beautifully crafted gizmo, a wooden headshell,  is REALLY wonderfully sounding, folks.

When used with, say, ALLNIC's top-of-the-line  Puritas (more soon...) MC cartridge with Boron cantilever and wooden hollow-body... it - Yamamoto's HS-3 "Tsuge" (Japanese for Boxwood) - sublimely clicks with South Korean masterpiece and "magic" happens: that seldom heard sense of Easyness and overall Perfection... a (musical) world where no words are needed and only the naked beauty of Music speaks.

Allnic's paper speaks about and suggests the use of "heavy arm, the heavier the better" and Thomas Schick's arm sure is a rigid, playless bearings and heavy arm.

Of the several headshells I have in my collection, only Bosoeum Acoustics "Big Nose" headshell from Japan sounded so "right" in Schick's arm... more than  Ikeda magnesium, Fidelity Research "Big Screw" or Kimura Labs RS-3... in my humble opinion, it seems that more than "weight" it's "material" quality and own resonance(s) to blend or not with arm and cartridge as a combo.

The humble, nicely priced HS-3 made out of box wood, more than its cherry and ebony wood headshells, always made by Yamamoto, despite its 8,3 grams weight, is rigid and elastic and less dry sounding than ebony.

Also the BT-1 titanium screws set, 2,6 mm and several lengths, are both rigid and light and... cannot say, at the moment, but they sure "play" their role in matching the whole still better.

... with Puritas... well, it's hard to believe how pure and airy and musical and detailed it sounds, also now it's brand-new and just out-of-the-box... I'm right now going ahead in breaking-in and maturing its sound with a lot of different kind of music and recordings and vinyls... but I already know I'll be not able to return to other cartridges in my collection!

Will report soon...

Happy Birthday, Stephan Micus!

Happy birthday, Stephan!

Stephan Micus is sixty, today... and he gave the world more than 40 years of music... wishing ALL the very best and thanking him for his vision.

His new disk, Panagia, is available at ECM, now.

Paper ending?

Maybe... yet a book or a newspaper or a magazine is old styled and reassuring... but very handy, unassuming and easy... you can throw it away... forget it, give away as a gift... an old newspaper also makes windows glasses shiny:-)

... and, let me play rude... try to find you in the countryside and... well, you know... the missing rest-room...  ohhh, you got it, I know:-) ... talking about "that" corporal need... try "it" with an IPad after you did "it":-)))

Paper is... useful, enriching, soft, friendly... so let's cherish our books and paper mags.

Have a look to this...

Share it and enjoy.

Thanking my friend Daniele and Ken Ottman's 3D animation.

Seijin no Hi in Tokyo... yesterday, January 14th, 2013!

Twenty years old young ladies wearing elegant furisode in Tokyo... yesterday, in the snow - ゆき (Yuki).

Thanking my friend Daniele and Shizuo Kambayashi for the nice picture.

Peter Lang needs our support, folks...

In May of 2008 Guitarist Peter Lang was involved in an Automobile Accident. He suffered neck and back injuries including nerve impingement which has affected the use of his left hand. His no fault insurance provider has refused to cover his medical expenses that continue to accrue. Any help you may be able to provide would be greatly appreciated. You can donate using the button, after which you will be directed to a download page where you can download a number of Lang’s albums as a partial thank you for your kind generosity, or you can go to the page directly through this site.

If we so much loved Peter's superb music, this is the time to reciprocate...

Sunday Record - Bruniferd on Rec Rec label (Switzerland)

Bruniferd = Bruno & Ferdinand

A strange, strange disc, indeed... not surprisingly, as liner notes are thanking Chris Cutler and Fred Frith recorded for same Swiss label...

Imagine: six strings bass guitar and alto and tenor saxes plus some poems reading recorded live, with traffic and street crowd noises...

Original music and an Ornette Coleman's cover... the music is a mix between Henry Cow and Kevin Ayers' first discs and the recording is - would you say? - superb.

A nice disc.