Time flies when you’re having fun.
Twittering Machines first appeared on March 4, 2007 with the above “Off The Charts” post. The message was simple — let’s talk about music that’s not well worn in audiophile circles. Let’s get lost.
The first proper post followed later that month:
A beautiful quiet album, The Quest from 1961 features Mal Waldron, Eric Dolphy on alto sax (and clarinet on “Warm Canto”), Booker Erwin on tenor sax , Ron Carter on cello, Joe Benjamin on bass and Charlie Persip on drums. From the first note to the last, these Waldron penned sonatas are rich, dense, melodic moody set pieces. At times I hear a touch of Satie and dissonance from Mal’s keys adding a sense of mystery and expanse to The Quest. Available on OJC for a song.
Friends joined, topics expanded to include art, audio, clothes, film, cars, books, and more. Here’s a particularly personal post from 2011:
Childhood Vinyl Memories #2: Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter
My grandparents on my father’s side had a summer home at, and eventually retired to, the Jersey Shore. This was before its most recent incarnation as a pen for mindless, self-absorbed nitwits whose raison d’être appears to be too much hair product and tanning. This was also back when working-class people, my grandfather was a carpenter, could actually afford a summer home.
My grandfather along with a bunch of ‘cousins’ (we called actual cousins cousins no matter the distance from 1st as well as close family friends) bought up nearly one block of vacant land, imagine when there was such a thing at the Jersey Shore, on 1st Avenue in Ortley Beach and together they built their summer homes.
When we weren’t on the beach, we were always on the beach unless it was raining, we would hang out behind the row of cousin’s homes in the strip of adjacent sandy backyards and play. Some of the kids were older – I was probably around 6 or 7 playing with teenagers – so their form of play was different from mine. One rainy day one of the Rogers boys had setup his portable record player on their sightly raised cement deck and was giving a concert. He was recruiting for an all-boy band and the pickings were slim so I ended up as the guitar player – my guitar was a mop. The Roger’s boy, I thought he was so cool mainly because he was a teenager, put on a record and we played along as if we were Herman’s Hermits playing “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter”.
I remember initially feeling nervous and kinda confused – I was given strict instructions on how to pretend-play the mop convincingly but why would I want to? I wondered – and then feeling elated as the girls watched the boys play but they cheered for real. I loved that jangly muted rag-stuffed guitar sound and the heavily accented Peter Noone singing out to Mrs Brown about her lovely daughter. I don’t recall how many times we repeated that 45 (many is my best guess) but I do recall feeling the stirrings of something I didn’t yet understand but I did understand that music was its soundtrack.
Twittering Machines, in its first incarnation, went on for about 10 years and more than 1,000 posts.
This was all for fun.
One of my favorite guest articles from these old days (2010) was penned by none other than Herb Reichert, one of my favorite writers on hifi — Playing It Over And Over — one of a handful of posts I chose to bring along for Twittering Machines v2.
The current Twittering Machines, which launched in 2018, is very much an outgrowth of the original but with the obvious shift of focus to reviewing hifi gear.
All told, I’ve been at this reviewing gig since March of 2005, when my first review appeared on 6moons wherein I concluded:
The ability of a system to allow the recording to unfold is usually conveyed in ultimate terms as bringing the performance into your listening room. By contrast, the PHYs invite you into the performance. Maybe a subtle distinction but I’d like to suggest that listening in to the nuances of music as opposed to being wowed by the presence of the musicians may just let us enjoy something that’s more about the music and less about the gear its playing through.
Some things change, some things persist. Thank you for joining me on this journey.