Is a record not spun a record not played? Dragging a needle across old, brittle vinyl records or wax cylinders can damage them — not something you want to do with rare historical recordings. At the Library of Congress, researchers have developed a scanner that can extract audio from records by scanning them digitally – no spinning required. Images are analyzed and transformed back into audible sound. “Stuck” records magically become unstuck, while physically broken records can be pieced back together with great results.

How does it sound? “The machine is not adding its own color. It's not adding anything of its own nature,” says the device's developer. The samples on the NPR site are low-res internet audio, but the comparisons to the original are impressive, despite a persistent viagrapill.com background hiss.

The technology could eventually become available to general consumers, meaning that the daunting task of MP3-encoding piles of vinyl would become way less daunting. It's a strange and beautiful world.

Thanks Jeb

Budding guitarists (hell, all guitarists), take note: Guitar music is church, and there are ten commandments you gotta internalize if you want that axe to say something that will raise souls to the ether. Prophet / spiritual leader / ghost dancer Captain Beefheart, whose voice allegedly once destroyed a $1200 Telefunken microphone, saw (sawed?) through the blues, took them to metaphysical planes, twisted them up in old socks and dish rags, made your spine vibrate with surrealistic pleasure.

More on the Good Cap'n another day, but for now: Beefheart's 10 Commandments of Guitar Playing:

Continue reading Practice in Front of a Bush →

Every few decades, reincarnation goes on a bender and a soul is born into the wrong nexus of the time-space continuum. Take Meg Reichardt and Kurt Hoffmann, a dashing pair of musicians from pre-war France, accidentally transported into 21st century New York. Unheeding of their incorrectly assigned era, the pair – two parts of the quintet Les Chauds Lapins – have taken it upon themselves to re-enliven the spirited chansons of Paris.

Les Chaud Lapins, which translates literally as “The Hot Rabbits” or figuratively as “The Super Turned-On Rabbits” (those French are always turned on!), have a new recording – Parlez-moi d’amour. This collection of 1920s-40s French love songs is steamy to be sure, but it’s not the steam of jungle love the Rabbits are after – this is the kind of steam that pours gently from vents in a Paris sidewalk and blows up your lover’s skirt as children roll hoops and street vendors hawk pretzels piled high with rock salt and spicy mustard, while the Hurdy Gurdy man grinds away at his organ, pet monkey banging tin cup against the sidewalk. “Parlez-moi d’amour” is the steam of a hot latte and a plate of onion quiche on a spring morning, the steam of the landlady’s boiler blowing a gasket next to the spot where you and your secret paramour are making love on a time-worn picnic blanket.

Continue reading Speak To Me of Love →

When I think about Tom Snyder, the talk show host who passed away earlier this week, the first thing that comes to mind is his laugh, an old-school guffaw that bordered on self-parody long before Dan Aykroyd made it the centerpiece of a Saturday Night Live routine. Then I think about the eyebrows, twin black caterpillars that gave away his mood just as convincingly as Sam Donaldson’s as he made conversation with guests ranging from Ayn Rand to Charles Manson (and no, I’m not drawing any connection here). But most of all, I remember the music and interviews on Snyder’s signature program, The Tomorrow Show, which ran in my formative years between 1973 and 1982. At a time when even SNL had distinct boundaries on what could be played and discussed during the show, Snyder took risks with performers considered too edgy or unpredictable for most of the “alternative” shows of the day.

Superficially, the slightly haughty Snyder could come off a bit like the Mr. Jones of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” (“something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is”). But Snyder didn’t patronize the performers, wasn’t afraid to call them on their own contradictions, and got some unlikely subjects to stand and deliver. Many of the highlights (although conspicuously, not the Clash and U2) are included in Shout Factory’s recent DVD release The Tomorrow Show: Punk and New Wave, which captures appearances by the Jam, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, and the Ramones, among others. In the rest of this post, I’ll share a few memorable Tomorrow Show moments. (Also discussed below: the hidden connection between Martha Stewart and the Plasmatics.)

Continue reading Tom Snyder in Tomorrowland →

The Arctic Monkeys’ reworked version of “Dancing Shoes” with a ridiculously catchy Cuban rhythm, featured on last fall’s Rhythms del Mundo compilation, first seems noteworthy simply for its goofy exuberance. A YouTube video, which borrows a classic Bollywood dance sequence, makes the song even more relentlessly silly. But beneath the surface humor is a desperate plea for help, revealing the Arctic Monkeys’ struggle for survival in an increasingly inhospitable climate.

Sadly, the Arctic Monkeys’ plight is representative of a huge, and until now, underreported problem: the threat climate change poses to the world’s music supply. This six-part essay reports on the impending musical catastrophe and the global efforts, spearheaded by international celebrity and unofficial “fifth Monkey” Al Gore, to bring about a saner and more musically balanced future.


Holiday in the Sun

Between 1971 and 2000, July high temperatures in the Arctic Monkeys’ hometown of Sheffield, England averaged a moderate 67.1 degrees Fahrenheit. Monkeys members fear a rise of several degrees could induce a complacency that would thwart their ability to turn aging Buzzcocks and Libertines riffs into snappy pop songs. It’s hardly a coincidence that the Arctic Monkeys’ new album is titled Favorite Worst Nightmare. “This is serious, man,” remarked lead singer Alex Turner. “Take away that distinctly British chill, and before you know it, we’d be crooning bloody Cliff Richard songs on ‘Top of the Pops’ for me bloody mum and auntie.”

British musicians fear that warming trends threaten the supply of angst, guilt and irony, the three pillars of British musical expression, and arguably of all Anglo-Saxon culture. MySpace ska-pop princess Lily Allen announced she is canceling a spring break in Ibiza and touring by dogsled in Lapland instead. Allen, who asked “sun is in the sky, oh why?” on last year’s prescient “LDN,” wants a secure place for her music. “The reindeer are a bit daft, but I feel safe here,” she said, sipping Absolut vodka in Sweden’s Jukkasjarvi Ice Hotel, 200 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle.

The direst warnings came from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. “Look, I’m not trying to get all Bono on you about global warming,” he said, “but I think we may already have reached the tipping point. You know that old Pink Floyd concert movie filmed at Pompeii, where the lads are so out of it that they sing a 23-minute song about an albatross and babble incoherently about wanting pie with no crust? Well, that would be Radiohead in a warmer world. If you thought Kid A was already full of little blips and burps, you haven’t seen anything yet.”

Continue reading Global Warming Threatens Arctic Monkeys →

On the second anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, I’m posting my New Orleans odyssey, “Listening to the Water.” The soundtrack to the story features Irma Thomas, Mos Def, the Meters, Amerie, Bessie Smith, Randy Newman, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, with a special public service announcement from Kanye West.

The man at the door of the Blue Angel nightclub had the ugliest mustache I had ever seen. It looked penciled on, like he was playing Rhett Butler in a school production of “Gone with the Wind” without really giving a damn. I moved toward my sister, trying to look married. The man grinned. “Uh, y’all are eighteen, aren’t you?,” he asked. “Yes—uh YES,” I croaked. “Well, come on in,” he said, “don’t get too crazy all at once, you hear?”

It was May 1977. So far, I’d had a New Orleans experience the Chamber of Commerce could have scripted. Stroll the French Quarter’s sunshine-filled streets. Inhale chicory-scented coffee and beignets. Clap as ancient tuba and banjo players at Preservation Hall trot out their millionth rendition of “St. James Infirmary,” and clarinetist Pete Fountain entertains your mom’s corporate convention.

At 15, I didn’t understand that to natives, most of this signifies “New Orleans” the way Rice-a-Roni is the “San Francisco treat.” But inside the smoky club, I sensed more mystery. The cornet player stopped his Dixieland riffing and hit a note so hushed and low it hinted at another New Orleans behind the tourist curtain. Outside the nightclub, a street drummer coaxed ripples and torrents out of garbage can lids. He motioned to me, as if to share a secret. But he only said one thing: “The sound is in the water.”

Irma Thomas – It’s Raining

Mos Def, “Katrina Klap”

Continue reading Listening to the Water →

While you were busy not paying attention, the world changed: “Buyers of digital music are purchasing singles over albums by a margin of 19 to 1.” That stat could be a smidge misleading, since an album may consist of, say, 12 songs, and only get counted as a single purchase, but still, “Individual songs account for roughly two-thirds of all music sales volume in the United States.”

We all know that the theory was that digital downloads would let people only purchase the songs they liked, rather than the entire album, but I had no idea the tide had shifted this far already. Me, I’ve bought exactly one single from iTMS in the past few years – a track from Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers, which I needed for a performance piece we were prepping for a friend’s wedding.

Continue reading AOR RIP →

A friend took his nine-month-old son to the local record store recently, muttering something like “I’ve got to teach him early about the importance of buying music, rather than downloading.” “For copyright reasons or tangibility reasons?,” I asked. “Neither,” he responded, “It’s about getting all the information.” He was talking audio aesthetics — preserving maximum data in the recordings you own, rather than paying for convenience with aesthetically diminished, massively compressed audio. I respect that, but wonder if there will be any CDs left to buy by the time our kids have their own allowances.

Continue reading Fear the Reaper →

It’s time to play a punk rock variation on the ancient What’s My Line quiz show, where you guess the musician and his new career direction. Here are the clues:
• Suppose your guitar playing and threadbare singing carry such coruscating intensity that concertgoers can hear their ears ringing days later—and this is after your solo acoustic shows.
• Suppose you were the grittier part of a songwriting team often described as punk’s Lennon and McCartney.
• Suppose Nirvana, the Pixies, My Bloody Valentine, Green Day, the Hold Steady, and much other “alternative rock” couldn’t have existed without you, and yet none of your offspring matched the melding of noise and melody, and the sheer adrenaline rush, that spills out of your best work.
• Suppose a British website theorizes that you and Bobby Hill of King of the Hill are, in fact, the same person.

The mystery guest is Bob Mould, former leader of the umlaut-worthy Twin Cities power trio Hüsker Dü, and later the potent and more refined Sugar. And his new career direction? As I discovered on a recent trip to Washington, D.C., Mould–who has been a dedicated blogger, electronica DJ and man-about-town in the district for several years–is the new advice columnist for an alternative weekly, the Washington City Paper. In his Ask Bob column, Mould invites readers to ask him questions about “music, cooking, travel, politics, religion, neighborhoods, and sociology.” Continue reading Bob the Builder →