With a powerful, breathtakingly adorned voice that bore considerable influence on contemporary vocal icons such as Liz Fraser, Jeff Buckley, and Antony Hegarty, the late Sandy Denny packed a considerable body of work (and a seemingly equal number of untoward stories) into a decade-long career before her death at age 31 in 1978.
posted to MetaFilter by mykescipark at 8:10 PM on September 29, 2007 (7 comments)

MeFi Trainspotting Dept.: While most music consumers long ago traded up their sonically dodgy, graphically threadbare, non-bonus-enhanced early CD pressings of their favorite albums, a subculture has naturally arisen to absorb their discarded digital detritus. Witness "Target CDs", a family which encompasses certain early West German and Japanese pressings on the Warner/Elektra/Atlantic (WEA) labels. So named for their distinctive label design, Target CDs - unlike, say, MFSL Gold CDs - make no particular claim to superior fidelity or longevity; in fact, due to their notorious "flat transfer" process from whatever version of the album happened to be lying around, it seems quite the opposite. (Further evidence for the purely nostalgic and/or aesthetic value of these discs can be seen in the "hypothetical Target CDs" threads.) Even so, as within any oddball subculture of collectordom, one can now expect to lay out serious bucks for certain of these shiny little period pieces.
posted to MetaFilter by mykescipark at 9:45 AM on June 3, 2007 (6 comments)