Greetings from Laurel Canyon!
They’ll stone you when you’re at the breakfast table / They’ll stone you when you are young and able / They’ll stone you when you’re tryin’ to make a buck / Then they’ll stone you and then they’ll say “good luck” / Tell ya what, I would not feel so all alone / Everybody must get stoned
I was up most of night with springtime allergies and woke up late this morning. I’m not sure if my scratchy eyes are from our beloved kitty Nori or from the massive amount of green pollen covering most of the canyon.
Even though we’ve been digging the warm early spring weather, a part of me is wishing for one of those April showers to wash away… well, to wash away everything. Can we simply restart everything?
No, like a real lesson. Tracy takes a studious approach to music and wants to share her musical training with kids who have an interest in learning about it. Her newest project, Young Maestros, Vol. 1 has the goal of instilling into students some solid musical theory without pandering to them or talking down to them (kids hate when you do that!).
Seems bassist Randy Meisner–who would shortly thereafter become a founding member of the Eagles–quit the band in a royal snit after Richie Furay and Jim Messina (both formerly of Buffalo Springfield) excluded him from participating in the album’s final mix. This left Poco in a rather awkward position when it came to the painting of the band’s members meant to grace the album cover. Poco might have done any number of things to remedy this situation, the most obvious and simple one being to scrap the cover and come up with a new one. Instead they opted to air brush poor Randy from the cover Josef Stalin style–and replace him with a dog.
New York, NY | New record store brings hard wax to Industry City: A new record store in Industry City promises to be a haven for crate-digging Brooklynites. HiFi Provisions, a passion project from collector Matthew Coluccio, opens its doors in Industry City to wax-spinners this week — making the owner’s hobby official, after ten years of obsessive collecting. “It was kind of a hobby gone awry,” said Coluccio. “Records are kind of like cockroaches, more and more of them just keep showing up.” Throughout his years of collecting, Coluccio often sold records and stereo equipment at the yearly Carroll Park flea market in Carroll Gardens, but never had plans to open up a brick-and-mortar store. Yet, after a conversation at a birthday party with an Industry City executive, he decided to turn his side project into a full-blown business. Now, he’s set up a space in the sprawling waterfront complex and filled with records and other collectibles, including objects like a vintage fly-fishing rod and piles of old stereo equipment. The collector says he envisions the shop filling to the brim with records and other items, creating a space where collectors can dig for hours in hopes of finding 
Los Angeles, CA | There’s a new ‘rare vinyl” record shop opening in Los Angeles: The shop in downtown LA is run by the promoters behind the city’s Dialogue and Midnight Lovers events. A new record shop is opening in downtown Los Angeles, run by Rolando Alvarez and Eddie Vela, the duo behind the city’s Dialogue and Midnight Lovers parties. The pair launch Chapter One Records — a store they say 
It was the Melody Maker review that finally convinced me to give Kid A a listen–if the the damn thing was really that bad, I wasn’t going to miss out on the opportunity to pile on. But Kid A isn’t the space age fiasco I’d hoped for; its Pink Floyd/Brian Eno vibe make it the perfect accompaniment to a hard day over a hot bong. Your more active types, on the other hand, risk drowning in its ambient ooze. That sound you hear off in the distance is a non-fan, crying out hopelessly for a lifeguard.
NEW RELEASE PICKS: Natural Information Society with Evan Parker, descension (Out of Our Constrictions) (eremite) Formed in Chicago by multi-instrumentalist Joshua Abrams in 2010, the Natural Information Society on this 2LP features Jason Stein on bass clarinet, Mikel Patrick Avery on drums, and Lisa Alvarado on harmonium and effects, with Abrams on guembri and British saxophone titan Evan Parker completing the lineup of 7/9/2019, captured live in London at Cafe OTO as they explore the possibilities of one piece for 75 minutes. Naturally, it’s divided across four sides of vinyl, but in an interesting twist, also into four mp3s, which formulates a digital experience that’s a little like listening to the first CD edition of Coltrane’s Om (where the vinyl fadeout-rise up was retained). This might seem like an odd digression, but not so much when Coltrane’s impact on Parker is considered. His breath tangles with Stein are simply magnificent (indeed, evoking Trane and Dolphy), but it’s the incessant groove (with ties the Chicago House) and Alvarado’s wonderful contribution that enhances the unique flavor. A
Christine Ott, Time to Die (Gizeh) Ott’s skills as a multi-instrumentalist and composer are well-established, both through her solo albums (this is her fourth overall) and more recently in the side-project duo Snowdrops with Mathieu Gabry; earlier in her career, Ott contributed extensively to Yann Tiersen’s band. For Time to Die, she sings and plays piano, harp, and the Ondes Martenot (something of a signature instrument for her), along with adding percussion, Jupiter8, timpani, tubular bells, monotron and vibraphone. Gabry also contributes on a variety of instruments, and it’s the spoken voice of Casey Brown that’s heard in the opening title-track (reading a “beloved cinematic text” I shan’t spoil). Offered as a sequel to Ott’s 2016 LP Only Silence Remains, this record’s stylistic range is appealingly wide, beginning in a dark ambient-electronic zone and gradually drifting into assorted modes of modern classical, and with particular emphasis on her skills as a pianist. Although this isn’t a soundtrack (Gizeh calls it a “musical fresco in eight chapters”), Ott’s strengths as a film composer do shine through. A-
REISSUE/ARCHIVAL PICKS: V/A, Sound Storing Machines: The First 78rpm Records from Japan, 1903-1912 (Sublime Frequencies) The output of Sublime Frequencies is reliably captivating, and this set is no exception, the third in a series devoted to early recordings from Asia, all compiled by Robert Millis of the Climax Golden Twins. The prior volumes are The Crying Princess: 78rpm Records from Burma and Scattered Melodies: Korean Kayagum Sanjo, both released in 2013, and of the three, this set reaches back the farthest. Flat disc recording (as opposed to Edison-style cylinders) had only been in existence for a few years prior to the timeframe of this LP/ CD, so the audio quality isn’t optimal as surface noise is abundant. But I somehow doubt that anybody excited to hear these offerings will be too bothered by the rough ambience. No doubt many will welcome it. As Millis observes in his notes, the haze of surface noise intensifies the aura of strangeness. Amongst the most unusual are two by Suenaga Togi with the Imperial Household Orchestra, but the overall value easily eclipses the weird. A
V/A, MIEN (YAO) – Cannon Singing in China, Vietnam, Laos (Sublime Frequencies) Recorded and produced by Laurent Jeanneau aka Kink Gong, this LP offers three vocal duos, Keo and Na (from Laos), Deng Fu Mei and Zhang Wu Mei (from China) and Yang Chun Jin and Yang Bao Cheng (also from China), plus one track by Gap Choun (from Vietnam) that combines singing with considerable percussive clatter and bash. Succinctly, the Yao are hill tribes residing in the countries of the title, and the Mien are the largest branch of the Yao. While the vocal style doesn’t vary all that much across these pieces, the nearly 20 minutes of Keo and Na (sequenced first) becomes quite hypnotic as it progresses and is further enhanced by its nature as a field recording. There is birdsong (very welcome), but also at a few points a low hum that injects a mysterious tension into the scheme of things, at least until it becomes apparent that it might just be a distant motorbike. Due to its prominent rhythmic component, I kinda dig the Gap Choun piece the best, but nothing captured here is the slightest bit disappointing. A-
London, UK | Gothport shop reopening “feels like Christmas” for vinyl record shop owners: It seems that optimism has arrived on Gosport High Street following the reopening of non-essential retail stores. Shoppers were seen perusing High Street all day long, and entrepreneurs wanted small businesses to spend the day in the sun without so many large retailers. One of those business owners is Keelon Howes, who runs the Slice of Vinyl Record Shop on South Street. Angela Albray, 59, from Blockhurst, made her first haircut since the launch of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. “I wouldn’t mind if no one appeared, but fortunately there are really loyal customers who are very supportive of our work.” Kieron wants the people of Gosport to shop locally and help independent retailers during these times of distress. “Currently, especially in Gosport, there seems to be a lot of love for independent shops,” he said. “This year, we have a lot of space for major brands to jump in, so I think we can often see 
A Pressing Issue: How ‘the vinyl revival’ has caught out the music industry during the pandemic: Release dates going back and back. Box sets getting postponed by a year. Physical albums arriving months after their digital release. Rumours of pressing plant meltdowns… COVID-19 was bound to have an effect on the release of albums. But the pandemic has brought home a crisis in the music industry, and that is, quite simply, the fact that there aren’t enough pressing plants to cope with the demand for vinyl. On the surface, the figures for the so-called vinyl revival are healthy: even with the high street shut for most of the year, vinyl sales in the UK rose by nearly 10 percent to 4.8 million in 2020. It’s the 13th consecutive year that vinyl sales have risen. Sales of turntables grew too, as music fans who had previously resisted the headlines about ‘The Vinyl Revival’ finally succumbed and began rediscovering love for the black stuff. Despite the rise in popularity, there has been no serious initiative, since vinyl sales picked up, to increase vinyl production. No new pressing plants of any significant size built in the past decade, coupled with an ever-increasing rise in sales, means 
