About a year ago here on Audiogon I started a thread to see if Audiogoners were interested in music reviews and news-it turned out they were mostly and so a year later a site is ready born out of that initial post and the feedback.
My motivation was simple; I enjoyed Audiogon greatly but discussions and posts on music, a lot of them anyway showed two trends to me.
One was confusion about re-mastered material-what was available, what versions were best and people discussing discs long since surpassed.
Secondly a lot of discontent about the quality of new music and a lack of knowledge as to what was available.
These were two issues near to my heart and ones were I felt I could help and share my continuing passion for music, new and old.
I even liked the idea of long debates about why my latest rave wasn’t very good at all.
With the initial idea seemingly a goer I soon discovered fitting it directly into Audiogon wasn’t going to work, I spoke to Arnie (the main man at Audiogon) via phone all the way from here in Glasgow, Scotland and we exchanged several e-mails-he liked the idea but as a very busy businessman with most of his resources tied up I decided to try and get something up and running independently and try to develop the interface with Audiogon at a later date.
I posted for contributors on Audiogon a few times and I know some folks had real life problems that meant they couldn’t contribute others simply faded into the ether. I even had non-Audiogoners back out.
So we are left with three hardy souls who have contributed and I thank them yet again Lyle Crawford and Gordon Russell good friend and workmate for the last 16 years or so.
I really want to state that the door remains open for contributors, anyone who wants to write anything about music-this site will be open to any ideas and formats as hopefully it shows already. Too many sites imho stick to a rigid format-if this idea has a future I envisage articles, lost classics, live reviews, music book reviews-anything really.
As for the delay and the time it took I have to reflect a bit on 2004 and how it went for me and my partner Eileen, who designed the site from scratch with no previous experience. A series of fortunate and not so fortunate events befell us last year-we sold our flat and bought a bigger one, that took up a large chunk of April till August-the week we were due to take our summer break I unexpectedly got ill-I was on medication for 3 months and missed a month from work ( it's not all bad news).Finally as Christmas approached and the site started to take real shape we were struck by further bad luck in the shape of a sudden bereavement.
The real star of this show is Eileen who listened to me constantly nag and delivered this site when her health wasn’t great and had a myriad of bigger issues on her plate.
I love her to bits.
As for the content of the site-I see it as a start, it has a slant towards Audiophiles-I was glad to discover the vast majority of newer material was available on vinyl-we tried to cover the sound quality and production but I confess I don’t always relate to certain views on that subject.
It’ll certainly be interesting to hear feedback on how useful or otherwise people find the reviews and indeed to hear people who disagree with our views.
Feedback is crucial and whilst I think we did a good job-it’s been struggle writing as none of us are professionals at this game however some constructive criticism would be welcomed(for Lyle and Gordon anyway).
The Rhino Yes re-masters series is a bit old now but it was my intention to cover the series early in 2004 and I continued with it.
As regards material reviewed-there was no set pattern-we tried to stick to what we enjoyed or thought was important certainly we could never review every CD we bought.
As for the future-we may go for a magazine type structure with a new issue every so often-Gordon and I plan to tie up 2004 releases and publish a review of the year with our top albums of the year-quite a few of which have not been covered yet.
Enough said on it but a heart felt thanks to those Audiogoners-too many to mention who encouraged me with this project.
It is called Lugs and a cyber fortune to the first person to work out why.
Whilst the name is coincidental I think it is a nice tribute to Lugnut-Patrick Malone who is in many of our thoughts at this time.
Here is the link…..
http://www.lugsmusicreviews.com |
