Box sets for diehard music fans: The holidays bring exclusive gifts for diehard music fans. And if you’re the giver of such gifts, please know they’re not usually budget-friendly. Record companies mine back catalogs of legendary artists to release extravagantly packaged box sets focusing either on a certain period or the entirety of their career. With consistent sales in the niche vinyl market, some box sets previously released on CD have been reissued on vinyl. Here are a few new box sets by classic acts out in time for Christmas shopping.
The 5 Best Places to Buy Vinyl in Seattle: Small but exquisitely curated, Wall of Sound has been to Seattle what the defunct Other Music was to New York City: the place with the highest ratio of amazing, obscure, eclectic vinyl from around the world. Owners Jeffery Taylor and Michael Ohlenroth are the underdogs of the city’s music-retail ecosphere, because they cater to a tiny niche clientele who don’t care about what’s popular. If you’re looking for elite selections in avant-garde jazz, minimal synth, psych-rock, prog, funk, soul, ambient, experimental, and many manifestations of “world” music, or Bobby Beausoleil’s Lucifer Rising box set, Wall of Sound will hook you up.
What the Tech: Gifts for music lovers: Audio-Technica turntables are my choice this year. The Audio-Technica LP60 is easy on the budget at $89 and plays music the way it was made to be played. The fully automatic belt-drive turntable connects to stereo systems and has a pre-amp built in, which is important because most home audio systems are not equipped with a pre-amp and have no connections to a turntable. With the built-in pre-amp, you can connect the record player to the system through the cd input. Other Audio-Technica models can connect to a computer with a USB and some models have Bluetooth capability. Purists though will prefer listening to vinyl through a direct wired connection.
19 Iconic Record Covers Reimagined by Top Young Artists: At year-end of 2017, the creative team behind Depositphotos (one of the world’s leading visual content marketplace) came up with the idea of bringing visuals and music together within one creative project. Over a dozen visual artists were invited to reimagine some of the all-time legendary record covers. 19 top young creatives presented their personal, unique vision for the covers of 19 true masterpieces of music — from The Beatles to Sigur Ros, from Aladdin Sane to Kid A. In their experiments, the designers tried to put forward their artistic perceptions, while not departing too far away from the original images or music on the record. See all the concepts here.
Al Muskovitz – Vinyl Memories: In what I hope will become a new holiday tradition, we pulled out a record player and spun my old albums that we found boxed up in the most inaccessible to reach, darkest, spider-webbish corner of our storage room. It was a treat to see the look on the “youngins’” faces as they listened in amazement to the sounds emanating from the wax disks, especially when scratches repeated lyrics off my Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely (lift needle, gently place back down) Hearts Club Band album. To say my collection is eclectic would be a vast understatement. Besides the Beatles, we flipped through the Supremes, Moody Blues, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Streisand and Sinatra albums that co-mingled with Alvin and the Chipmunks, Captain Kangaroo’s Songs and Dances, and Detroit Tiger Denny McLain playing his Hammond Organ.
