Banner Message
Please note that online availability does not reflect stock in store!
Please contact us via email or phone for immediate stock information.
Holiday Hours:
11/22: 10am-5pm
11/23: CLOSED
11/24: 10am-6pm
Music
The serene, delicate songs on Another Green World sound practically
meditative, but the album itself was an experiment fueled by
adrenaline, panic, and pure faith. It was the first Brian Eno album to
be composed almost completely in the confines of a recording studio,
over a scant few months in the summer of 1975. The album was a proof
of concept for Eno's budding ideas of the studio as musical
instrument, and a signpost for a bold new way of thinking about
music.
mysteries, venturing into its dense thickets of sound. How was an
album this cohesive and refined formed in such a seemingly ad hoc way?
How were electronics and layers of synthetic treatments used to create
an album so redolent of the natural world? How did a deck of cards
figure into all of this? Here, through interviews and archival
research, she unearths the strange story of how Another Green World
formed the link to Eno's future -- foreshadowing his metamorphosis
from unlikely glam rocker to sonic painter and producer.
In the spring of 1969, the inauspicious release of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band's Trout Mask Replica, a double-album featuring 28 stream-of-consciousness songs filled with abstract rhythms and guttural bellows, dramatically altered the pop landscape.
Yet even if the album did cast its radical vision over the future of music, much of the record's artistic strength is actually drawn from the past. This book examines how Beefheart's incomparable opus, an album that divided (rather than) united a pop audience, is informed by a variety of diverse sources. Trout Mask Replica is a hybrid of poetic declarations inspired by both Walt Whitman and the beat poets, the field hollers of the Delta Blues, the urban blues of Howlin' Wolf, the gospel blues of Blind Willie Johnson, and the free jazz of Ornette Coleman. This book illustrates how Trout Mask Replica was not so much an arcane specimen of the avant-garde, but rather a defiantly original declaration of the American imagination.
Los Angeles, 1976. David Bowie is holed up in his Bel-Air mansion, drifting into drug-induced paranoia and confusion. Obsessed with black magic and the Holy Grail, he's built an altar in the living room and keeps his fingernail clippings in the fridge. There are occasional trips out to visit his friend Iggy Pop in a mental institution. His latest album is the cocaine-fuelled Station To Station (Bowie: I know it was recorded in LA because I read it was), which welds R&B rhythms to lyrics that mix the occult with a yearning for Europe, after three mad years in the New World.
Bowie has long been haunted by the angst-ridden, emotional work of the Die Brucke movement and the Expressionists. Berlin is their spiritual home, and after a chaotic world tour, Bowie adopts this city as his new sanctuary. Immediately he sets to work on Low, his own expressionist mood-piece.
What resonated about Endtroducing when it was released in 1996, and what makes it still resonate today, is the way in which it loosens itself from the mooring of the known and sails off into an uncharted territory that seems to exist both in and out of time. Josh Davis is not only a master sampler and turntablist supreme, he is also a serious archeologist with a world-thirsty passion (what Cut Chemist refers to as Josh's spidey sense) for seeking out, uncovering and then ripping apart the discarded graces of some other generation - that pile of broken dreams - and weaving them back together into a tapestry of chronic bleakness and beauty.
Over the course of several long conversations with Josh Davis (DJ Shadow), we learn about his early years in California, the friends and mentors who helped him along the way, his relationship with Mo'Wax and James Lavelle, and the genesis and creation of his widely acknowledged masterpiece, Endtroducing.
Dusty in Memphis, Dusty Springfield's beautiful and bizarre magnum opus, remains as fine a hybrid of pop and rhythm and blues as has ever been made. In this remarkable book, Warren Zanes explores his own love affair with the record. He digs deep into the album's Memphis roots and talks to several of the key characters who were involved in its creation; many of whom were - like Zanes - outsiders drawn to the American South and mesmerized by its hold over the imagination.
EXCERPTThe love that is the subject of 'Dusty in Memphis' is different from the love of her earlier songs: it is a love that is all at once diffuse, dark, unpredictable, ecstatic, and a terrible deal. It is a love too big for the lyrical (and for that matter musical) framework of Dusty's earlier pop productions, no matter the breadth of that work. Like Memphis itself, the love that is the subject of 'Dusty in Memphis' is indeed bursting with the contrary: it happens not simply when you yearn for it, as in some adolescent dream, but when you're not prepared for it; it reveals itself not simply under the star-filled skies where a moon hangs low--in fact, as the first and last tracks on side one attest, it might be at its best when the sun's just arriving at work.
Thirty-Three and a Third is a series of short books about critically acclaimed
and much-loved albums of the past 40 years. Over 50,000 copies have been sold!
Passionate, obsessive, and smart. -Nylon
...an inspired new series of short books about beloved works of vinyl. -Details
Franklin Bruno's writing about music has appeared in
the Village Voice, Salon, LA Weekly, and Best Music
Writing 2003 (Da Capo). He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy
from UCLA, and his musical projects include Tempting:
Jenny Toomey Sings the Songs of Franklin Bruno
(Misra) and A Cat May Look At A Queen (Absolutely
Kosher), a solo album. He lives in Los Angeles.
Marc Woodworth's book covers the album's long and unorthodox period of writing, recording, sequencing, and editing. It includes interviews with members of the band, manager Pete Jamison, web-master and GBV historian Rich Turiel and Robert Griffin of Scat Records. At least sixty-five songs were recorded and considered for the album and five distinct concepts were rejected before the band hit upon the records final form. One late version, very nearly released, contained only a few of Bee Thousand's definitive songs.
The rest were left out and nearly ended up in the boxes of cassette out-takes cluttering up Robert Pollard's basement. The story of Guided By Voices transformation from an occasional and revolving group of complete unknowns to indie-rock heroes is very much part of the story behind the making of Bee Thousand. In addition to providing a central account of how the record was made, Woodworth devotes a substantial chapter to the album's lyrics. Robert Pollard's lyrics are described by critics, when they're described at all, as a brand of tossed-off surrealism, as if his verbal sensibility is somehow incidental to the songs themselves. Nothing could be further from the truth. Woodworth offers a sustained discussion of Pollard's work as a writer of often sublime, beautiful, and very human lyrics. The third key section of the book covers aesthetics. Woodworth considers the great appeal of the do-it-yourself nature of Bee Thousand and reflects on the larger importance of the strain of alternative rock for which this record is a touchstone.
The power and influence of Grace increases with each passing year. Here, Daphne Brooks traces Jeff Buckley's fascinating musical development through the earliest stages of his career, up to the release of the album. With access to rare archival material, Brooks illustrates Buckley's passion for life and hunger for musical knowledge, and shows just why he was such a crucial figure in the American music scene of the 1990s.
EXCERPT:Jeff Buckley was piecing together a contemporary popular music history for himself that was steeped in the magic of singing. He was busy hearing how Dylan channeled Billie Holiday in Blonde On Blonde and how Robert Plant was doing his best to sound like Janis Joplin on early Led Zeppelin recordings. He was thinking about doo-wop and opera and Elton John and working at developing a way to harness the power of the voice...In the process, he was re-defining punk and grunge attitude itself by rejecting the ambivalent sexual undercurrents of those movements, as well as Led Zeppelin's canonical cock rock kingdom that he'd grown up adoring. He was forging a one-man revolution set to the rhythms of New York City and beyond. And he was on the brink of recording his elegant battle in song for the world to hear.
When Johnny Cash signed to Rick Rubin's record label in 1993, he was already in the wax museum of memory, a fondly regarded but totally marginalized legend, unheard on the radio and unseen on the charts. His odyssey from oldies act to folk hero depended entirely on his first American Recordings album, a record of uncompromising directness.
Tony Tost digs into the worlds of American Recordings, showing it to be the crossroads where cultural, spiritual and mythic forces came together, reanimating and revitalizing The Man in Black. Tost has written a guidebook to myth and mystery, revealing the stark, often hidden terrains of Cash's greatest album. American Recordings: the sound of history singing to itself. American Recordings: the secret ache of the old, weird American. American Recordings: a man alone with the silence and darkness, buying back his soul, one song at a time.
Joy Division's career has often been shrouded by myths. But the truth is surprisingly simple: over a period of several months, Joy Division transformed themselves from run-of-the-mill punk wannabes into the creators of one of the most atmospheric, disturbing, and influential debut albums ever recorded. Chris Ott carefully picks apart fact from fiction to show how Unknown Pleasures came into being, and how it still resonates so strongly today.
EXCERPTThe urgent, alien thwack of Stephen Morris' processed snare drum as it bounced from the left to right channel was so arresting in 1979, one could have listened to that opening bar for hours trying to figure how on earth someone made such sounds. Like John Bonham's ludicrous, mansion-backed stomp at the start of When The Levee Breaks-only far less expensive-the crisp, trebly snare sound with which Martin Hannett would make his career announced Unknown Pleasures as a finessed, foreboding masterpiece. Peter Hook's compressed bass rides up front as Disorder comes together, but it's not until the hugely reverbed, minor note guitar line crashes through that you can understand the need for such a muted, analog treatment to Hook's line. Layering a few tracks together to create a six-string shriek, Hannett's equalization cuts the brunt of Sumner's fuller live sound down to an echoing squeal, revealing a desperation born of longing rather than rage. This is the way, step inside.
By pulling Kid A from its canonical status and grounding the album in various contexts, Marvin Lin explains not only why Radiohead suddenly adopted a new songwriting methodology, but also how properties like genre and authenticity distracted us from understanding our reactions to it. From bovine growth hormones and neurological impulses to Dada poetry and bandwidth throttling, the book articulated the politics behind both Radiohead's music and our listening experiences. But in a period of socio-political unrest, is listening to Kid A a waste of time? In and through the album, Lin seeks to answer this question by examining what Kid A does to us over time, what Kid A tells us about the future, and whether it's possible (or even desirable) to use Kid A to transcend time altogether.
