To celebrate Buddy Holly's 75th birthday (coming up September 7th), online music creation marketplace Indaba Music has launched - oddly enough, though it is the business Indaba is in - a remix contest, inviting contestants to take on Jenny O's version of Holly's "I'm Gonna Love You Too."
Watch out, hip-hop: If you don’t stay on top of your game, you might get bumped out of the limelight by other forms of pop music. That’s the meaning behind the title of Jay-Z and Kanye West’s brash, lavishly produced collaboration, as Jay himself has acknowledged.
District 97 has won over some impressive fans. Bill Bruford and John Wetton have been singing the praises of the band's debut, Hybrid Child. And S+V's editorial staff was equally unable to resist the Chicagoans' progressive pop in selecting the band as our first Breaking Out contest winner.
YOU’RE SCRAMBLING NOW, thinking, Wait — I recognize her . . . don’t I? Yes — yes, you do. Can’t quite place her though, hmm? (She might actually appreciate that; she doesn’t like or seek being typecast.)
Murray Perahia’s recordings of Bach’s Keyboard Concertos, originally released from 2001 to 2003, have now been reissued in this specially priced Limited Edition three-CD set (with a new essay by Jeremy Siepmann) — and if you missed them the first time around, do not make that mistake again.
While Spotify and MOG have been getting the lion's share of the press, Rdio has been running a perfectly useful little subscription streaming music service for almost a year now. Overlooked by many (admittedly, even by S+V) in the glare surrounding the arrival of Spotify in the U.S., Rdio is now poised to be the first streaming service to release an iPad app.
Sad news in the headlines this week. We all mourn the passing of Borders Books, not just one of the last megabooksellers, but one of the last that also sold music. Who’s to blame? I blame my mom.
Dave Grohl and I are crouched together on a hot blacktop driveway that encircles the SoCal locale where the photo session for this exclusive S+V cover story is taking place. To the onlookers who shuffle past us and sometimes hover at a respectful distance, it appears as if these two hunched, animated, close-talking bearded longhairs are plotting to take over the world — and perhaps that’s not an entirely wrong assumption.
Back in September 2002, I interviewed Michael Tilson Thomas about the launch of a bold new project with the San Francisco Symphony: a complete cycle of the Mahler symphonies to be released on hybrid multichannel SACD via the orchestra’s fledgling in-house label, SFS Media. At the time, Thomas already had clearly formed ideas about the sound he wanted:
My current favorite all-format album is the Raveonettes' Raven in the Grave (Vice), which sounds smoky-fab whether I'm listening to it via CD, MP3, or LP. I asked Raveonettes co-founder Sune Rose Wagner, 38, how the band (Wagner and co-conspirator Sharin Foo) corrals the backbeat for its 21st-century-cool Wall of Sound. Read on for his answers (and for a listen to "Forget That You're Young," a track from the new album.)