Amoeblog > Tag > cassettes

Songs By Thom Limited Edition Cassette-only Release

Posted by Amoebite, March 31, 2013 07:49pm | Post a Comment

Amoeba Hollywood employee Thom Petrizzo's band Songs By Thom has just released a limited edition cassette called Love...Unrequited. Get it HERE on Amoeba.com before they're all gone!

"Local L.A. musician and Amoeba's very own Thom Petrizzo (a.k.a. Songs By Thom) presents Love...Unrequited, a limited edition cassette-only release. This album is a whimsical and wistful collection of catchy ditties with simple but universally-relatable topics: longing, yearning, and hard-won love. Thom builds upon guitars, keyboards, and drums, with heartfelt, confessional lyrics and layered vocals, such as on album opener "May I?" or the kaleidoscopic treat "It's Nice To Dream." This is bashful bedroom pop at its most charming!" - Brian G.

Happy Birthday, Compact Discs -- Reflections on the Format

Posted by Eric Brightwell, October 1, 2012 05:09pm | Post a Comment

Billy Joel 52nd Street

On this day (1 October) in 1982, the first album released on CD came out -- Billy Joel's 52nd street.

Carmen Rivero On the day of that occasion, I still hadn't really discovered music for myself yet. My dad played '50s, '60 and '70s jazz records on the rare occasions that he mustered the paternal energy required to make his children grilled cheese sandwiches. My mother was more likely to play Carmen Rivero, Johann Sebastian Bach, Bill Monroe, Aretha Franklin or Otis Redding records that she'd purchased back in the ancient, vinyl 1960s. We also had a Victrola which was fun because you had to crank it if you wanted to rock out to some Earl Rogers or other shellac 78.

CASSETTE FROM MY EX: STORIES AND SOUNDTRACKS OF LOST LOVES

Posted by Billyjam, November 4, 2009 09:43am | Post a Comment

Since the release last week of Jason Bitner's engaging new book Cassette From My Ex: Stories and Soundtracks of Lost Loves, the St Martin's Griffin published, 212-page anthology of 60 short stories, has been striking a nerve with readership of a certain age who can directly relate to and recall its pre-iPod subject matter: the bygone era of the homemade mixtape -- specifically mixtapes made to woo new crushes or love objects.

An image that pops into many minds would be the Rob Gordon character played by John Cusack in the Stephen Frears directed film adapatation of Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity and his obsession with making the perfect mixtape, regardless of how long it took. Or as Shirley Manson of the group Garbage wrote for Cassette From My Ex's jacket cover, "Anyone who understands the obsessive attention to detail, the time it took to collate, select, and edit the content of a perfectly executed mix tape, or just someone who appreciated the rhythms and nuances of such extraordinary artifacts will treasure this collection of stories, comfortable and secure in the knowledge that such exquisite efforts were not made in vain and indeed there was a time when a humble cassette tape was perhaps the greatest gift of all."

For Cassette From My Ex: Stories and Soundtracks of Lost Loves, Bitner, who is best known as a co-founder of the wonderful Found magazine series, compiled first-person essays about mixtapes fueled by crushes or love (some tragic, some hilarious, many in-between) written by sixty different writers, many of them journalists & musicians. Contributors include author Rick Moody, This American Life's Starlee Kine, The New Yorker's Ben Greenman, The Magnetic Fields’ Claudia Gonson, Improv Everywhere's Charlie Todd, Mortified's David Nadelberg, and former Rolling Stone writer and MTV2 veejay Jancee Dunn.

AMOEBA AS THERAPY & NINE OTHER REASONS TO LOVE THE SF STORE

Posted by Billyjam, February 19, 2009 08:55am | Post a Comment

"Amoeba has so much more vinyl and is a much more happening store to forget about life worries ... it's therapy for me. Amoeba has always been THE BEST!" So recently wrote Amoeba fan "Lovedrop Says" in a posting on the NBC website as part of a poll amongst Bay Area residents intended to decipher which is a better store, Rasputin or Amoeba.

By end of the voting Amoeba had beaten out Rasputin with 68% to their 32% of votes by Bay Area NBC website visitors. The poll was actually about the Berkeley Amoeba but what Lovedrop Says about the Telegraph Ave. Amoeba is equally true of the Haight Street Amoeba, as reaffirmed about a week or so ago when I stopped by the San Francisco Amoeba Music store for some therapy myself.

Besides that feeling of "therapy" described by Lovedrop Says -- when you get so lost in the rows and rows of vinyl and CDs that time just magically slips away and what seems like ten minutes can be two hours -- there are many other reasons to love visiting the Amoeba Music San Francisco store. I made a list of ten of the top reasons to shop Amoeba right here, including what Lovedrop Says wrote about Amoeba as therapy -- reason #1.

As an art lover, especially graffiti, I have almost as much fun outside Amoeba SF gazing at the walls of colorful art on the store's outer walls (reason #2) including the image above (minus the photoshopped in Tony Bennett I Left My Heart in San Francisco LP -- that record can found inside in the used LPs section). So impressive are the colorful outer walls of Amoeba SF that they have been used in many photo and video shoots including in Bored Stiff's most recent video "@ A Distance." There is also lots of other graf art on walls nearby all within a block of Amoeba SF. It is like a free outdoor art gallery. Well wicked!

THE ORIGINAL RECORDED SONG, NEW CASSETTE TECHNIQUES

Posted by Billyjam, March 27, 2008 07:44am | Post a Comment

There is a really interesting article in the Arts section of this morning's (Thursday, March 27) New York Times about newly uncovered research that challenges the belief that Thomas Edison was the father of recorded sound. This new research claims that even before Edison had recorded his first sounds a French man named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded a ten second sound bite of a female vocalist singing a French folk song (Au Clair de la Lune) back in 1860. However, it was not recorded onto a record but rather on a "phonautograph" or "phonautogram" (as seen in photo left) which was in turn recently made playable - by converting the written images on the paper into sound - by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Library. If you click on the NYTimes story, not only can you read about this amazing discovery in detail, but they also have an MP3 sound file of this historic 10-second 1860 recording.

When you stop and think about it, it is truly amazing how far we have come in the advancement of music

recording and playback in the short time span (relatively in the history of mankind) since Thomas Edison (pictured right) first invented the phonograph in 1877 and unveiled it a year later to an amazed public.

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