Twittering Machines

“The Way I Work: Matt Mullenweg”, Inc. June 2009

“Music is my muse and I listen to it all day. There’s a lot of jazz — Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins — but I’m also a big fan of Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and Method Man. I have an analog Shindo stereo that was hand built in Japan and the aural experience is mind-blowing.” ~ Matt Mullenweg

Shindo’s Street Sign
photo credit: Matt Mullenweg

Ken Shindo
photo credit: Matt Mullenweg

These are photos Matt took during his visit to Ken Shindo’s shop in Tokyo. You can see more on Matt’s blog (highly recommended).

And you can see more pics of Matt’s system on Pitch Perfect Audio (also highly recommended).

footnote: WordPress kicks ass.  Thanks Matt ~ “Code is Poetry”

I was introduced to high-end audio by the political theorist Allan Bloom, who back in the early 1980s had what seemed to me a crazily expensive Linn Sondek turntable and a collection of over 2,000 records.

from All Hail…Analog? by Francis Fukuyama – audiophile, philosopher, political economist, and author.

The Keep + Animal Collective collection is a collaborative project that benefits the Socorro Island Conservation Fund. Each member of the acclaimed band Animal Collective designed their own signature Keep shoe.

Clockwise from top left ($75/pair except where noted):

THE TOBIN Avey Tare (ghost)
THE GUERRA Deakin (fish)
THE RAMOS Geologist (shark)
KIDS RAMOS Geologist (shark) $35/pair
Keep + AC Shirt $25
THE RAMOS Panda Bear (camo)

Mark Leckey
Soundsystem (2002)
Sound system, amplifiers, speakers, turntables, record player, acetate record
Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, NY
8 1/2′ x 8 1/2′ x 38″

From the initial press release (2002):

“. . . one moment becomes another, Victorian ragamuffins steam past McDonalds and as the bass plummets your ribs shake like a vibraphone and our teeth nearly fall out of our heads. Sound loses all sequence, and at 4000 watts, 200 years in Old Compton Street crunches together instantly with bad acid crystal clarity.”

On exhibit at the Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA, 19 May – 26 June 2011

Most exciting experiences?
“Having actor Jack Webb buy the first LNP-2.” ~ Mark Levinson

“All we want are the facts, ma’am” ~ Sergeant Joe Friday

Grouper
A I A : Alien Observer/Dream Loss

I usually enjoy what the musician has to say about their record as much as what other musicians say about it and almost always more than what critics, especially the fake ones, have to complain about. Here’s Liz Harris of Grouper on this release:

“Dream Loss is a collection of older songs, mostly written before a hard time. Alien Observer, for the most part, is made of songs recorded after that time. Each has a song that belongs thematically on the other, a seam stitching them together. Both albums… explore otherness. Being an other to one’s own self, to other humans; ghosts and aliens, both literal and metaphorical; and other worlds to escape to (beneath the water, in the sky). Thinking about people who have died…

The process of making these albums reacquainted me with what I want to explore in music: friction, exploration of something large and outside of me, describing and traveling to intangible objects and places, unseen movements and connections between people and spaces. Songs that move on their own, that have an autonomous monstrous quality, songs from another world.”

You can hear some here (sounds dreamy, swimmingly deep and lovely to me). From Yellowelectric and its selling out fast (look for a repress this summer).

V/A
Princess Nicotine: Folk And Pop Sounds Of Myanmar

Limited edition LP reissue from Sublime Frequencies of music from formerly Burma compiled by Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls) in 1993 and originally released on Majora Records (LP/1994). Listen and be enchanted here.

I didn’t think I could make it but I did thanks to the heavy rain which curtailed my outdoor to-do list activities. I headed down to the Princeton Record Exchange, one of the best record stores in the world according to Jim Sclavunos among many others, arriving just past 3PM. There were tons of Record Store Day records remaining – too many for any one person to purchase and a wide enough selection to appeal to even the most exquisite of tastes.

The majority of shoppers were on the younger side, that is to say younger than me and I got to listen in on a few conversations among friends. One of my favorites involved a young man holding the Grateful Dead’s Record Store Day release (their first record — ‘The lacquers were cut by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering, and the vinyl was pressed at RTI. This is a limited edition pressing of 3,000 copies in mono’!) and debating whether to get it or eat lunch out – he had enough money to get the other records he’d already decided on and the Grateful Dead or lunch.

I spoke to Jon, the extremely affable General Manager of PREX (one of the greatest record stores in the world) and he said they had a long line (over 300 people by his estimate) waiting for a few hours before the store opened even though it was cold, windy and raining and there was a constant line out the door and down the street until about 2PM. According to Jon the crowd was very friendly and patient with no pushing or shoving or arguing over who got what. Vinyl as peacekeeper.

I went to Record Store Day (RSD) at PREX to get some records (and succeeded as you can see and not just with RSD records) but also just to check out the scene and support my favorite record store. To my mind, Record Store Day is meant to raise awareness of the local Independent Record Store, to lure people in who otherwise might just buy online with limited edition releases of their favorite or soon to be favorite music and to make the Independent Record Store some extra money, i.e. help their business.

So you have to ask yourself how can anyone object to Record Store Day? Of course since this is such a large world and non-places like Facebook allow us to kinda interact with people we’d otherwise cross the street to avoid, I’ve seen a few people griping about RSD and how they weren’t going to go which was the only thing that made sense in terms of explaining their piss-poor attitude. One guy, although I’m beginning to think he’s a fake composite personality because he embodies nearly every cliche douchebag trait known to man, claimed RSD was just for the rich. As if the rich go record shopping on Record Store Day in the rain.

That kid with the Grateful Dead record and the conundrum decided with the help of his friends to get the Grateful Dead record and eat lunch at home, proving you can have your records and eat lunch too.

“Today music is an international language; through records and films and television you can reach audiences of millions of people. Bringing music to so many people has been the great satisfaction of my life. Music is no longer something only for those who have the knowledge or the money. That audience still exists but we can also reach out beyond it.” Herbert von Karajan

Gerhard Richter
Record Player (Plattenspieler), 1988
Oil on canvas, 62 x 83 cm
The Museum of Modern Art

From the 15-painting cycle “October 18, 1977″ – This painting is based on a photograph of Andreas Baader’s phonograph taken after his death. Left on the phonograph is side two of Eric Clapton’s “There’s One in Every Crowd.” Richard Huffman, baader-meinhof.com

The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Live at Clark University

Recorded March 15, 1968 at Atwood Hall, Clark University, Worcester, MA (second show). An “Official Bootleg” professionally recorded released by Dagger Records and an absolutely blistering live performance. Jimi is in tip-top form, on top of his game and at one with his guitar and amplifier and the Experience are right there with him.

“Fire”, “Red House”, “Foxey Lady”, “Purple Haze” and “Wild Thing”. Released for the first time on vinyl on Record Store Day in 2010, “Red House” alone makes Record Store Day worth celebrating. Listen in as Jimi reshapes the blues.

“Because it’s the main thing for a party, it’s the main thing for me; the main factor which defines if the party is good or not is the sound quality.”

“It’s possible, because the idea of high fidelity is to transport, of course, a classical concert, a symphony that you can’t transport to your home. But you try by buying the best speakers possible, to put the concert feeling into your living room. And the better the speaker is the more live feeling you get.”

“This is very important, because we are running in the wrong direction at the moment. MP3 is like offering you an 800-pixel camera as the newest shit. And this is what is happening to sound at the moment. It’s absolutely important to fight against it, so I buy old mixers, old studio equipment, because the best equipment for recording was in the ’50s and ’60s. And all digital recording is only a photograph of the reality. The only recording well is analog on tape and vinyl. Going to the mastering studio and putting it directly on vinyl is the target.”

~ Ricardo Villalobos, from Tony Ware’s September 2007 interview, XLR8R

Moritz Von Oswald Trio / Digital Mystikz
Restructure 2

Killer 12″ 45rpm EP from Honest Johns released in 2010 as a precursor to this year’s full-length Horizontal Structures from the Moritz Von Oswald Trio. Moritz Von Oswald has been around the block a number of times as 2MB (2), 3MB, Basic Channel, Cyrus, His Name Is Dime, Marathon, Maurizio, Moritz Von Oswald Trio, Palais Schaumburg, Phylyps, Quadrant, Rhythm & Sound, Round Five, Round Four, Round One, Round Three, Round Two, Schizophrenia, Time Unlimited…Here we have – Side 1: Paul St. Hilaire/Tikiman (Guitar), Sasu Ripatti/Vladislav Delay (Percussion), Max Loderbauer, Moritz von Oswald (Keyboards) and Marc Muellbauer (Double Bass). Side 2 gets the Digital Mystikz rebuild.

This music positively percolates with freshness, life and energy. The mix is superclean and the musicians so supertight and so deep in the groove it’s hard to believe they’re not synthesized. Compared to Burial or The Bug, we’re talking about the sunnier side of the dubstep/techno street without the dirt, crackle and haze. Rippingly refreshingly good “dance music from another dimension.”

Alex Steinweiss
The Inventor of the Modern Album Cover

New from Taschen – the trade edition of this previously limited edition. Hardcover, 34 x 28.3 cm (13.4 x 11.1 in.), 420 pages.

“I love music so much and I had such ambition that I was willing to go way beyond what the hell they paid me for. I wanted people to look at the artwork and hear the music.” —Alex Steinweiss

From the publisher:

Alex Steinweiss invented the album cover as we know it, and created a new graphic art form. In 1940, as Columbia Records’ young new art director, he pitched an idea: Why not replace the standard plain brown wrapper with an eye-catching illustration? The company took a chance, and within months its record sales increased by over 800 per cent. His covers for Columbia—combining bold typography with modern, elegant illustrations—took the industry by storm and revolutionized the way records were sold.