Thought I’d get an early handle on my best-of-the-year list this time around. I’ve blogged surprisingly little about music in 2011. That doesn’t mean that I listened any less, or less attentively. In fact, audio-wise, it was just this past year that I finally managed to get my hands on digital playback equipment that allows [...]
Posts tagged with "reviews"
Listening to: Coeur de pirate
Béatrice Martin, who goes by the stage name Coeur de pirate, is a wildly, fantastically talented singer-songwriter from Montreal. She has just released her second solo album—the excellent Blonde—and she’s only 22. Like many listeners outside of France and Quebec, I first noticed Coeur de pirate as a guest duet vocalist on Bedouin Soundclash‘s lovely ’Brutal Hearts’ from [...]
Review: Pure i-20 iPod dock
I had read about the i-20 iPod dock a few months ago. It seemed like a very exciting proposition: a dock that could extract the digital signal of the music stored on an iPod without relying on the iPod’s own digital-to-analogue circuitry, and pass the music to an external DAC (digital to analogue converter) for [...]
Today’s desert island disc: Beck, Modern Guilt
Sometimes, it takes me a while to really start to like an artist. Beck is one of those. I have no excuse, really. This — and quite a few of his other records — is a masterpiece of a kind of modern, hip hop/electronica inflected pop. Beck has the same mastery of song craft that someone like [...]
Listening to: Stephen Marley, Revelation (Pt. 1 The Root of Life)
A review of Stephen Marley’s Revelation (Pt. 1 The Root of Life)’ (2011) Voice-wise, Stephen Marley is definitely his father’s son, more so than his brothers Ziggy or Damian. He cut his musical teeth in Ziggy’s Melody Makers, then chose primarily a producer’s path — he is largely responsible for helming Damian’s solo records as well [...]
Listening to: Cee-Lo Green, The Lady Killer
A review of Cee-Lo Green’s ‘The Lady Killer’ (2010) Cee-Lo Green is that maddeningly brilliant, completely left-of-centre genius that only rolls around every few years in a genre. R&B has of course had its fair share of auteur geniuses: off the top of my head, Marvin Gaye, Prince, Bootsy Collins come to mind (and I [...]
Best new music of 2010
It’s been a different sort of music listening year for me. Starting last January, I largely took a break from listening to popular music and reconnected with my first love, classical music. The last few years of increasingly commercial ‘indie’ rock had left a decidedly bad taste in my mouth. (The pretence of innovation when [...]
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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.
