Subtitle it, Let It Breathe. When The Beatles: Get Back initially aired across three consecutive nights on November 25, 26, and 27, 2021 on the Disney+ streaming platform, it was, to say the least, a cultural phenomenon. Not only did Get Back grant a new generation access to many of the sights and sounds required to understand the full scope of the ongoing impact of The Fab Four to this day, but director Peter Jackson's almost-8-hour docudrama also served as a redemption of sorts for the lingering, decidedly mixed reactions to the 1970 band documentary directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Let It Be.
Porcupine Tree returns after a decade-long hiatus to deliver a career benchmark, Closure / Continuation. All three bandmembers give us the scoop on how it all took root, and Steven Wilson takes us inside the making of the album’s truly stunning Dolby Atmos mix.
As August comes to a close, it’s time for the first monthly installment of our ongoing Spatial Audio File column. As always, I’ve thoroughly spec’ed and checked all five tracks I’ve selected here by way of my personal deep-dive listening sessions on both my home system and headphones alike. You’ll find each and every one of them amidst the cavalcade of Made for Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos tracks within the ever-expanding Apple Music library.
With the fall season seemingly right around the corner, let’s take one more summer spin together and check out this month’s fine quartet of truly immersive tracks, which are. . .
The key to the enduring appeal of Black Sabbath’s career-making second album, September 1970’s Paranoid, doesn’t only reside within its fist-pumping, headbanging, metal-genre-establishing bonafides. Actually, the secret sauce can be found via something you may not have even considered — Black Sabbath’s inherent sense of melody. And where might that come from, you ask? Two words — The Beatles.
I don’t know about you, but I love hearing what I call “the humanity of performance” while listening to music. What I mean by that is, whenever I hear singers take breaths before or after they sing their lines (or even when they do it in the middle of them!), and/or I discern things like chairs scraping across floors or fingers moving across fretboards, I’m totally cool with it.
These recording elements all give me a sense of space (i.e., where the recording took place and the proximity of those involved) and even the character of the performers, to some degree. Certain producers like their recordings to be more insular than that, which is certainly fine in isolated cases—but the more “real” a recording is the better, imo.
The reason I bring this up is there are plenty of human elements involved in the five tracks I’ve selected for this week’s Spatial Audio File. As always, I’ve thoroughly spec’ed and checked each track by way of my personal deep-dive listening sessions on both my home system and headphones alike. You’ll find each and every one of them amidst the scores of stellar Made for Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos tracks within the ever-growing Apple Music library.
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Let’s all now plug directly into the inherent sonic sea of humanity at hand as we collectively check out this week’s five-spot of truly immersive tracks, which are. . .
Elton John could do no wrong as the calendar came to the close of 1971. Madman Across the Water, his third album in that calendar year alone, came out in November, and it was considered to be the best entry in his Trident Studios orchestral trilogy, featuring production by Gus Dudgeon and arrangements by Paul Buckmaster. (The previous two releases in said trilogy were April 1970's self-titled Elton John and October 1970's Tumbleweed Connection.)
While I was listening to the five song selections I made for this week’s Spatial Audio File column, I was struck by the fact that we as listeners can easily have our attention sidetracked by catchy choruses—you know, the ones you just can’t help but sing along with every time you hear them. Call it the “Bohemian Rhapsody” syndrome—which, by the way, is not a bad thing at all, mind you. If anything, it proves the artists/songwriters at hand have handily succeeded in their mission to hook you with their music. But as we’re joyfully singing along, we’re not really paying attention to the music itself since we’re technically “competing” with what we’re hearing in the moment.
Hence, once I got my reflexive singing out of the way—either out loud, or in my head—I buckled down to refocus my critical listening of these five tracks, each of which I thoroughly spec’ed and checked by way of my personal deep dive listening sessions on both my home system and headphones alike. You’ll find all of them, alongside a veritable singalong fest of other stellar Made for Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos cuts, within the burgeoning Apple Music library.
Let’s curb our ready-to-sing enthusiasm but instead ramp up our ready-to-listen eagerness by checking out this week’s quintet of readily engaging immersive tracks, which are. . .
The acquisition of Bandcamp by Epic Games could lead to some quite intriguing, game-embedded music-streaming opps that could further enhance the already large appeal of the Fortnite franchise and its Soundwave Series.
Spatial Audio: The Final Frontier. Those are two phrases that naturally came together in my mind as I, like many of you, marveled at the deep space images sent back to us here on Planet Earth via NASA’s James Webb Telescope. They’re a stunning reminder the universe is as big as we can comprehend, if not more so.
Audio can be like that too, especially when you listen to music mixed in 360 degrees. Done right, these fully enveloping mixes can be as vast as you can possibly imagine, and they can go to places somewhat hard to fathom, even in the exact moments they’re swirling in and around your head. Either way, they’re joys to behold—or should that be, behear?—which is but one reason I consistently relish the tracks I cover each and every week here in Spatial Audio File, because I always hear something I’ve never experienced before.
As always, each of the five deep space cuts that follow has been thoroughly spec’ed and checked by way of my personal deep dive listening sessions on both my home system and headphones alike. You’ll find each and every one of them, alongside a veritable starfleet of other astronomical Made for Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos cuts, within the ever-expanding universe that is the Apple Music library.
Let’s now engage with this week’s cosmic cavalcade of five celestially immersive tracks, which are. . .