Lovely Recordings

Greetings from the antipodes, NZ more precisely. I’ve been thinking about this for a while and finally managed to make myself do it.

It’s 1996, well before iPods, smartphones and easy Internet access. My employer is sending me from New York City to Sydney, Australia for a 1-year work assignment. My wife and two little kids are coming too. We can bring whatever fits into allowable checked luggage and carry-ons, plus a small “barrel” of other personal items (mostly toys & clothes) that will follow by cargo ship a few months later. We’ll be living in a very small apartment, so most of our possessions will be staying behind (or being sold at garage sale, in the case of my vinyl collection) including everything from our pets to our musical instruments, the hi-fi system and most of my recorded music library. We have two months to get organized. I designate a small cardboard box for CDs to bring along. The ones I choose to fit in that box will have to do me for a year, and I’ll be playing them on a boom-box to be purchased once we arrive. Not the happiest thought for an audiophile, but to be honest there are more pressing things to think about.

If there's a theme for this list it's psychedelic repetition. Not all of it falls into that category, but those craving songs in the traditional sense will have some barriers to overcome. Regardless of whether it's ultra lush or mind meltingly harsh, those hypnotic qualities of music is a theme across almost everything I listen to. Oh, and not a lot of vocals, which seems to be another preference of mine. I guess it's easier to drift away to other worlds when there's no human anchoring you to reality.

I think it's time to throw some dance moves at this lovely recordings party! Not everything on this list is a party banger but my natural listening tendency is definitely towards music that infects the hips and makes you want to do a little shimmy on the dance floor, or just plain freak out!

I've loved music since I was five and proudly taking a tiny plastic record player everywhere I went (I think it had to “disappear” eventually to preserve the relative sanity of the adults around me). I wasn't especially attuned to quality of sound until about fifteen years ago and am still a piker in terms of equipment and analysis compared to most of the posters and readers here. Anyway, here are four recordings I love for musical reasons that also boast at least decent sound.

What a delight this feature of Audiostream has been. It’s great to see that audiophiles listen to something other than Kinda Blue and Diana Krall. I’ve been looking for the next great musical thing for as long as I can remember. Along the way there were memorable moments of discovering Roxy Music as a teen, seeing Steve Reich premier Tehillim in the Rothko Chapel and watching journeymen players get lost in a sound at the Lennox Lounge in Harlem.

It's easy for classical music listeners like me to fall into a rut and listen to the same familiar pieces in multiple different performances. While it's true that there is always something new to find in the old chestnuts like Beethoven's Ninth, why not stretch your ears? So here are three recordings of music that I found exciting and fascinating, plus one fine recording of familiar Chopin played by an artist new to me.