Can confirm that the vinyl version of the new Mulatu Astatke & Hoodna Orchestra album sounds very nice:



Recommended in any format!

A little moody but also buoyant/bubbly/colorful.

Yeah, your personal experience of the place might be good, and that's not worth nothing, being there and seeing what it's like on the ground, to an outsider of sorts, in the present day. But China has earned a notoriously bad reputation for cracking down on dissent. Maybe they aren't as bad as Russi...

Haven't heard it yet, but Pop Ambient 2025 comes out on Friday.

Wouldn't hold it against any American who wants to leave here for greener pastures. This country isn't quite the worst, but it's not the best. And the direction things seem to be going in isn't too promising. In addition to tangible issues that might affect a person's quality of life/standard of liv...

The last-ever Lou Reed thing, Hudson River Wind Meditations , got reissued earlier this year, after being out of print for some time. It's nowhere near as fiery/piercing/in the red as Metal Machine Music ; if anything, it's closer to ambient and kind of slow and throbbing, and repetitive; but it's n...

"My Week Beats Your Year" is a funny diss, which I'll assume was directed at the label execs, though it could have also been directed at the listener, or maybe just anyone who might have bristled at the recording when it came out. Metal Machine Music is Not Crap. More "punk rock"...

Aggressively "patriotic" guitars are nothing new.

That might be the first time someone's gone through the trouble of crafting a MAGA fretboard, though.

Quite bad coming out the mouth of a Ron DeSantis or Elon Musk type person. Good god. Neutral/not inherently bad in other circumstances. But I kind of hate the culture wars at this point. Sorry. As a dude who gets good stuff done in other facets of his life, I don't feel the culture wars are necessar...

Wait . . . so, Steve was gonna retire and shuffle off to Hawaii?

The world got robbed of an interesting chapter there.

Sounds kinda Walter Becker/Magnum P.I.-esque.

Getting a little merch made for future book fair engagements and the like. The rule of thumb I'm following is that I won't get anything manufactured that I wouldn't personally buy and have genuine use for. So . . . no golf tees, penny purses*, and bucket hats. * = What I have against the penny purse...