Switched-On Wendy Carlos

Moog pioneer Wendy Carlos is a musician I’ve always been fascinated with. One, for her ability to emote so beautifully with the Moog synthesizers. And two, for the relative mystery around her. It’s nearly impossible to find her music available to listen to online. None of her albums are streaming, and the only way to […]

Free As A Bird

I was a pre-teen and teenager in the dark days of the mid-to-late 80s. For a kid that wanted his music loud, fast, and marginally offensive the powers that be wanted to make it as hard as possible for a 14-year old to get his slab of expletive-strewn metal. When I first started buying music […]

99 Problems But Vinyl Ain’t One

The year of our Lord 2023 started out with me feeling like I’d run the course in regards to vinyl buying. I don’t know if I was burnt out, going through a rough record patch, or maybe it was just the idea that prices were going to just keep going up and up. Regardless, I […]

Christmas, 1988 : The Stockin’ Was Rockin’

Christmas, 1988. I was a newly-minted 15-year old, in the prime of a dorky and awkward teenage existence. I didn’t play sports, got bi-weekly allergy shots, had a mere handful of friends(the kind you spend lots of time with, not the kind you bide your time with in Algebra or English Comp), and spent most […]

A Box Full Of Wilco : A Deep Dive Into ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’

It’s safe to say that Wilco’s 2002 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is one of the most important albums to come out in the last two decades. It’s certainly one of the most important for me personally. It was one of the most striking sonic shifts that a band could make, while also simultaneously not changing […]

“You’ll Know When You Get There” : The Genius Of Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi

It’s not that Herbie Hancock doesn’t get the love and heaps of praise that he deserves, but his trilogy of albums he released for Warner Brothers Records in the early 70s definitely do not. Mwandishi, The Crossing, and Sextant were released concurrently in 1971, 1972, and 1973, and saw Hancock expanding his sonic palate exponentially. […]

’68 To ’72 : MIles And ‘Water Babies’

It’s safe to say that Miles Davis was the first jazz artist I was obsessed with. I bought Thelonious Monk’s Monk’s Dream back in the mid-90s, but I didn’t deep dive into jazz until the late 2000s when I bought an AT-PL120. Yes, my jazz journey coincided with my purchase of a record player. It […]

“Louvered ribcage, gills rise metamorph”

I’ve gotten stoned just a handful of times in my life. Weed was never really my jam, honestly. There was maybe two times that it clicked for me, and one of those times was getting high in my cousin’s Nova as we drove around the Amish countryside waxing ecstatic about Steely Dan. Besides that, most […]

How Stuart Hamm Rewired My Brain(or the odd case of Dr. Gradus ad Parnasum)

For a long time now I’ve wondered what happened in my brain to where I’ve veered from loving the singer/songwriter to being almost exclusively a fan of instrumental music. I mean, from 16 or 17 years old until about 5 years ago I was all about great songs. The Beatles to the Kinks to Brian […]

I bet your 7″ lathe cut can’t do this….

I thought I’d seen everything. From UFOs landing in Midwest cornfields and their extraterrestrial pilots revealing to me the meaning of existence thru an old Lite Brite, to talking coyotes that revealed to me the meaning of existence thru an old Milton Bradley Simon game, to a monkey that could make Toaster Strudels for a […]