Newsletter September 2005

The big news this month is the Stereo Society’s release of Lene Lovich’s latest album, Shadows And Dust. This has been many years in the making, but it’s here and officially released September 13. For Stereo Society subscribers, it’s already available online, along with a raft of complementary pictures and features. The price is $16 including priority mail in the US and Canada. Anywhere else, you just add $4 (for any number of CDs in the order) for air mail shipment. It comes with a 16-page full-color booklet and a cardboard jewel-case sleeve.

Some of you have reported difficulties in getting our shopping cart to accept credit cards, especially from outside the US. Teething troubles seem inevitable, but we have been working to eliminate problems. Also, verification by the credit card processors can sometimes be too rigorous, a reaction to increased online fraud. Our internet service provider, for example, tells us that 40% of transactions attempted on his site are fraudulent.

We’ve taken pains to set up the best and most helpful shopping cart available. If you have trouble, don’t drive yourself nuts, just drop us an Email through our email ideas contact page and we’ll sort you out personally. If it’s your fault, we’ll make world-weary remarks. If it’s ours, we’ll grovel apologetically. One way or another, we’ll sell you a CD.

Lene returns to New York this coming Monday September 12. At 9.30pm she plays Joe’s Pub, on Lafayette Street, downtown. It looks like selling out, so get your tickets ASAP. CDs and posters will be on sale there.

And BTW, we made a collectors’ item mistake which we would have preferred not to. The disk track order on the Shadows CD is different from the order on its booklet and sleeve, which are what we intended. For the facts, go to our order (so-called) page. We’ll reformat the disk to what we intended when we repress the CD. Online, CDDB/Gracenote brings up the disk running order.

As well as direct from our site, the CD will shortly available from BeStiff in the UK (the site devoted to former Stiff Records artists) and from CD Baby in the US. Eventually, it will be available on Amazon. Individual tracks (and the complete CD) will eventually appear on paid download sites worldwide, including iTunes. We'll let you know here and in our monthly newsletter.

We have added streaming audio to Lene’s 2005 interview. It’s always more interesting and personal to hear the artist speak, so we always try to do this. From now on, instead of RealAudio we post interview audio in streaming mp3 form. Just click on the link. This form won’t clog your computer with long mp3 files, but just download a tiny file which links to the audio for streaming from our site. Our music samples, around two minutes for each track, continue to be set to download the full file so that as well as hearing it immediately you can listen off-line at your convenience.

Lene was also interviewed for our site way back in February 1999, when her new album was just starting to come together. It still makes interesting reading, complementing this year’s model.

Johnny Reinhard’s realization of the Universe Symphony of Charles Ives isn’t exactly a mass market item, but has received some seriously favorable reviews, with more expected. This truly sounds like Ives’ masterpiece, and with an outstanding recording to suit (as noted by several commentators). The CD price (same as Lene’s) is a real bargain considering the time and effort that went into the production (not that we ever skimp in the interests of saving money). There’s a very nice review coming in October’s Fanfare magazine, but since it’s not online yet it would be rude to post it here.

BETTY haven’t been quiet, playing a few gigs and festivals here and there. Their big future performance event will be the return of their musical BETTY Rules to Washington DC for a six-week run. Before that, they will be in residence at Joe’s Pub for what has become an institution: their three day holiday show special. Watch this space for full details.

Thorne hasn’t been idle either. As well as producing for the Universe Symphony and for Shadows And Dust, he has been preparing The Contessa’s Party for release in January next year, and incidentally creating a few fresh new club mixes based on its material.