Hi-Res Downloads

Billy Hart, Ethan Iverson, Mark Turner, Ben Street
Just (96kHz/24-bit, WAV)
www.ecmrecords.com; ECM 2748

Yes, it’s another one of those beautifully recorded ECM releases, bringing together drummer Hart with Iverson on piano, bassist Street and saxophonist Turner, and opening in gentle, reflective mood with ‘Showdown’. Hart takes a back seat to the sax, with not a sign of the ‘drummer’s album curse’, in which the mix is all about the percussion. Instead there’s a fine balance of the four musicians, which progresses into the more experimental ‘Layla Joy’, one of three tunes written by Hart. In fact, this set is all originals, the unfamiliarity stoking the sense of exploration, whether in the bustling, swinging ‘Aviation’ or the more intimate ‘Chamber Music’, with Iverson and Street winding lines around each other. Meanwhile ‘Billy’s Waltz’, written by Turner, is light and intricate, and the closing ‘Top Of The Middle’ provides a punchy coda to the set. AE

Sound Quality: 90%

Lab Report

Recorded at Sound on Sound in NY, many of the tracks here peak at a high –0.7dB but the dynamic range remains excellent with peak-to-RMS values hovering around 18dB. The sax makes good use of the available ~45kHz bandwidth. PM

Chris Cheek
Keepers Of The Easter Door (192kHz/24-bit, WAV)
www.analogtonefactory.com; Analog Tone Factory ATF 002

Saxophonist Cheek opens this set as he means to go on, with a vibrant, impactful sound, his instrument front and centre, and a starry band – Bill Frisell on guitar, bassist Tony Scherr and drummer Rudy Royston – backing him up. It’s an appealing selection of originals and covers, taking in music as wide-ranging as The Beatles and Henry Purcell, and stopping off with Messiaen and Mancini along the way. It was recorded live to analogue tape at Power Station in NYC and mastered by Bernie Grundman direct for both LP and the 192kHz digital release we have here. The sound is warm and generous, but beautifully detailed as Cheek and Frisell duet on the title track, and as Purcell’s ‘Lost Is My Quiet’ leads into Lennon & McCartney’s ‘From Me To You’. The album is a delight from start to finish, with fine instrumental textures and excellent playing, plus that wonderfully vivid sound. AE

Sound Quality: 85%

Lab Report

This 192kHz sampling of an ‘all analogue’ recording fully captures the tape’s bandwidth (96kHz would have sufficed). Dynamic range is good, but four tracks are pushed to the 0.0dB digital ceiling. Pity, also, about the 84kHz spuriae. PM

Later
Golden Bay (48kHz/24-bit, WAV)*
www.cookierecords.fr; Cookie Records, n/a cat. no.

On this, their second album, Parisian fourpiece Later invite us to ‘embark on a trip and feel the way we do when we’re in the studio, at 3am, and we don’t want to stop because you have to catch these rare moments when inspiration strikes you’. Take that rather retro leap and what you get is a pop album full of unpredictability. There’s everything from electronica, rock and gospel here, and spontaneous, exciting music-making but also a compressed and rather muddy sound. The album has real vitality, both in the first ten tracks and in the ten more instrumentals filling up the set, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on. However, if the overloaded mix is meant to sound rough and fresh, it really only succeeds in frustrating with its denseness. An opportunity missed, this one – I’d so like to hear this material with a cleaner, more open balance. AE

Sound Quality: 70%

Lab Report

Golden Bay is sampled at 48kHz except for trk 3 which is a 44.1kHz file [black trace]. In all cases the dynamic range is well below average with peaks normalised to a (too high) –0.1dB. If it sounds compressed, this is why. PM

Sankt Otten
Tote Winkel (48kHz/24-bit, WAV)
www.denovali.com; Denovali DEN377

This is the 14th album by the German electronica duo of Stephan Otten and Oliver Klemm, and despite the massive instrumental textures here, it really is just the two performing: Otten on drums, programming, synths and voice, and Klemm on more synths, Fender Rhodes piano and guitar. The title track – it means ‘blind spots’ – marks the first appearance of a voice, albeit run through a vocoder, on the duo’s recordings and reinforces the retro vibe of the analogue synths that are in use. Don’t anyone mention Kraftwerk… There’s a lot of portent and synthesised arpeggios, but the sound finally resolves into a beat to which you could at least tap a toe with ‘Goodbye, Düsseldorf’ before the set closes with the epic ten minutes of ‘Schon Wieder Apokalypse’, which is every bit as bleak as the title suggests. Deeply weird, but the sound is bold and enveloping. AE

Sound Quality: 80%

Lab Report

All seven tracks here are normalised to –0.37dB and the overall dynamic range is a little below average. This is synthesised content so there are some sub-48kHz samples in the mix plus some spuriae on a few of the tracks [black trace]. PM

Charles Rouse
Two Is One (96kHz/24-bit, WAV)*
www.mackavenue.com/collections/strata-east; SES-19746-25

We’re plundering the vaults here! Recorded in 1974 at The Warehouse in New York City, this album saw saxophonist Rouse, who played for ten years in Thelonious Monk’s band, deciding in his 50s to record a set with a group of much younger musicians, including Stanley Clarke on bass and David Lee on drums. It’s a spiky, loose set, very much of its time, and for quite a while a sought-after collector’s item. Funky but uneven in both playing and sound, which seems strangely vintage, it’s accessible enough on tracks like Joe Chambers’ ‘Hopscotch’ and the driving, Rouse-penned title track. However, the closing ‘In His Presence Searching’ is odd, with signs of everything including the studio sink having been thrown at it as it rambles between seeming disjointed ideas with a real ‘hunting the radio waves feel’, and then just stops. Perhaps you had to be there… AE

Sound Quality: 80%

Lab Report

Trks 2-5 are 96kHz digital copies of the original analogue ’74 recording. Dynamic range is excellent but the 0.0dB peaks could cause clipping in some DACs. Trk 1 looks like a 44.1kHz copy, upsampled to 96kHz, but with aliasing >22kHz [blk]. PM