Pitchfork has been doing a weekend series where they commission reviews of older albums, featuring an eclectic mix of genres, artists, and selections. In a strange bit of synchronicity with my last post, this weekend they covered  Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly, a solo album released right after Steely Dan released Gaucho and broke up. It’s a great review, and adds a lot of color to the album I wasn’t aware of. There are several classics on this album: IGY, New Frontier, and the title track are all equal to any of Steely Dan’s best output, while some others are a fraction of that quality. The Nightfly was one of the first ten CDs I bought in the late 80’s—I already had several Steely Dan albums on cassette and I decided I wasn’t going to buy stuff I already owned. Right after this, both Fagen and Becker went dark for a couple of decades, and I didn’t reconnect with their later output.

I’m sitting in front of our living room hi-fi system, listening to a used vinyl copy of Aja by Steely Dan on the turntable I brought back from the dead. The turntable itself is a Technics SL-0033, a really nice midrange deck with automatic start and stop. It’s playing through a Denon head unit I saved from the side of the road (really, no kidding), a pair of Mission bookshelf speakers—also saved from the side of a different road, on a different day—and a KLH subwoofer saved from my parents’ basement.  I’d like a little more treble response out of the high-end; Aja is an excellent reference record to test out sound, and the high frequencies are too muddy for my taste. I can’t adjust the subwoofer frequency cutoff like I can with the Polk unit in the den, this being a lower-end brand. I turned the Loudness feature on and jacked the treble up, and that made a little bit of a difference, but still not quite where I want it. There is another subwoofer gathering dust in Mom’s basement; I’ll check to see if the circuitry is adjustable, and maybe that one will find its way back to Maryland.

Following up on the thinking I was doing about my old iPhone the other day, I used the email address assigned to the basement server to create a new Apple account, and used that to sign into the phone. This way the two machines were happy to talk with each other, and it didn’t fuck anything up on my current iPhone (using the same email address tells Apple you want to mirror the two devices, so you wind up with apps on the old phone that don’t work and no room left to add music). Once I got it connected and loading music, one of the other things I wanted to do was see if I could add it to the list of devices shared in my iCloud account, so that I could see it with Location Services. Because the iPhone is only on OS 12.5.8, it took a bit of finessing, but I was able to get it in the list and visible on my newer phone. With 64GB of storage, it’s a very fancy iPod, but it’s free and it works, so I’ll keep filling it with tunes.