Classic Album Sundays is the world’s most popular album listening experience and allows the listener to hear music contextually, communally, uninterrupted, and in great sonic detail. At our worldwide listening sessions, music fans are able to immerse themselves into an album that has helped shape our culture and in some cases, our lives.
We relay the artist and album’s unique story and provide a musical context that gives the listening experience deeper meaning.We share the experience of hearing the album in its entirety, on vinyl, and on a world-class audiophile hi-fi so that fans can experience the music as close as possible to the artist’s original intention. Classic Album Sundays treats the album (and music in general) with the respect it deserves rather than as a free commodity or aural wallpaper. We remind people what they love about music.
For our September 2019 session we celebrate David Bowie classic “Heroes”!
After falling into hedonistic rock’n’roll clichés in mid-’70s Los Angeles—a place he later called “the most vile piss-pot in the world”—he set his sights on Berlin as a spartan antidote. And though “Heroes” is the second part of his Berlin Trilogy, it’s actually the only one of the three that he fully recorded in the city. “Every afternoon I’d sit down at that desk and see three Russian Red Guards looking at us with binoculars, with their Sten guns over their shoulders,” the album’s producer, Tony Visconti, once recalled. “Everything said we shouldn’t be making a record here.” All of the manic paranoia and jarring juxtapositions surrounding Hansa bled into the music, which often sounds as if Bowie is conducting chaos, smashing objects together to discover scarily beautiful new shapes.
The album’s contradictory nature went beyond Berlin and its spitballing creation, too. “Heroes” was released on October 14, 1977, just two weeks before the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks and a few months after the Clash’s self-titled debut LP. So as punk was whirling into a frenzy, Bowie’s TV appearances around the time of “Heroes” doubled as acts of stoic defiance. On the Dutch program “TopPop,” for example, he looked nonchalant in a smart blazer, button-up shirt, and leg warmers, effortlessly crooning the title track like Sinatra in his prime. During the song’s swirling bridge, he steps away from the microphone, lights up a cigarette, and stares into the middle distance—the face of calm in an era of turmoil.
Join us to hear David Bowie like you never have before!
Washington D.C.
Time and Date: Sunday September 22nd 2019 2:00pm – 4:00pm
Venue
Songbyrd, 2477 18th st NW, Washington, DC 20009, United States
Tickets
Presenter
Joe Lapan
Audio Menu provided by Audioism.
REGA Planar 3 turntable with Elys MM Cartridge, REGA Fono MM Phono Preamp, Audioism MicroZOTL Preamp (David Berning Design), Audioism Venue-Class Playback System, Xcilica HD System Processor, Audioism ZOTL Amplifiers (David Berning Design), Class AB Hybrid Amplification for Subs, WyWires Audio Interconnects
