While I hate to defer to an argumentum ad populum, Waits' work has been critically lauded for decades. From Wikipedia:

Quote:

He has been nominated for a number of major music awards and has won Grammy Awards for two albums, Bone Machine and Mule Variations. In 2011, Waits was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He is also included among the 2010 list of Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Singers and the 2015 list of Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time.

Speaking for my personal taste, prototypical of the INTJ, I enjoy creative works which are dark, offbeat, antiauthoritarian, and, at times, crude. Waits embodies the eccentric, archetypal outcast with his fascinating lyrical concoctions about the seedy underbelly of the world. And critic Daniel Durchholz described his voice as sounding like "it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car."

I find him endlessly fascinating.

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Honestly, I'd say to watch him live. My introduction to Waits was watching one of his concerts on TV, and while I knew absolutely nothing about him, I was instantly glued to the screen due to him being the complete and utter embodiment of effortless cool.

No idea if this is what I saw, but it's probably amazing...

Thanks, Bat! You very likely saw a rebroadcast of the Austin City Limits 1978 program, or possibly his concert film, Big Time.

Big Time is so awesome, I actually consider the soundtrack to be his best album.

For several years I've wanted a copy of The Avalanches' Since I Left You LP - call it sampledelic, or plunderphonic, leftfield or abstract... it's just magnificent from start to finish. Sadly, copies have commanded hundreds of dollars and no reissue had been available to date.

Out of curiosity last week, I took a look at the official Avalanches FB page to see if there was any discussion going about a potential reissue. That's when I saw that one was planned THREE DAYS from that date!

BETTER STILL, it was rumored to be the Original Australian Zomba Promo Mix - the band's intended album before they had to remove several uncleared samples!

My copy arrived today from Germany, but sadly international postage was not kind to the package. One corner is crushed and I've reached out to the distributor to see what they can do.

Regardless, I'm absolutely stoked to have their first album (and their newly-released follow-up) in my vinyl collection!

http://i.imgur.com/fr04m0Pl.jpg

Lovely Broken Thing
 

Ready to dive into my writing for the evening and I'm presently enjoying the first volume of the Riverrun Trilogy by Underworld, titled Lovely Broken Thing.

http://i.imgur.com/xKt7pNYl.jpg

The EP's opening single, "JAL to Tokyo" is a magnificent and entrancing exercise in Karl Hyde's trademark stream-of-consciousness lyricism, which serves more as a rhythmic device than as a concrete narrative. Karl famously pieces together conversational fragments of passersby in cities like New York and Tokyo, lifting curious and puzzling phrases wherever he finds them. This was best realized in his Tomato Art Collective's print publication, mmm... skyscraper: A Typographical Journal of New York.

http://i.imgur.com/WhuwzLtl.jpg

The Riverrun side projects were independent internet-only releases, granting the founding members, Rick and Karl the freedom to experiment and explore more textural and freeform sounds than the anthemic floor-stomping club tracks they were famous for in their "Born Slippy" days with Darren Emerson. The resulting extended EPs feature wonderfully artistic and engaging tracks which are all the more rewarding upon repeated listening, both actively and passively on evenings just like this one.

Lovely, indeed.

The second volume - Pizza for Eggs is a bit more ambient but it certainly maintains an abstract quality with hints of progressive trance.

http://i.imgur.com/OrnjXnal.jpg

And the third and final volume of Underworld's Riverrun series - the curiously-named, I'm a Big Sister, and I'm a Girl, and I'm a Princess, and This Is My Horse.
This volume is the most minimal and ambient of the series, and a wonderful conclusion to the project. But my personal favorite recording is an early draft of the EP, broadcast only once on 05-19-2006 from Lemonworld Studios by Karl, himself. The track was then-dubbed "Always Loved a Film (Silver Boots)" but bears little resemblance to either the eventually-released "ALAF" single from the Barking LP or its "Silver Boots" demo. The sprawling ambient track does, however, contain spoken word lyrics addressing the title of this final project.

I always like to close a listening session of IABSAIAGAIAPATIMH with the Lemonworld broadcast to finish off the evening.

Cheers.

http://i.imgur.com/BySaplrl.jpg

Innerspace,

Thank you for sharing your post regarding Underworld. Certainly one of my favorite acts to see live. I am grateful that I recently got to see them again at Coachella.

Outstanding! I've seen them twice in NYC. If you have any interest in exploring more of my Underworld features, you can find them all here, (I've bookmarked a keyword search for "Underworld" on my blog).

Thanks for reading!

Upgrade Season
 

After years of contentment with my Sennheiser HD380 Pro circumaural monitors and more recently my AudioQuest Nighthawk cans, I've really become discontent with the listening experience they produce. Thankfully, I've several pro-audio savvy gents in my circles who kindly offered their considered advice.

It is quite likely that the $300-$600 headphone equipment is simply revealing the limitations of the shoddy internal DAC on my mobile and of my $25 entry-level Behringer UCA-202 DAC which processes the audio signals from my server to my integrated amp.

They've advised that a portable DAC upgrade would very likely improve the performance of both my portable and desktop listening environments. And AudioQuest's new DragonFly Red may be exactly the solution I'm looking for.

Thanks to a tip from another fellow audiophile, I've just picked up the latest issue of Stereophile which features a review of the newly-launched Red. I can't wait to dive in!

Side Note: Holy Christ... it's 2016 and I just bought a MAGAZINE.

http://i.imgur.com/GBeTtvrl.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/cwFahoql.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/hhYU5xDl.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/D7P29mql.jpg