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Sounds

A collection of 90 issues

The Worlds within Galaxies

A Jazz-Casual's Re-encounter with Alice Coltrane You reach a certain age and there are artists you are simply supposed to have absorbed by osmosis. Alice Coltrane, for instance. Revered, influential, cosmic, harp, Indian devotional period—absolutely, yes, of course. Titan in her own right. Also John Coltrane’s

The River, the Shore, and the Tide Pool: A FiiO Snowsky Disc DAP "Review"

It is possible to review a device by listing its specifications. The Snowsky Disc DAP is roughly the size of two stacked MiniDiscs. It accepts a 1TB microSD card (and, ominously, up to 2TB). Mine currently handles 11,544 FLAC files without complaint, occupying 318 GB and leaving 637 GB

Who's On Third?

On Contested Canon, Unstable Artifacts, and the Songs That Survive the Argument I. The CD Player This Morning On the CD player this morning is the 1992 Rykodisc version of Big Star's Third / Sister Lovers. This is a statement that sounds simple and isn't. It'

The Shelf After the Signal

How a Mood Became a Genre and Who Got Filed Where I. The IHOP Commercial It was a late-’60s IHOP commercial. Nuclear family. Balloons. Patina’d Technicolor optimism. The camera tracking their run toward pancakes as if breakfast were destiny made manifest. I slowed the video down. Laid Boards

Power Is a Daily Need

The Boo Radleys and the Voltage Outside Last year I wrote about “Lazarus,” a kaleidoscopic milestone in the sizable songbook of a UK indie band whom few now remember. I described it as a song about discernment. The door is unlocked; you can go out; you choose not to. I

Has Anyone Seen the Bridge?

"Sara" is playing in a Starbucks. Six minutes of Stevie Nicks twirling, 1979 piped into 2026, background music for laptops and lattes. The song has become wallpaper—not because it stopped being good, but because that's what survival looks like now. The elongating tail of pop&

Following the Thread (Backwards)

It started innocently enough, the way these things often do: Slayer's Seasons in the Abyss, put on after a long absence, and a technical question that hadn’t mattered the first time around. How clean the separation was between rhythm and lead. How intentional the overdubs seemed. And

Pitch-Slapped

The Bureaucratization of Aesthetics The story we tell about cultural flattening usually starts with a villain. Auto-Tune ruined singing. Algorithms ruined music. AI is ruining writing. The plot is tidy: a tool appears, standards collapse, character disappears. It’s emotionally satisfying precisely because it’s structurally wrong. The problem is

Contained Excess: Psychedelia, Custody, and What Survives

There is a temptation, when revisiting canonical rock records, to argue over taste: whether Jim Morrison now sounds corny, whether Forever Changes is overrated or underheard, whether Atmos remixes are revelation or necromancy. Those arguments miss the more durable question. What matters isn’t whether these records are “good” or

Éliane Radigue: A Control Case

Not an edge case, but a control case. That distinction matters more than it first appears. An edge case reassures the system. It says: this is rare, exceptional, statistically ignorable. An edge case proves the rule by standing safely outside it. A control case does the opposite. It reveals what