Newsletter December 2001

Newsletter December 2001/January 2002

Every time we add something new, you'll see a linked guide to it here,
with an archive of past additions.

If you have joined the Stereo Society, you will receive a monthly newsletter with direct links to everything new and announcements about fresh downloads etc.
Please forward a copy to a friend.

Our featured interview in December is with a person who has seen an extraordinary range of musical scenes and broken new ground in several of them. Genya Ravan, born in Poland at the end of the Second World War but sounding as if she was born into R&B, first enjoyed big hits as the leader of Goldie and the Gingerbreads, the female four-piece whose career spanned much of the sixties. The seventies saw three albums from Ten Wheel Drive, a ten-piece jazz/funk/fusion amalgam that she fronted, after which she went on to release six solo albums.

Production, which she had started in the mid-seventies on embracing the New York punk scene, became her main focus, leading to her own label Polish Records. Always raucous, she reminisces about the old days and about new and future days. Her new For Fans Only CD includes a version of Lennon and McCartney's Don't Let Me Down, recorded with Mike Thorne and the Uptown Horns in the early nineties as part of a Beatles cover project that went unfinished. We also stream another cut here, I'm Down. It wasn't as bad as the titles sound, really. Her interview is also available in streaming audio.

We've also fleshed out several of the pieces in November's huge update, principally with musical illustrations so that you can hear what's being discussed. In Jimmy Biondolillo's interview, we have posted rough mixes with his orchestrations highlighted, as well as the finished tracks.

We stretch a point in the articles on surround sound, which doesn't exist in streaming form yet, but at least you can now listen to the mono or stereo music as you read about surround production and dream......all of these articles are newly enhanced:
**** An article from the British Studio Sound magazine by renowned engineer/producer Alan Parsons about the making of the quadraphonic version of Dark Side Of The Moon in the quadraphonic sound of the time. Naturally, this one's called Four Sides of the Moon.
**** The notes by the producer and engineer of an enormous classical surround recording, Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder conducted by Pierre Boulez in 1974.
**** A long article written by Mike Thorne in 1974 dealing with the musical possibilities of surround sound: Quadraphonics and Music.

With this newsletter, we cannot provide hot links that work in an AOL browser, thanks to their mail formatting restrictions. All links can be copied and pasted, but the most convenient way in any browser is to go directly to our New Web page and bounce directly from there. We continue to provide musical examples in both Liquid and Real Audio, with interview sound bites in Real.

It remains just to wish you all happy holidays. We'll be disappearing for them too, and will return at the end of January with details of impending releases and some new ideas. Thanks to you all for your support and suggestions (keep them coming at our Contact page please).