Mike Mettler

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Immersive Audio File
Crossing the Atmos Rubicon With The Pineapple Thief’s Visionary Mix Maestro, Bruce Soord
Mike Mettler  |  Mar 30, 2024  |  3 comments

Bruce Soord, guitarist, vocalist, and founder of the British post-prog collective The Pineapple Thief, caught the surround-mixing bug well over a decade ago, and he’s yet to shake it—something that’s quite good news for those of us who admire his learned approach to the 360-degree soundfield. Soord’s recent Atmos forays include The Pineapple Thief’s evocative new album It Leads to This, as well as current albums by Jethro Tull and Big Big Train—and he’s not done yet. During a recent Zoom interview across the Pond to Paris, music editor Mike Mettler and Soord discussed how he first got into surround mixing, what mistakes he made along the way, and why he strives for achieving a “natural feel” in his Atmos mixes. . .

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Music Disc Reviews
Frank Zappa – Over-Nite Sensation: Super Deluxe Edition Box Set
Mike Mettler  |  Mar 27, 2024  |  0 comments
Performances
Sound

Frank Zappa was a master at creating musical Venn diagrams. What do I mean by that? Well, Zappa’s compositional talents stretched well beyond the rock music idiom, so many of his releases would offer a keen intersection of doo-wop, classical orchestration, avant-jazz, progressive jams, country funk, and pure pop sensibilities (for starters). Sometimes he would even incorporate all his artistic powers into all 20-plus minutes of an album side’s lone track.

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Music Disc Reviews
Remaster Class – Alice Cooper: Billion Dollar Babies
Mike Mettler  |  Mar 14, 2024  |  1 comments
Upon inception, Alice Cooper was conceived more as a group construct, not just a moniker for one person. The name itself was intended to encompass an all-for-one band concept, but it was also concurrently adopted by lead singer Vincent Furnier, who soon enough embodied the id and ego of Alice Cooper to such a degree that he transmogrified that persona into his fully becoming one and the same. Six-plus decades later, Alice Cooper is still going strong as the king of shock-glam metal to this very day — and his rabid fanbase wouldn’t have it any other way.
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Special Features
Moody Blues: Passed, Present, And Future
Mike Mettler  |  Feb 27, 2024  |  1 comments
How The Moody Blues co-created the hybrid music genre known as orchestral rock by going all-in on making their groundbreaking audiophile-favorite masterpiece, November 1967’s Days of Future Passed.
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Spatial Audio File
Steve Hackett on the Genesis of His Surround Sound Mixes and Atmos Inclinations
Mike Mettler  |  Feb 23, 2024  |  3 comments

Whenever the calendar turns over to a new year, there’s a pretty good chance a new Steve Hackett solo album will also be in tow and ready to greet our collective ears. And lo, what do you know—early 2024 has indeed blessed us with the presence of the onetime Genesis guitarist/vocalist’s (yes) 30th solo album, The Circus and the Nightwhale (InsideOut Music). Naturally, the 1CD/1BD mediabook version of the genre-straddling Circus includes a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix of its 13 tracks done by Hackett’s longtime keyboardist, Roger King. During a recent Zoom interview, music editor Mike Mettler and Hackett discussed the importance of sound placement in the Nightwhale surround mix, what his favorite Genesis song in 5.1 is, and what Genesis track they’d both like to hear most in Atmos.. . .

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Ultra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Moonage Daydream
Mike Mettler  |  Feb 02, 2024  |  0 comments
Picture
Sound
Extras

Call him the Thin White Chameleon. As pioneering as the late, great David Bowie was as a multitalented artist who came of creative age during the initial wave of the rock era, what comes across most prominently in Moonage Daydream — a provocative documentary helmed by multi-hyphenate director/producer Brett Morgen — is his deeply philosophical nature as a man constantly questioning norms, pushing social mores and cultural boundaries, and seeking cosmic truths.

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Music Disc Reviews
Remaster Class – Soundgarden: Badmotorfinger
Mike Mettler  |  Jan 29, 2024  |  4 comments

Burning Dinosaur Bones

Soundgarden was catching fire. The proto-headbanging Seattle-bred foursome began to emerge from the misnomered grunge ooze with their second LP, September 1989’s aptly named Louder Than Love, with tracks like “Loud Love” and “Big Dumb Sex” deftly adding observational tact to the band’s already thunderous bouillabaisse. And then, in October of that forever-hallowed alt-rock emergence year of 1991, Soundgarden swerved into even more progressive-leaning hard-metal lanes with the unrelenting Badmotorfinger.

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Spatial Audio File
Ryan Ulyate Opens the Curtains on the Atmos Mix of His Grammy-Nominated Solo Album, Act 3
Mike Mettler  |  Jan 26, 2024  |  1 comments

With apologies to the late, great Tom Petty, we do know how it feels to be Ryan Ulyate, thanks to the open book approach the acclaimed producer/engineer has taken with the songwriting and subject matter that dominates his very first solo album, Act 3, which has also been nominated for a Best Immersive Audio Album Grammy. During a recent Zoom interview, music editor Mike Mettler and Ulyate discussed how he learned about his Grammy nomination, why the immersive Atmos palette gives him the additional space needed to take more of an orchestral approach with his mixes, and why the cover image for Act 3 is the perfect full-circle choice to best reflect his life’s work. . .

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Spatial Audio File
The Ten Best Immersive Audio Albums of 2023
Mike Mettler  |  Dec 29, 2023  |  6 comments

It seems like everyone is riding the immersive audio wave these days, which ultimately isn’t such a bad thing at all to see our favorite format reach the ears of as many spatially interested and Atmos-curious listeners as possible. With that in mind, here are my choices for the ten best and most thoroughly immersive audio albums of 2023, which appear as follows in reverse order from 10 to 1. . .

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Music Disc Reviews
The Who – Who’s Next: Life House Super Deluxe Edition & 4LP Box Sets
Mike Mettler  |  Dec 26, 2023  |  0 comments
Photo: Trinifold Archive

Performances
Sound

Life House was intended to be Pete Townshend’s life’s work, so to speak, following the somewhat unexpected runaway success of The Who’s May 1969 groundbreaking 2LP rock opera,Tommy. But for various reasons, portions of Life House were instead transmogrified into the nine songs that comprise one of the truly seminal albums of the rock era, August 1971’s Who’s Next.

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