Big Star recorded Third at Ardent in 1974, saw it rejected, and watched it appear in 1978 in several versions. Here is why no definitive copy exists.
How Planet Rock rebuilt Kraftwerk's Numbers and Trans-Europe Express, hedged with a B-side, and settled for a dollar a record.
The Number That Moved the Snare Open any drum sequencer and you will find a dial labelled swing, usually a percentage. Most producers treat it as a feel knob. It is better understood as one of the most successful pieces of interface design in electronic music, because it reduces a drummer's lilt to a single […]
On 29 September 1986, Iron Maiden released Somewhere in Time, and the sleeve promised a machine age: a cyborg Eddie, a neon city, and guitar synthesizers credited on the record for the first time in the band’s career. The detail worth keeping is a smaller one. The song that started life on a synthesizer is […]
In 1968 the BBC Radiophonic Workshop existed to score continuity idents, radio drama and the odd Doctor Who cue, not to make records. It had no mandate to release music and no budget line for a pop album. That did not stop two of its staff engineers from making one anyway, after the building emptied […]
In the 1930s, engineers at Bell Labs had a problem that had nothing to do with music. Long-distance telephone calls arrived thin and unnatural, stripped of the small delays and reflections a voice picks up in a real room. Their fix was mechanical: a spring stretched inside a housing, with a transducer at each end. […]
Every house and EDM track built in the last twenty years carries a rhythm inside its rhythm: a bassline or pad that visibly ducks and swells under the kick drum, breathing in time with the beat. Producers call it the pump. It is now a single knob in every DAW’s stock compressor. In 1996, it […]
Released 21 September 1979, Wire's 154 was named after a gig tally, lost its producer mid-mix, hid a solo EP in the first 20,000 copies and ended the band at UK number 39.
Montreal post-rock is usually explained as a sound. It is better explained as real estate: an Anglo exodus, a loft above a garage, 500 hand-glued LPs, and two venues opened by a bass player. How Mile End built the infrastructure first.
The story of the Monks is almost always told as a costume. Five American GIs stationed at Gelnhausen, two German design graduates, shaved tonsures, black habits, a manifesto. It is a great story and it is also the least interesting thing about the record they made. What produced Black Monk Time was not an art […]
