VIA PRESS RELEASE | The Louvin Brothers—Ira and Charlie—were one of the great family close harmony acts that did much to shape the sound of Country music in the fifties and sixties.

Like just about any Country music act of note from that era, their off-stage lives were permeated by fraternal fallings-out, spousal abuse, alcoholism and violence. However, on record and in concert, the brothers managed to produce an ethereal sound that couldn’t help but move their listeners. By Charlie Louvin’s own account, people who saw the Louvin Brothers perform were mystified by the experience. Ira Louvin was a full head taller than his younger brother, played the mandolin like Bill Monroe and sang in an impossibly high, tense, quivering tenor. Charlie strummed a guitar, grinned like a vaudevillian and handled the bottom register. But every so often, in the middle of a song, some hidden signal flashed and the brothers switched places—with Ira swooping down from the heights, and Charlie angling upward—and even the most careful listeners would lose track of which man was carrying the lead.

This was more than close-harmony singing; each instance was an act of transubstantiation. “It baffled a lot of people,” Charlie Louvin explains in his revealing memoir. “We could change in the middle of a word. Part of the reason we could do that was that we’d learned to have a good ear for other people’s voices when we sang Sacred Harp. But the other part is that we were brothers.”

The Louvin Brothers influence can be found in artists as varied as The Byrds, Everly Brothers, The Lemonheads, Nirvana and countless other acts. This CD—which features performances recorded at the Grand Ole Opry in 1962 and 1963, shows the magic of their close harmony style, the other-worldliness of their voices. It’s beautiful stuff.

“I’ve had a bit of a funny relationship with vinyl, in that when I first got ‘into’ music in the early ’90s, it was pretty much the last hurrah for the original vinyl age before CDs became ubiquitous, and then in the last couple of years I’ve really fallen back in love with it as a way of enjoying music. I don’t think its a nostalgic thing, but rather the tactile and linear nature that forces you to sit down and listen to an album from start to finish, while the physicality of a record forces you to consider the whole design as well as the music itself.”

“The first bands that I considered ‘mine’ were Nirvana and Suede. (I still have the initial run of singles from the latter in my collection today!) Before that I loved TOTP and chart music as an ’80s kid, and then towards the end of that decade my four older brothers began to get into ‘alternative’ music. As anyone with older brothers or sisters will tell you, at a certain age there’s nothing quite as cool as your older sibling’s music collection. I distinctly remember my brother Sean passing me on the stairs and singing the sweary line from Dinosaur Jr’s “Freak Scene” into my face, and around the same time hearing Pixies records suddenly being played at home. The illicit, alien and deranged sounds of these records were an instant hook.

Hurtling have been compared to a few early ’90s bands since we started, but I think if there’s anything we are inspired by, it’s in how some of these bands approached music. There’s always been something a bit ragged and loose about bands such as Dinosaur Jr, Stereolab, or the Breeders (particularly live) that gives the music an immediacy and rawness that has kept it exciting. Both Jen and Jon are great and very experienced musicians, but we’re not afraid to make mistakes or improvise in places, so whenever we play live it feels fresh, and hopefully that excitement and energy is felt by the crowd.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | “This warmly diverting film is not just for Fab Four fanatics, but for anyone who recalls the start of the Sixties.” —The Times (UK)

The Beatles defined music and popular culture like no other band — but how exactly did they make the journey from Merseyside teenagers to international pop stars in the ’60s? Featuring unique and revealing interviews from those involved in the early years of The Beatles, in THE BEATLES: MADE ON MERSEYSIDE, home audiences will discover the story of Fab Four’s ascent from Liverpool and Hamburg to the pinnacle of success.

Recounting how American rock ‘n’ roll and rhythm and blues dragged post-war Liverpool into one of the most vibrant music cities ever with the Mersey Sound, this acclaimed doc delves into the young history of the Fab Four, their early band iterations and why it took so long for them to break through the noise. From school bands, to colleges, Hamburg to The Cavern Club, The Beatles moved from skiffle to rock ‘n’ roll before creating their own unique sound that took the world by storm.

With newly filmed contributions from the “fifth Beatle” Pete Best, Quarrymen Colin Hanton and Len Garry, Brian Epstein’s business associate Joe Flannery, The Beatles first ever secretary Freda Kelly, original Mersey Beat magazine owner Bill Harry, and flatmates of John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe, this acclaimed doc charts the original music and the energy and excitement that led to the explosion of Beatlemania and one of the most influential and beloved bands in history.

It’s probably a fair statement to say Terrane is something of an anomaly in the current climate, where an artist’s persona and public image is valued above their creativity.

Terrane’s work has, against contemporary logic, been rapidly gaining traction for its beautiful fusing of dreamlike cinematics and raw emotion, whilst the artist has remained hush about who he is and where he came from.

His newest single, “Circles,” is an expansive piece of world pop which strikes a balance, walking the tightrope between organic and electronic composition. His subdued melodies drift in and out of earshot over richly emotive soundscapes before static drenched wires crackle and beaming harmonies are pulled into sharp focus.

The man remains a mystery but his music becomes more and more personable, conveying the urgency of raw emotions caught in the moment and the distorted memory of stories and connections made, lost and only half remembered in a haze of dial-up era discord.

The chances are good that anyone reading this site knows about a certain three-day music festival held in August of 1969. Well, this review delves into the other major musical gathering from that month of that year; it occurred from Aug. 1-3 at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor’s Hill Auditorium, and it was dedicated to the blues. For half a century, the occasion has been a part of the genre’s lore rather than an interactive milestone, but Third Man’s release of Ann Arbor Blues Festival 1969 Vols. 1 & 2 changes this situation across two double LPs offering a multiplicity of approaches from names big and small and just in time for the 50th anniversary of the whole affair.

Organized by a handful of blues-nut attendees of the University of Michigan, the Ann Arbor Blues Festival is notable as the first musical event held on US soil devoted solely to blues music. Scoping out the names that comprise these eight sides of vinyl, it’s remarkable how they excelled without much of a specific template, though of course there were folk and jazz fests a la Newport that served as a sort of rough guide.

While the lineup is loaded with titans, it’s diversity that’s the vital organizational tactic, interspersing acoustic country blues, with obvious nods to the Delta, into a landscape of electrified urbanity. The guitar is unsurprisingly favored, but there is room made for pianists, harp blowers, horn sections, and even some accordion.

The co-rulers of amplified Chicago, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, are here, both in strong form, with B.B. King joining them on the fest’s marquee of post-WWII blues mega-names, but it all kicks off with the indefatigable and highly adaptable pianist Roosevelt Sykes, whose skill on the keys is matched (indeed surpassed) by his ability to work a crowd as he dives with relish into the risqué smack-talk of “Dirty Mother For You.” As Sykes mentions, he cut it in ’34 for Decca, and it establishes a lineup spanning considerably wider than the cravings of a typical rocker turned budding blues aficionado.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | A Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to LP mastering legend Bernie Grundman at the third annual Making Vinyl conference on October 14, 2019 that celebrates the global rebirth of the record manufacturing industry.

The ceremony will be held at the W Hotel in Hollywood, a few blocks away from Grundman’s flagship facility which opened in 1984, following a 15-year tenure with A&M Studios. In 1997, Grundman opened his Tokyo mastering studios and in 1998 relocated to expanded facilities in Hollywood. “The name Bernie Grundman is synonymous with mastering,” says Making Vinyl president Bryan Ekus. “Bernie’s world-renowned facilities responsible for a consistently large percentage of chart recordings, and makes him the perfect recipient of our award.”

Grundman’s mastering credits include: Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, Stevie Wonder, Van Halen, Prince, The Carpenters, Steely Dan, Herb Alpert, Barbra Streisand, Jack Johnson, Mary J. Blige, Maroon 5, and Outkast, among thousands of other top recording artists.

Grundman’s Hollywood facilities comprise a complex of six studios, including dedicated 5.1 Surround and Lacquer Cutting rooms, which provide mastering services for vinyl, digital streaming, and CDs. Coexistence of physical media in the digital age is a theme of this year’s Making Vinyl conference, which soon will be announcing other confirmed speakers.

Grundman, an expert with the LP cutting lathe, describes mastering as “basically post-production for the recording industry—the final creative step before delivery to the manufacturer for mass production.”

“Vinyl is something that had been pushed aside by cassettes and CDs by the time any of us in the band were born, and all of these were pushed aside by iPods and iPhones by the time we were in school and actively consuming music (unaided by our parents). With the resurgence of vinyl I have been able to connect with it as an adult in a number of ways and observe how others connect with it.”

“There are the obvious things, such as listening to an album in its entirety (how music should be digested IMO), and the importance of artwork. Nowadays, some people buy vinyl to be used strictly for wall art and they don’t even listen to the album… hipsters! But there are 2 things I have really come to appreciate about vinyl that both revolve around the inflexibility of the this persistent technology:

1. Audio quality. Yes in theory audio quality today on phones and computers has the capacity to be just as good or better than vinyl, but not in practice for most people. Making digital copies of songs that are easy to stream requires a lot of compression to make the files small enough to share. If you are listening to your music through computer speakers or ear buds or worst of all…your phone speaker, you miss out on so much in terms of the fine details in the recordings.

Most songs you listen to have so much depth and the people who worked on that recording made hundreds of decisions that are so important to their vision, but so easily lost on poor quality playback. The inconvenience of vinyl forces you to listen through the proper stereo components.

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