Category: Audio Gear

This piece of music burst into my life when I was still living in Tucson, a few months before relocating to San Francisco. There was a program of “Space Music” that aired on our local NPR FM station every Sunday night called Hearts of Space that I faithfully recorded onto cassette for later listening enjoyment. Novus Magnificat was the music I subsequently used for meditation for many years afterward, but the one instance of that mediation that really stands out in my memory was one afternoon in June or July 1986. I was floating on an air mattress in the swimming pool, my little tape walkman in a sealed plastic bag to prevent it from getting wet, headphones in place, and eyes closed.

All of a sudden I saw myself in San Francisco and I had just met Justin Banks, cover and featured model of the June 1986 issue of MEN. My heart fluttered.

It was a premonition that actually manifested about eighteen months later. The details of our meeting were very different from what I saw in my vision, but the fact that the meeting and subsequent brief affair happened at all still seems fantastical. Was that future already in place and my meditative state just allowed me a distorted glimpse into it, or did my meditation cause it? Was it all just sheer coincidence? I’ll never know. But I do know is that I came away that instant with the absolute certainty that eventually our paths would cross. I didn’t know where. I didn’t know when (especially since the actual timing and circumstances of my San Francisco move were still very nebulous), but I knew it would happen. Looking back at it all now while it’s true that our relationship that never turned into anything more than casual dating/fucking, much less the love-of-my-life thing that I’d hoped for while floating in that pool, Justin was a lesson—albeit a painful one—that I needed to learn. (And it wasn’t just “never date a porn star.”)

But back to Novus Magnificat, I had the pleasure of meeting Constance Demby in person a few weeks before I met Justin. Dave, a guy I’d been dating somehow managed to get us invited to the small recital she was holding one night at her home in Marin County.

It wasn’t a huge house, but the energy it contained was amazing. “Sparkly and Purple” are two words that even today, nearly 40 years later, best describe it. I remember several museum-quality crystals scattered around the living room, but the one that stands out the most in my memory of the evening was a three-foot-tall group of amethyst crystals that was standing off to the side of where she had her instruments set up. (Probably where the “sparkly and purple” impression came from come to think of it.)

She sat down to play and the room fell silent. When we left several hours later I won’t go so far as to say we were high, but we were definitely buzzing.

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Yanni before he became YANNI and the caricature of all that was horrible about 80s New Age music. The second—and my first—of his albums holds a special place in my heart because it—along with Patrick O’Hearn’s Ancient Dreams were a gift from my ex the first Christmas we were in San Francisco. I hadn’t heard of either artist, but immediately fell in love with both.

I bought only two more of Yanni’s albums—Out of Silence and Chameleon Days—before he hooked up with Linda Evans and his music went to hell..

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I’m slowly backfilling my Loscil catalog and this has become one of my favorites.

And in case you haven’t noticed, this particular player, the D-EJ915 has also become my favorite portable. The overall design and choice of materials used, the build quality and the sound all contribute to that. Yeah, it uses rechargeable gumstick batteries, but even the crappy ones made nowadays still manage to keep it happily powered for a couple days’ listening sessions. And if those run out, I have the external AA battery case to connect in an emergency. (Can your music player running out of juice really be called an emergency?)

The 915 doesn’t have a built-in display but that’s proven to be less of a liability than I initially thought. The display on the supplied inline remote [one of Sony’s worst designs IMHO] supplies all the info and frankly after living with this player for a couple months now, I think if they’d designed a built-in display on the lid it would’ve really destroyed the aesthetics.

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