XXHighEnd

Often my wife comes up with something to play. She digs up something from whatever obscure program and then asks "do we have that ?". This time I had to enter Blind Blake in XX's search field. Nope, nothing.

All kind of mysterious boxes switch on, Torrent hunters are activated and all sorts of mystique goes on, and 5 minutes later I'm handed a USB stick.

In this case, during the process, I was shown a Wikipedia page :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Blake
Right away I see two numbers : 1926 and 1932 and say WHAT ? Are we going to play cylinders now ?

I was cooking dinner and just dropped some meat balls in the pan. They sizzled nicely (of course all I produce in the kitchen sizzles the most nice).

Put the USB stick in (the PC, not the kitchen), pressed play, and while the album (??) normalized which takes some 30 seconds, I went back to the kitchen and never payed attention really.

Then my balls started to sizzle quite some louder and went on to turn down the fire, but no balls were jumping up and down and it appeared to be the music which reflected the "cylinder" noises to the back wall and it really made me think it were my balls.
So imagine, loud knispering sounds like from meat baking hard in oild, but now through your loudspeakers. And somewhere behind that oughts to play some music.

I was told that Blind Blake played the guitar in special fashion, because he plays it like a piano is played. Indeed, I could hear something of that.

So, noise is louder than the music itself. Also, noise gets louder when a voice gets louder. But funnily enough, it is not noise as we know it. It is knispering meat ball noise. Very dynamic and very well rendered meatball noise. Crazy to let stay playing actually ...

But I did. And I don't think I ever have been whisteling and wiggling so much on any album before.
I also never heard so bad "sound" (!!) through my speakers before. But possibly I also never heard such good MUSIC through by speakers before.

This is the album I played : Ragtime guitar's foremost fingerpicker (http://www.worldcat.org/title/blind-blake-ragtime-guitars-foremost-fingerpicker/oclc/023187925).
In MP3. So the real thing probably is better. Haha.

Peter

Yes Peter, Blind Blake is a revelation. I have that CD(since out of print) and it contains some of the best music in my collection. I have Ryan Cooder and Jorma Kaukonen versions of Blake's "Police Dog Blues" and, trust me, everything they do can be heard done better on Blake's original recording. I rarely listen to Blake, partly because the reproduced surface noise from those original old 78's is more than a challenge(sizzling meatballs indeed) and partly because the guitar player side of me is so humbled by the listening experience that it makes me want to put down my Froggy Bottom parlor guitar and never pick it up again. Anyway, thanks for the story and especially thanks for getting me to "dust off" my Blake recording for another listen.

Esau

... and try this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf6OjxYPzoo

Georg