Although their music was often categorized as some sort of electronica, UK’s Broadcast always had a tinge of hauntology, and even folk horror, to it. The work of duo Trish Keenan and James Cargill often felt like the past, maybe the distant past, being superimposed over the present. It is the kind of art which […]

Many records are scarce or rare, but few are such holy grails as an original copy of Ithaca’s A Game for All Who Know. This 1973 UK private press title was only produced in a run of just 99 copies, so as to avoid having to pay sales tax. I can’t help but think whoever […]

A year spent listening almost exclusively to The Beatles in my teens was like a self-imposed exile in the wilderness. Contemporary music was undergoing many sea changes in 1989, yet I was stuck in the music of two decades earlier. I’m not sure how many times I had to be told about a highly influential […]

“My head’s attracted to a magnetic wave of sound.” That lyric may define my life. It is from Roy Wood’s “I Can Hear the Grass Grow”, a 1967 song by The Move, which I first heard on the second Nuggets box set. This is a collection which expanded my musical tastes more than any other […]

My favorite movie, band, album or book are decisions I do not take lightly.  A change in any of these is to be given lengthy consideration, to be taken as seriously as if I realized my sexual preference had changed or I had suddenly found religion.  I can recall the moment when I realized Stereolab […]

I find it hard now to believe there was a time when I hated the Grateful Dead, and it has only been in the past decade that I have begun to appreciate them.  Before then, there were some tracks that I enjoyed to some extent, but I felt I was betraying the credo I had […]

Let’s face it: most electronic music, when there isn’t a regular vocalist, doesn’t have much of a distinctive sound that one can associate with one particular person or group. Unless it is somebody like Nine Inch Nails or Moby (and, for the latter, only as concerns a couple of albums), it would be difficult to […]

Robert Schneider is a polymath, with the emphasis on “math”, having a PhD in it and currently working as an associate professor in the subject of his expertise. Previously, he spent a couple of decades leading the band The Apples in Stereo, one of the many groups and artists in the loosely defined Elephant 6 […]

Similar to this list of albums, per a challenge to pick my 100 favorite albums, a friend posed a devious challenge for myself and a couple of other friends, for each of us to create a list of our 100 most favorite songs. Failing that, a list of 50 songs. Years ago, I had posed […]

My wife is currently down with some sort of stomach bug, and I’m just waiting for it to hit me, too. Should that happen, I will doubtlessly be spending some time with the only album I think of that feels like being under the weather, and that is Ween’s sophomore release, The Pod. This disc […]

No comment. Take away from this selection any meaning you wish. “Walking with Jesus” by Spacemen 3 “Jesus” by The Velvet Underground “Jesus Was a Cross Maker” by Judee Sill “Jesus Gonna Be Here” by Tom Waits “Jesus Came from Outer Space” by Supergrass “I Just Want to See His Face” by The Rolling Stones […]

I never need to hear anything by Led Zeppelin ever again. I heard them too much back in the day when played by almost every guy I knew in high school, and then you couldn’t get away from them on most of the radio stations I liked. Not that I actually dislike the band that […]

It was in October of 2000 that I was spending another day in the hospital room of my dying grandfather. He had recently had a heart attack, another in a series of several of them and the resulting corrective surgeries. Something felt final about this one, as it would turn out to be. He was […]

Elvis Costello was three albums into his career and still desperately trying to conquer America on yet another tour when he nearly derailed his career entirely on March 15, 1979.  After a gig in Columbus, Ohio, he was drinking heavily in the Holiday Inn bar, which is where Stephen Stills and other similar performers from […]