Silbatone Shrine is always “the” place at MOC 2025

 

Y

Joe Roberts is in town, folks 💫🌈💫

Thanks, Gabor 🥂

RIP for “the” President 🌈🌸🌈

 

Politicians without ties and Tasmanian 120 suits are rare breed… honest and pacifist, Mujica was a good man for his people: he didn’t need any armed escort. 

Thanks for showing the world that things can be better ❤️

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"I support a personal way of living with sobriety, because to live you need to have freedom and to have freedom you need to have time. (...) If I worry a lot about possessions, about the big house, about the service, about this and that... I don't have time because I have to take care of these things. And if I have a lot of money to have all that, I have to worry about it not being stolen from me. (...) So, I prefer to have the greatest margin of time available to do what I like and that is freedom. (...) I am free when I do with my time what I like and what motivates me.

So I am sober to have time. Because when you buy with money, you are not buying with money, you are buying with the time of your life that you spent to have that money. And the only thing that cannot be bought on earth is life, so you have to be stingy in the way you spend it.

I am a social fighter. I have been all my life (...) and I continue to dream because I believe that it is worth fighting so that people can live a little better and with a greater sense of equality. And I believe that man has the resources to create a better world, but it must be a world rich in material factors but much richer in culture and knowledge"

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How Italy s(h)aved Robert Fripp 🍀🍀🍀

 

Robert Fripp is in recovery after emergency heart surgery in Bergamo, Northern Italy.

He underwent two operations in Italy for a trifurcated artery... but - at E.R. - they - to Robert’s surprise and amusement - preventively shaved his balls (RF’s actual words 😉)…

Fortunately, he’s fine after the application of three stents and at home with his wife Toyah, already videoing 🍀

Best wishes of full recovery to Mr. Fripp 💫🍀💫

SAT arm 💫

 

Disturbing AI 🤪

 

Acapella Hypersphere Energèia at MOC 2025

 

In my agenda for next week ✅

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A Ralph Towner’s Gem 💎

 

… this is one of my most beloved disk, ever: Ralph Towner’s OST of Carlo Mazzacurati’s “Un’Altra Vita” movie.

An amazing variation on Maestro Towner’s melody…

A dreamy wonderful timeless journey into his mind.

I highly recommend anyone into RT’s music to search for it.

You won’t regret 💫

The resonant cello podium 💫

 

This is a resonant cello podium.

 I was asked to build this by Effe Baltacigil the principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony. He was very happy with it, the amplification is amazing. Two positions one on the platform itself and a brighter one on the Sitka spruce inlay. Steel reinforcement bar on the skinny part of the foreword sound hole.

Thanks and credits to Matt Armstrong, the luthier who built this beauty.

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Cinema gears at its holiest 💫

 

Ralph Towner on cassette 💫

 

A ‘54 Martin D18 workhorse 😢

 

“I’m screwed”, the guitar sez 🧐

Happy birthday to Keith Jarrett 💫🍀💫

 

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Slow Music 💫

 

AFTER “SLOW FOOD”,  “SLOW MUSIC”  AND  “FREE WILL” IS THE WAY!

WHY I BELIEVE THAT FOR LISTENING TO MUSIC THE PHYSICAL MEDIA IS NOT AT ALL OBSOLETE, COMPARED TO ITS CURRENT DIGITAL ALTERNATIVES, AND WHY ITS RELOCATION IN THE SPACE OF CULTURAL EDUCATION SHOULD STILL BE A COMMITMENT AND A GAME TO BE PLAYED.

1. Cultural and ritual value: The CD is not just a medium, it is a cultural object. Unlike streaming, listening to a CD implies a deliberate choice, a dedicated time, a sequence thought up by the artist. This makes it part of a ritual, not a passive consumption.

2. Tactile and aesthetic experience: A CD has a cover, a booklet, graphics. It offers a visual and tactile experience that is part of the work. It is an object that can be collected, given as a gift, shown. Digital listening, however convenient, is dematerialized and impalpable.

3. Stable sound quality: Contrary to what many believe, the quality of CDs is often superior to that of compressed streaming. Furthermore, a CD on a good audio player provides a fidelity and depth that not all digital services guarantee.

4. Responsibility towards artistic memory: Abandoning physical media also means making music more vulnerable to oblivion or arbitrary removal. CDs remain, even when an algorithm decides that a song is no longer useful.

5. Education in listening: Offering and promoting CDs means educating new generations to listen more attentively, less bulimic. It means sowing a culture of slowness, of in-depth analysis, of quality.

6. Digital ecology: Streaming is not immaterial. Its environmental impact is far from zero, between server farms, data traffic and continuous updates. A CD, once produced, consumes less in the long term.

These answers are based on a simple idea: not everything that is new is necessarily better, and not everything that is old is to be thrown away. True innovation does not lie in the uncritical abandonment of the past, but in its conscious reinterpretation.

Re-educating listening: an act of cultural resistance

In an era where everything is instantaneous, where music is consumed by shuffling, jumping from one song to another like from one shot to another on TikTok, talking about physical media such as CDs may seem anachronistic. But perhaps this is precisely why it has become urgent.

The new generations are not to be blamed: they are immersed in an ecosystem designed to fragment attention and accelerate rhythms. Digital psychopathology is not just an addiction to screens, but a progressive inability to stay in the time of experience, discovery, fertile boredom. Listening to music – the real one – instead requires slowness, patience, waiting.

So how can we reactivate this desire for depth, for “presence”?

1. Giving music a body back: Every song has a story, a cover, written notes, intentions. The CD – or vinyl, or cassette – is a body that bears witness to this story. Showing this to new generations, perhaps at school or in workshops, can be a revealing act: "Look, this is a complete work. It's not just a file."

2. Ritualizing listening: You can teach that listening to a record from start to finish is like reading a story or watching a film. It's a journey. Initiatives like guided "collective listening", evenings in which you turn off your phone and put an entire album on the turntable, help to re-educate the ear and the mind to the long term.

3. Encouraging research as part of pleasure: Finding a CD, looking for it in a market, ordering it, waiting for it to arrive: it's a process that amplifies the value of the object and the experience. Show kids that “owning” something – in the full sense of the term – is different from “having it available”.

4. Questioning the freemium model: Everything immediately and (almost) for free has a hidden price: loss of attention, standardization, algorithmic manipulation. Discussing this openly in schools, in the media, in families, can open their eyes to how much they are really paying, in cognitive and emotional terms, for this apparent freedom.

5. Creating “slow” places for music: Media libraries, cultural spaces, independent shops can become laboratories for slow listening, for comparison between generations, for exploration of sound. There, the CD is not a commodity to be placed in a sandwich, but a living trace of a cultural heritage that is renewed.

Returning to physical media is not an escape into the past. It is a radical gesture of resistance and reappropriation. It is remembering that music is not a background, but an entire world to travel through. And the very act of looking for it, touching it, listening to it carefully... is already music.

Thanks to Stefano Amerio for the above insight, which I totally agree with 🖖

Reshaping 💫

 

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