This is the end of an era and an amazing run as one of the most influential record stores in the Big Apple. Many many lifetimes ago, I made regular pilgrimages up Interstate-95 to buy records here, many of which became major influences in my music and references against which I still measure myself as an artist and producer.

Read the official closing blurb, interestingly enough, on their new-ish virtual storefront. So I'm glad they're still around in some form, keeping the business alive online and making things happen. I will definitely miss though, the physical and multi-layered sensory gestalt associated with so many great musical discoveries.

Meap is a newish composition/rearranging/remixing tool (with groovy experimental mashup-style aspirations) from the folks at the Columbia University Laboratory for the Recognition and Organization of Speech and Audio (labROSA).

The tool's concept centers centers around, firstly the segmentation, then analysis of input audio for features like pitch, onset times, spectral centroid, average spectral flatness, spectral stability, chunk length, Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, etc.

Once these features have been identified, the audio can be run through a variety of composers that sort, rotate, group and otherwise re-arrange the segmented chunks according to the features selected.

There are lots of good demos of what the composers can do over on the showcase page.

This Onion article is a devilishly funny, tongue-firmly-in-cheek, emphatic diss of Pitchfork and their take on music criticism.

I think it is a hilarious, back-to-basics reorientation that shines a light on what happens when folks start taking themselves and their lofty musical opinions a bit too seriously. Classic Onion.

Pitchfork Gives Music 6.8

should be a good one ...