The Esbjörn Svensson Trio sounds like the most balanced and smartest modern ‘jazz’ piano trio of the ones I’ve heard. It’s post-everything: it’s not ironic, not ‘fusion’ in any way – it feels like a logical growth path for jazz. It’s sad that Svensson died in a scuba diving accident last year. This tune sounds [...]

Thelonious Monk’s two words
Thelonious Monk, from Library and Archives Canada via Wikimedia Commons Seen today on Wikipedia: Bassist Al McKibbon, who had known Monk for over twenty years and played on his final tour in 1971, later said: “On that tour Monk said about two words. I mean literally maybe two words. He didn’t say ‘Good morning’, ‘Goodnight’, [...]

Listening to: Chick Corea & Hiromi Uehara, Duet
Cascading, effervescent, energetic, virtuoso, surprising, accomplished. You’d need a stream of adjectives to describe how these two play together. An easier way to say it might be to think of four hands attached, somehow, to the same brain. An orchestra of pianos, perfectly conducted by a single musical mind. This record is the result of [...]

Combatting winter neglect
When it’s winter, I find I let things slide. Or maybe they slide all by themselves, and I just don’t do anything about them. That’s often because I find I’m quite unaware that something needs doing. Take, for instance, some inflation issues I encountered recently (no, not of the economic kind…). This is the first [...]

Listening to: UB40, Twentyfourseven
A review of UB40′s Twentyfourseven (2008) An elegant, slightly dark and dubby swansong, Twentyfourseven affirms for the last time what a strong and intelligent reggae band UB40 was. Forging its own path on the periphery of reggae, and – at the same time – somehow propelling the genre into the future by keeping it anchored [...]

Currently reading: Books about 2012
Also, an insightful and entertaining review of Toward 2012 from the New York Times. Many of the essays are available at Reality Sandwich.

A font in your own handwriting
YourFonts offers a free online utility to create a TrueType font based on your handwriting. Basically, you download a 2-page PDF form that you print out and fill in, in your handwriting. Then you scan the two pages and upload them to YourFonts. There, they are processed into a TrueType font that you can download [...]
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About

Carsten Knoch
Software and services professional, attentive music listener, vision enabler, instigator, reader of books and the web, vegetarian, affordable audio hobbyist, thinker, writer, blogger, tinkerer, Internet dweller since 1992. Human being since 1970.
I blog about music, technology, business, vegetarian food, politics, culture and life.
More about me on the About page.
Me, elsewhere
@carstenknoch on Twitter
- I learned what a stud finder is yesterday. I even bought one. I feel enlightened somehow. As if I can look through walls. 5 hours ago
- Bought an @umbra_ltd Conceal floating shelf & intend to put Eng. language reference books on it, near my PC. Simpler than Google 4 writing. 19 hours ago
- Barbarism is not the inheritance of our prehistory. It is the companion that dogs our every step. (Alain Finkielkraut) 2 days ago
- Music really is amazing. No matter how deeply you steep yourself in it, or for how long--there's always a fantastic new artist to discover. 2 days ago
- More world's worst brands: http://t.co/FEgngM6s 2 days ago
- How to accommodate low literacy readers in your web writing. http://t.co/2s1dKV52 3 days ago
- @dybskiy So what — are you staying? 3 days ago
- @joniv Absolutely. No issues. We're having the easiest winter in the history of winters this year... can't complain really :) 4 days ago
- @joniv Great - now I have that song in my head! Hope you're well :) 5 days ago
- It's 5:30pm, and - strangely - things are finally starting to flow (where I've been beating my head against a wall for most of the day). 6 days ago

