Greetings and welcome! This blog is an off-shoot of my other music blog “Catch a Groove” which is more of a catch-all for anything music-related – from any genre or perspective. I posted a few items relating to classical music there, but this space will give vent to a more specialized area of research – thrift store vinyl classical record reviews. I know – just what the world needs, right? As if my lopsided opinions about music in general were not fascinating enough – how about reviews of musty old classical records? Especially considering that the author (me) is, how shall I put this, GROSSLY ill-qualified to write with any level of legitimate authority on such a topic – at least from a “trained” musical perspective. I’m a lot closer to Joe Sixpack than (the great music critic) Harold Schonberg.
Yet this is also a celebration of something Joe Sixpack (as the official representative of the average middle class humanoid of the 20th century) was a key participant in – namely the emergence and flowering of vinyl record culture of the modern age. Classical records had a marketing slant to them just the same as jazz or popular records did along with advertising gimmicks, heroes and villains alike. And, believe me, the classical world is just as populated with freaks and weirdos as the LA Punk scene of the 1970s.
The name of this blog comes from a composition by 20th Century composer Edgard Varese. His music was so weird it inspired Frank Zappa to become a composer/musician. Which is one connection to the so-called “classical” or serious music world I made as a young lad back in the happy 1980s. When everyone else was listening to WHAM! I was busy scraping noises out of avant-garde 20th Century composers records. Not to say that I was at all “cool” – cluelessly geeked-out is more appropriate (as I remain, proudly, to this very day!). But enough about me – are you ready, dear reader, to begin our journey into oblivion? I thought so………………….
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