Articles
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Portrait of a musician: Enrique Mazzola, conductor
|Editor’s Note: Branko Bozic of Audiofreaks has rarely been so animated and inspired as he is by conductor Enrique Mazzola. Bozic first contacted us about writing a feature on Mazzola about a year ago. On ...read more -
David Bowie (1947-2016) – a personal tribute
|I was somewhere over the Atlantic when the news about the death of David Bowie broke. As the 747 landed at Gatwick, practically a plane full of text messages rang out in unison. I saw ...read more -
New Year's Resolutions
|New Year is the time of making resolutions that you are destined to break by mid January. The longest I managed to stick to my resolutions was back in my college years, when I vowed ...read more -
Breaking the wrong record?
|There are some valuable records out there. Earlier this month, Ringo Starr’s ‘No. 0000001’ copy of The Beatles (also known as the White Album) achieved $790,000 at auction, and a copy of The Sex Pistols ...read more -
Exposing the ‘Good for Classical’ myth
|We all do it. We tend to pigeonhole systems (especially transducers like headphones and loudspeakers) as having specific characteristics that ally themselves to a particular genre. We often hear of loudspeakers being ‘good for rock’ ...read more -
In praise of challenging music
|As a gaijin living in England, my experience of sushi has traditionally been very ‘western’: recognisable bits of fish (tuna, salmon) or seafood (crab, prawn, maybe octopus) with rice, seaweed, and wasabi. OK, so there ...read more -
Rebooting classical music
|You probably missed it, but Western Civilisation came to an abrupt end last week. Its end was not due to instability in the worldwide financial market, the wanton destruction of archeologically important antiquities in Palmyra, ...read more -
The Show Must Go On
|If you were there at the time, Queen was a very big thing. From the early 1970s right up to (and beyond) the death of singer Freddie Mercury in 1991, the band had a string ...read more -
Bugge Wesseltoft
|Late last year, Norwegian keyboard player Bugge Wesseltoft released Trialogue, an album he made with laptop beat-meister Henrik Schwarze and former est (Esbjorn Svensson Trio) bass player Dan Berglund. Wesseltoft made his name as the ...read more -
Tidal - the future of audiophile streaming?
|In one of the most public displays of the music business setting itself straight, Tidal’s recent announcement was part showbiz glitz, part hard-nosed business. Last month, Aspiro, parent company of high-resolution streaming service Tidal (and ...read more -
Classic Albums – Huhtikuu's Ensimmäinen Päivähuhtikuussa
|Dark Loungecore was not long for this world. A brief moment of irony in the late 1990s and it was gone. It left no lasting legacy, produced no stars, and most of the albums were ...read more -
Classic Album Sundays - Pink Floyd's The Wall
|I must admit I have not listened to Pink Floyd’s The Wall in its entirety for nearly three decades until recently. However, in anticipation of our The Wall 35th anniversary celebrations, I duly dusted off ...read more -
Classic Albums: Hot Rats by Frank Zappa
|Frank Zappa might not be your run-of-the-mill rock star. He was not one for recreational pharmaceuticals. As a teenager, when his contemporaries were listening to Bill Haley & His Comets, Zappa was paying attention to ...read more -
Classic Albums: Beethoven's 5th and 7th Symphony, Vienna Philharmonia, Carlos Kleiber, cond
|Although this Classic Albums series has its gaze primarily fixed on rock, jazz, and folk music, there are some extraordinarily powerful classic albums from the Classical canon that deserve greater attention. However, Carlos Kleiber’s legendary ...read more -
The Beatles Mono Box Set at Abbey Road
|I admit it, some elements of this job are inescapably on the “you lucky, lucky bastard!” side of things. So, when I got the last minute call to be at London’s legendary Abbey Road Studios ...read more