Why I want my own music in the age of streaming: Sorry, Spotify — I have no interest in your streaming. When it comes to the music I love, I’m possessive to a fault. I want to own it all…At each evolution of the medium and as technology has improved, we’ve ceded more and more of that experience. Sure, the opportunity is still there to forge connections through music with the modern equivalent of the mixtape, the Spotify playlist, but the personality is gone. You can make a highly personal mix and share it out to one person, but at the end of the day it’s only just another page to open on their phone or computer that they can transmit to the internet at large with just a click.
Jazz pianist Bill Evans celebrated with massive 22xLP vinyl box set: Genius jazz pianist Bill Evans is to be celebrated with an 11-album vinyl box set on Anthology Productions. One of the most important pianists of all time, Evans cut several quietly evocative trio LPs for jazz label Riverside, including the timeless Waltz For Debby and Sunday At The Village Vanguard releases, recorded during the same sessions in June 1961, ten days before bassist Scott La Faro was killed in a car accident. They are among the greatest jazz LPs ever made. As well as album’s recorded under his own name the box set will include Cannonball Adderley’s Know What I Mean? (with whom Evans played on Miles Davis’ seminal Kind Of Blue).
An artist has created a tube map out of vinyl records (and you can listen to it): Artist Keith Haynes uses vinyl records as material for his works of art. But they’re not just any records. Each of the records used in his Map Series shares its name with a place. In galleries, some of his pieces are displayed with headphones so people can listen to the tracks as a playlist. We asked Haynes to tell us a bit about his work and share the tracks that make up its playlist…‘I love working in mixed media and, for me, the choice of materials is as important as the choice of subject matter. I describe my work as pop art created from pop materials as it’s pop in both its look and in the materials used – vinyl records, album sleeves, button badges etc.
This bare-bones cassette player fits in the palm of your hand: The music industry’s shift towards streaming has got us nostalgic for analog formats in recent years, with sales of cassettes soaring by 74% in 2016. But where the vinyl revival has been matched by a deluge of new turntable designs, we’ve not seen a decent update to the bulky cassette deck (or Walkman) yet. Enter the Elbow, a bare-bones device that fits in the palm of your hand. The tiny Elbow has an arm with a single pulley to drive the tape, rather than the double pulley of a traditional box-like tape deck . The speed of the tape is tracked by an optical sensor, and the motor keeps the speed constant.
