Dance, you devils!!

 

Thanking Robert Shelton 💫🙏💫

Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma 💫

 

The “Gigi affaire”

Learning from Wikipedia, “The cover of the original LP varies between the British, United States, Canadian and Australian releases. The British version has the Gigi soundtrack album leaning against the wall immediately above the "Pink Floyd" letters. Storm Thorgerson explained that the album was introduced as a red herring to provoke debate, and that it has no intended meaning. On most copies of US and Canadian editions, the Gigi cover is airbrushed to a plain white sleeve, apparently because of copyright concerns, but the earliest US copies do show the Gigi cover, and it was restored for the US remastered CD edition. On the Australian edition, the Gigi cover is completely airbrushed, not even leaving a white square behind.”

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Luigi Nono’s gems 💎

 

A masterpiece, original Arcophon 1st pressing and its master-tape, as humble as it can be 💫

It’s incredible the weird places you can find truly interesting stuffs!

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Ohhhh yes 🍀💫🍀

 

John Peel, an unsung hero 💫

 

This man was responsible for spreading the best music, ever from his BBC program and letting know obscure awesome artists, thanking his great nose… ahem: ear and his exquisite taste for everything great.

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Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” unveiled 🌸

 

Suzanne Verdal in 1966 or Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”  

"Suzanne Takes You Down to Her Place Near the River

You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night beside her

And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be there

And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China'

— Leonard Cohen, “Suzanne”-    

Possibly one of Cohen’s most famous songs from his rich canon was inspired not by a romantic relationship but his infatuation with platonic friend Suzanne Verdal. Given to Judy Collins as one of the first songs he ever wrote, the song became a hit under her guidance but it was rooted in Cohen’s love life.

In truth, the song was, in fact, an amalgamation of his journey so far. In ‘Suzanne’ Cohen provided an infinitely detailed piece of work, capturing the encounters he had with Suzanne Verdal, the girlfriend of Canadian artist Armand Vaillancourt. “He got such a kick out of seeing me emerge as a young schoolgirl, I suppose, and a young artist, into becoming Armand’s lover and then-wife,” recalled Verdal, in a 1998 interview. “So he was more or less chronicling the times and seemingly got a kick out of it.”

“He was ‘drinking me in’ more than I even recognised if you know what I mean,” Verdal said when noting the song’s intensity. “I took all that moment for granted. I just would speak and I would move and I would encourage and he would just kind of like sit back and grin while soaking it all up, and I wouldn’t always get feedback, but I felt his presence really being with me.”

“The song ‘Suzanne’ is journalism,” Cohen says in the book Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters. “It’s completely accurate.”

Asked to confirm the line about tea and oranges, Cohen smirked: “Well, the tea actually had little pieces of orange peel in it. But ‘tea and oranges’ sounds better, doesn’t it? She lived near the water in Montreal. And she did used to ‘take you down to her place near the river’. You could ‘hear the boats go by’ and you could ‘spend the night beside her.’ All those things…and I touched her perfect body with my mind. Mostly because she was married to a friend of mine and I couldn’t touch her with anything else!” 

Regardless of the contentious issues of adultery within the track, it’s hard to ignore this as one of Cohen’s finest works.

Pierre Bolduc passed away 🌸

 

Mr. Bolduc was a man of many talents: an entrepreneur, an audio importer, a journalist and magazine founder and director, an event organizer and catalyst… but most of all a generous and passionate music lover, always wishing to share his knowledge and passion.

He was the one who was touring, decades ago, with his own pair of Be Yamamura’s Dionisio large horns and demoing at full-packed room at Milan audio fair… this event was paramount to many, myself included, to spread full-range and horns and triodes but most of all, he was among the first to publicly advocate in favor of 4 tracks reel to reel tapes with live comparisons vs. vinyl discs edition.

The efforts he took in spreading the verb left an enduring effect on many, to be remembered forever…

This amazing experience hooked me for life and I began avidly collecting these tapes when almost nobody did: this way I was able to pile a load of gems for peanuts… now any Miles’ 2 or 4 tracks Columbia or Mercury or RCA tapes are worth 4-digits amounts.

… and sound 💫💫💫

Pierre was a lighthouse and his imposing, sweet and gentle persona will be missed at audio events worldwide by many.

RIP and thanks, Pierre 

Miles 💎

 

Nick Drake and the making of “Five Leaves Left” 💫

 

Just bought and immensely enjoying this 4-disk and amazing book combo… 

Absolutely not for completists-only 💫

Superb!

The sleeping beauty 💫

 

My two souls 💫

 

Nick Drake and David Tibet… the timeless romantic side and the dark, underground sperimentalism 💫

Tom Waits & the crooked tree 💫

 

“My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day. 

I told them this story: 

In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." 

So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.” 

― Tom Waits

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Neumann DST at home 💫

 

✅

Rules, rules…

 

Super Disc Dept. (Italian style) - Angelo Branduardi - Il Ladro (1989)

 

Another humble gem issued before the current “Vinyl Renaissance”, in 1989, when CD ruled and thus pressed in ridiculously low batches.

This very disc is so enjoyable and I won’t never be grateful enough to my pal Marco Irone who introduced me to this beauty: it’s reminiscent of some Ry Cooder’s Paris, Texas atmospheres (guitar-wise), but it’s 100%  Branduardi’s with a cohort of stellar musicians to support him.

Recording is amazing with some truly seismic low-end notes; timbre is uncompressed and natural, and songs are really nice, too.

A very nice disc which will please your ears and audio-system, as well 😏

Salvatore Accardo’s Le Quattro Stagioni: Philips or Decca?

 

Both 💫

The Philips’ - gorgeously recorded and pressed in 1987 in VERY limited quantities while the CD era was flourishing - is a masterpiece in musicality, as Accardo’s playing is so painfully moving to tears with its beauty and (digital) recording is serving music so well.

The hybrid SACD on Decca I recently bought is also a superb musical treasure and sound is just a tad less involving and naturally smooth as on the sought-after (its prices skyrocketed hideously) Philips vinyl disc.

Nonetheless, kudos to the technicians on both media.

It’s one Vivaldi’s edition I very often return to, also if my first personal choice remains the Jean-Claude Malgoire’s on CBS 💫💎💫

Mind gym 😏

 

… because a comma matters 💫

In the meantime, in Düsseldorf 💫

 

The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound 💫

 

The Wall Of Sound 

The legendary sound system is one stop on a long, strange road.

The Grateful Dead’s legendary "Wall Of Sound" which debuted in their shows this week in March of 1974 is an engineering marvel. 

Although several different configurations of the 75-ton Wall of Sound are documented, one consisted of 586 JBL speakers and 54 Electro-Voice tweeters, powered by 48 McIntosh MC-2300 amps. Note: 48 (x) 600 = 28,800 watts of continuous (RMS).

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A seldom-seen Nick Drake’s

 

Desert Island Discs

 

On 19th January 1982, a quietly whimsical scene unfolded near the banks of the Thames: Roy Plomley, the distinguished British radio broadcaster and creator of *Desert Island Discs*, stood with dignified charm beside an antique gramophone on a parched stretch of riverbed at the bottom of his garden. Captured by photographer John Downing, the image is rich in both symbolism and character—Plomley, impeccably dressed, appears like a marooned gentleman, conjuring the core fantasy of his long-running BBC programme: what records would you take if stranded alone?

Plomley, who first aired *Desert Island Discs* in 1942, had by 1982 become an institution of British broadcasting. The show, with its deceptively simple format—inviting notable guests to choose eight records they’d take to a desert island—offered profound insights into personalities through their musical memories. Plomley's calming presence, elegant phrasing, and gentle inquisitiveness made him a beloved figure, and the programme a Sunday morning ritual for generations.

The image of him and the gramophone by the Thames reads like a visual metaphor for the essence of *Desert Island Discs*—solitude softened by the human need for music, memory, and meaning. It was a light-hearted yet poignant portrayal of a man whose voice had become synonymous with reflection and escape. In that moment, Plomley wasn’t just a broadcaster; he was the very castaway he had imagined for four decades, standing serenely on the edge of his own imagined island.

JBL D44000 “Paragon” (1957) 💫

 

… too bulky and expensive? Go for a tiny sized copy

 😏😁😏

… but you won’t listen to the real thing 🤣🤣🤣

New field-coil loudspeakers from Vilnius, Lithuania 💫

 

I recently came across Redas Šilinas’ 12” full-range loudspeakers, both field-coil and Alnico magnet, and I find them so “right” that… coming soon 💫

Frame and magnet came from Riga, Latvia ex-Telefunken factory… thusly, the model name (Riga).

Japan- and China-sourced handmade paper is “reinforced” with hemp-fibers for strength/rigidity without adding weight to the ultra-light cone, capable of truly remarkable performances; in these field-coil loudspeakers was used an hybrid voice-coil - i.e. - one layer copper, other layer a different alloy. So this voice-coil has no metallic resonance at highs which  are very often plaguing fullrange speakers and have more fat and natural overall sound....

Redas’ Instagram is a goldmine as his YouTube channel

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A blurred short story 💫

 

The man…

… and his turntable 💫

=

Good music, happy man 

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