My friend Jared — the one who lends me all his fancy records and who has successfully turned me onto jazz — is obsessed with Sun Ra. He’s got a massive collection of his stuff. I totally understand the obsession. A lot of the Sun Ra music is amazing. As a vinyl collector, there’s lots…

I’m going through a pretty huge Neil Young phase at the moment. I mean, there’s so much to enjoy! I would have first heard his records from my parents’ vinyl copies (which I still have!): the self-titled debut, After the Goldrush, and Harvest are the ones I remember best. Then I had a second phase…

Well, this is an exciting one — quite plausibly the coolest record ever. It needs no introduction. And will receive none. The pressings My friend Jared kindly lent me his pristine, like legitimately Near Mint, 1967 German first pressing. The banana has been peeled, and Mr. Emerson does not appear on the rear cover —…

Last week, I had one of those moments I live for as a blogger. Listening to borrowed copies of Clifford Jordan’s Glass Bead Games, I spotted what seemed like evidence that the Pure Pleasure reissue was sourced from a needle-drop that had then been digitally manipulated to remove pops and clicks… hardly a very “analogue”…

There is a moment in a story by I. B. Singer — I can’t remember where exactly, and maybe there are several of them — where he says that at a certain point in his career, it wasn’t about writing stories anymore. Once he had attained a certain fame, once people saw the kinds of…

Since I moved from my headphone-based system to my loudspeaker system, I’ve been revisiting a bunch of my Best Pressing Shootouts. Well, I’ve become tired of all the red fonts I need to use for those — and in the case, I’m adding a totally new pressing into the mix. So rather that a “Revisited,”…