Sending El Scorchio greetings. It’s another bubbling week of records from Drift!
Hello, Friends.
New, but not-new, but not a reissue, but certainly on the racks and on the stereo over at the Drift... Toast is the near-mythical 2001 studio album from Neil Young and legendary musical collaborators Crazy Horse at a ragged and thundering apex. The album was shelved after it was recorded, a brooding and dark catharsis of a set that - at the time - didn't need to be for anyone else. Toast was, "so sad that I couldn’t put it out", according to Young, but two decades later it finally does appear and it has some real later-career highlights. Half of the album appeared in revised form a year later as the 'Are You Passionate?' LP, but there is some serious growl to Toast as a dark and riff-heavy set. We, naturally, are right into this.
Note: Neil is misspelt as "Nei" on the spine of both CD and LP formats. Buy an extra copy for your loft and you'll 100% be able to put your kids through University with this shrewd and rocking investment.
Erratically available over the last few decades, Madlib Medicine Show #5 – The History of the Loop Digga is the first full-length hip-hop album by Madlib, chronicling his formative years of underground beat-tape production and the music made for himself and an extended crew of MCs known as Crate Diggas Palace. Created between 1990 and 2000, they predate his best-known works with Quasimoto, Jaylib and Madvillain, the clear sketches of his skills to find space with warm funk, soul and jazz source records. As ever, amazing energy.
A double set of Half Speed Mastered reissues this week from The Who archives, with the 1967 Sell Out album and 1969 rock opera, Tommy. Both were mastered at Abbey Road by longtime Who engineer Jon Astley from the original tapes. Seeing as we had someone in the shop asking about Half Speed Masters this morning, do you want a little non-expert chat about the process?
Broadly; the grooves cut into the discs are physical representations of the sound waves. High-frequencies produce very fast cycles that are more difficult to cut than longer, smoother, low-frequency sound waves. When you halve the speed, the more difficult to cut high-frequency sounds become much easier to cut at a mid-range sound. The cutting head also has twice the amount of time to cut the intricate groove, resulting in a higher quality, more detailed representation of the original sound source.
So, they're just a bit 'luxe.
Lastly today, Art Pepper's Art Pepper + Eleven – Modern Jazz Classics gets a really great pressing as part of the Contemporary Records 70th Anniversary Series. The 1959 sessions were arranged by Marty Paich and feature Pepper and many other players presenting renditions of works by Dizzy Gillespie, Horace Silver, Charlie Parker, Gerry Mulligan and more. All-Analog mastering from the original tapes by Bernie Grundman at Bernie Grundman Mastering and pressed on 180-gram audiophile quality vinyl at Quality Record Pressing (QRP). Good work.
Stay cool!
- Drift