On March 6th, The Magnetic Fields are slated to release Love at the Bottom of the Sea. It will be a return to form for the band and for their primary member, the absurdist songwriter and Morrissey-sound-alike Stephin Merritt.
After releasing 1999’s critically acclaimed 69 Love Songs, Merritt decided to Read more...
I’m very attached to the Eventide H3000 that lives at my studio. Some of my favorite go-to effects originate in this classic double rack-space digital behemoth.
A great deal of the Eventide experience comes from tweaking and interacting with the hundreds of presets that come loaded in the box. They Read more...
EAST WILLIAMSBURG/BUSHWICK, BROOKLYN: The three little bears aren’t there, but Brooklyn has a studio that’s juuuuust right: Swan7.
Founded by the busy producer/engineer Matt Stein, Swan7 expended as little energy as possible on nomenclature so it could get straight to tracking and mixing for its clientele. “Swan7 stands for Read more...
If you blinked during Sunday’s GRAMMY telecast, you might have missed the fact that the iconic jazz recordist Rudy Van Gelder was honored by the Recording Academy with a 2012 Trustees Award.
Van Gelder is credited with engineering thousands of jazz recordings from his Englewood Cliffs, NJ studio. Although many Read more...
LONG ISLAND CITY, QUEENS: Don’t take your ears off the drums: Try listening to nothing but the precision ballistics that shoot through every song on Resolution, Lamb of God’s addictive seventh studio album, and life gets almost unbearably exciting.
The source of this rhythmic exhilaration is Chris Adler, whose advanced Read more...
Surprised, but not surprising, was my reaction to the news of R&B superstar Whitney Houston’s passing yesterday. Her death came one day before the 54th GRAMMY Awards presentation tonight – a small shortfall mirroring larger shortcomings that unfortunately defined the last decade of her life.
Houston sold 200 million+ albums Read more...
MIDTOWN MANHATTAN: A new traveling high-end audio showcase will kick off in NYC this month! The Audio Underground Roadshow will take over the SAE facilities in Herald Square on Saturday, February 25 to show off a range of boutique audio equipment including A-Designs, ATC, Bock, Chameleon Labs, Cranesong, Daking, Drawmer Read more...
Something is an unusual record. It’s atmospheric yet danceable, plaintive but poppy. Its sound sparkles with a lustrous coat of wax, but it’s unafraid to remain decidedly off-kilter if not a little weird.
Stream tracks from Something at SoundCloudUnderneath the shimmering production aesthetic are Caroline Polachek’s startlingly well-performed vocals Read more...
Gillian Rivers is everything a classical violinist could want to be: She’s young, she’s beautiful, and she makes a reasonable living playing and arranging music for critically acclaimed contemporary composers. The only catch is that most of these composers turned out to be the songwriters in rock bands like MGMT, Read more...
Jeremy Holgersen, an NYC-based agent for The Agency Group, books the live appearances for a 49-artist roster that includes Bad Brains, Bear Hands, Ceu, Finger Eleven, Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, Lauryn Hill, The Pogues, Skinny Puppy, We Are the Ocean, and Yngwie Malmsteen. Here, he offers his perspective on Read more...
