carsten knoch - essays + ideas
A blog about technology, politics, business, anthropology and (occasionally) music written by Carsten Knoch.
I’m passionate about music, and this is where I post about it.
It’s now February, so obviously this post comes a bit later than I had originally anticipated. I will not bore you with the usual excuses, but I did discover something interesting after I posted my yearly summary of the best non-classical music: over the […]
My listening habits this past year have continued to shift in a decidedly classical direction. Other things—particularly rock—quickly feel like unwelcome distractions now, giving me a kind of ‘instant listening fatigue.’ It’s never just one thing, but often boils down to the combination of […]
Warning: This post is extremely nerdy and detailed. If you don’t really care about classical music, iTunes—or metadata, for that matter—you may lose interest rather quickly. Feel free to look around and see if something less navel-gazing catches your eye. Getting your metadata right […]
A surprising and delightful accomplishment: Heritage Blues Orchestra wields the full potential power of the modern blues arsenal but has the taste and restraint to deliver a varied album full of genuine dynamics, subtlety and intelligence. What often ails contemporary releases in the ‘blues’ […]
I first wrote about this topic in 2010. A number of additional download stores specializing in classical music have come online since (or maybe they were online back then already and I’ve only discovered them now?), so I thought I’d provide an update. As […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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