Category Archives: editorial

A Handy Guide to Digitizing Vinyl Records from Soul-Sides.com

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Soul-Sides dot com
Soul-Sides.com is an awesome vinyl/MP3 blog featuring rare soul finds including 45s, 12-inch singles and much more. The music selection is fantastic and highly recommended, but the added bonus of a well-informed and non-snobby guide to high-quality vinyl-to-mp3 digitizing makes this blog even more valuable.

Oliver Wang, AKA DJ O-Dub, has been running this since 2000 (as a blog since 2003), so he’s got more than enough to obsess over in the archives. I’ve only just discovered this blog but am already impressed by the scope and quality. Bravo! Continue reading A Handy Guide to Digitizing Vinyl Records from Soul-Sides.com →

WTF Album Covers: God Is A Killer

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WTF album covers God Is A Killer

A lifetime of gratitude to the blog A Basement of Curiosities for turning me on to the wonders of A.A. Allen, who was apparently a bit of a revolutionary in the pulpit as he was a pro-integration activist at the height of Jim Crow, separate drinking fountains and the rest of America’s big ugly period where the Constitution only applied if you were the right sort of white anglo-saxon-protestant jackass.

Progressive as Allen might have been on some fronts, he was a fire-and-brimstone loony and faith healer. But like all religious maniacs, he couldn’t heal himself and is said to have dropped off the twig in 1970 due to alcohol-related liver failure. Whoops!

This album cover is a treat. Allen looks more than a little like a Wild Bunch-era Ernest Borgnine, but that expression on his face implies that something long and wriggly has just crawled up his rectum. The title is a hoot–of COURSE God is a killer! Look at all those church collapses, Jihads and right wing holy wars. God’s in it up to his eyeballs, a river of blood to flood a thousand universes.

Funny thing is, Allen doesn’t seem to mind. From what I read at A Basement of Curiosities, Allen seems to get off on telling his audience that if they don’t wanna “get saved” God might just have to disembowel them (my words, not his) and send them downstairs to have sex with the devil. (My words again, I can’t help myself. Maybe I’m possessed.)

This one’s a real treasure.

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Blogs To Watch: Music For Maniacs, Stereofound, and Thrift Store DJ

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vinylby Joe Wallace

Every once in a while I like to call attention to blogs that have caught my eye, and there are three that I’m really enjoying. Music For Maniacs, Stereofound and Thrift Store DJ are all dedicated to the oddball stuff on vinyl that most record store shoppers pass up in favor of those albums by Modest Mouse and Radiohead.

What those shoppers don’t know won’t hurt them though–I’m all in favor of having the unclassifiable music left alone in the bins until I can swing by to scoop them up, doofy treasures that they are. My fellow travelers in search of vinyl weirdness blog about their discoveries and I am SO very glad they do.

Music For Maniacs covers everything from exotica to mechanical music. That’s right, music made by machines. Not COMPUTERS, mind you. Picture something on the order of Doctor Phibes’s Clockwork Wizards except without the animatronic mannequins. This blog manages to be even cooler with a whole section dedicated to sound collage and mashups. BRILLIANT.

Stereofound is dedicated to what it describes as “non-music” on vinyl. In fact, according to Stereofound, the blog is obsessed with “oddities on vinyl, found at thrift stores and flea markets. Think of stereo-test records, jingles, sound effects, instructions..” My favorite part of Stereofound is the Moog section, but the Floppy Records stuff is a close second.

Thrift Store DJ is on a similar bent in that it is dedicated to, you guessed it, the music that gets left behind in the junk shop. Continue reading Blogs To Watch: Music For Maniacs, Stereofound, and Thrift Store DJ →

The TruTone Mastering Process

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TruTone Mastering Process

Ever wonder what it takes to make a vinyl LP from start to finish? The actual creation of the physical product, as opposed to recording the music itself is fascinating, and a company called TruTone Mastering Labs has put the entire process online in a step-by-step pictorial.

For me, the most interesting part from a visual standpoint is the plating process:

TruTone Mastering Plating Process

But you’ll be amused to learn that your favorite, most expensive vinyl collectible in your stack originally looked like THIS before it became the precious thing you revere now as a sacred object: Continue reading The TruTone Mastering Process →