A "kick" refers to any form of instant or sudden pleasurable sensation, perhaps even of the unexpected sort, while "to kick...

I've been extremely busy this week hurriedly finishing an article on Ingmar Bergman's film The Serpent's Egg (1977) for a fort...

Last month, under the rubric The Great Lost Albums: One , I wrote about John Simon’s first album, John Simon’s Album (1970), arguing that i...

And so Nobel laureate Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, one of the great figures of Russian literature, primarily known in the West as a chronicler...

Although the word “groove” is generally understood as a musical term referring to a song’s rhythm—its groove —the word can refer to a number...

Electronic Music Laboratories, builder of the ElectroComp Synthesizer Model 101 (or just the EML synthesizer, pictured), started business in...

Back in March, I posted an entry on Art Laboe’s first Oldies But Goodies compilation, issued in the fall of 1959 on Laboe’s Original Sound...

According to Ronald Primeau, in his study of the literature of the American highway, Romance of the Road , the “American road genre”—popular...

Serendipitously, just a couple of minutes after posting today's blog entry, “Audio/Vison,” I checked my email to find that I’d received ...

Ambient music is generally defined as music in which the sounds are as equally important as the notes, its purpose being to invoke an “atmos...

Although initially invented in response to a request by trumpet player Clyde McCoy, who'd asked the Vox corporation for an electronic de...

“Border blasters” is the phrase broadcasters use to refer to the so-called “X stations”—Mexican radio stations—because the call letters of e...