Fine knacks for lecturers, cheap, choice, brave and new.

My latest toy is something called a USB turntable, by Ion. This spins your time-hallowed vinyl in the old way, but connects umbilically to your PC, and digitises the sound in one step - especially if (when you try to set this thing up) you just sit by the PC with the device ready to go, phone their help line, and get them to run through which processes detailed in the guide book which you neither can nor have to do, and which unmentioned changes to your sound settings you have to make. Then you are away. (The secret is to surrender to helplessness early: the kit is fine, the guide book to using it simply scandalous.)

At no time in my life have I ever possessed a crumhorn (opinions have varied over the years, perhaps), but back in the (my God!) late 70's and 80's, I was a Wigmore Hall regular, a fan of the still incomparable Emma Kirkby, and avid follower of the Consort of Musicke when the early music repertoire was first being extensively opened out and made available. My collection of LP's has followed me round since then. I was either too mean or too conservative to buy the music again on CD's; I'm not even sure that every disk reappeared in the other format. 'His golden locks time hath to silver turned', in the case of these LP's, their white slip cases time hath to yellow turned. But now their sound is released, and joins me again, in a new century.

A substantial Emma Kirkby fansite I used to know seems to have disappeared, while the official site http://www.emmakirkby.com/
seems to be just a place-holding site without content, as does http://www.musicke.net/
for the Consort of Musicke. Mysterious.

I wonder if I can post mp3's to Blogger? - To start with Dowland's 'Shall I sue?' would seem appropriate, I'd guess from this very cagey web-presence of the artiste. I recall that once, as I was fighting the wind along a motorway in a Citroen Dyane which I then owned, straining - against the rattle of the tiny engine - to listen to some lute music on a tape player I'd put on the passenger seat, I suddenly doubted my commitment to the late 20th century. But now I've got hold of some new (-ish) technology that puts me in touch with the past. Ace.

http://www.ion-audio.com/products/turntables/iTTUSB.html