Home audio and video systems have changed dramatically from their earliest incarnations. Television began as a mechanical device but didn’t really catch on until electronic TVs began to hit the market and more broadcasters began signing on.
It grew more popular as it changed from tiny black-and-white screens to large color sets. And now you can buy TVs that can take up the whole wall of your living room! In February 2009, television stations in the United States will switch from analog to digital signals, encouraging people to buy converter boxes or make the move and upgrade, which means plunking down big money for new high-definition sets.
Televison may be the cornerstone of home audio and video setups, but most people need more than just a good TV. We started recording TV shows on videocassette recorders, but fewer people use them anymore. They’re all switching to digital video recorders, DVDs and Blu-ray discs. And then there’s those sophisticated component sound systems and surround sound systems that add so much character and depth to our television and movie watching.
No doubt, home audio and video equipment is very popular, but deciding on the best equipment can be a challenge. Each person has his or her own preferences that lead to very different choices. We have a whole library of home audio and video articles that will help you learn more about different technologies. Find out what’s inside a remote control. Learn the differences between plasma and LCD televisions. See how speakers work. Find out how to bend your TV schedule to suit your viewing habits, with Internet TV, the TiVo and the Slingbox. We’ll even sneak a peek at the next wave of technologies, such as ultra-high definition TV. Explore our Home Audio and Video articles to find out more.
Thanks for staying past the first song,” says TV on the Radio singer Tunde Adebimpe from the stage of the Institute for Contemporary Art in London. Adebimpe has reason to be a little nervous: Not only are TV on the Radio playing their first gig in four months, they’re also debuting songs from their new album, Return to Cookie Mountain, a collection of hypnotic, shape-shifting tunes that has already earned raves from their buddy David Bowie.
Despite some rough edges, the new songs take flight with Adebimpe’s supple, soulful croon soaring over guitar fuzz, synth washes and stutter-stepping grooves. On a gorgeous version of “Ambulance” (from their first LP), David Sitek, the band’s thirty-three-year-old producer-guitarist, lays down a lung-taxing beatbox routine; the crowd clamors for a second encore.
The London gig is another tiny triumph for these unlikely heroes, a group of erstwhile visual artists with a far-out sound that Smiths fans can love. Cookie Mountain alternately evokes My Bloody Valentine’s noisy dream pop and Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, with songs that effuse pastoral beauty as they take off into uncharted territory. “It’s not often I hear other bands that are from the same planet as us,” says Kyp Malone, 31, the band’s hirsute singer-guitarist.
Formed in Brooklyn in 2001 as a sort of dadaist recording project for Sitek and Adebimpe, TV on the Radio didn’t release their full-length debut, the even more sprawling Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, until 2004. But the album won the ’04 Shortlist Music Prize, and the band earned praise from artists as diverse as Morrissey, Mos Def and Trent Reznor. In February, they announced a deal with Interscope Records, which will release Cookie Mountain in June. The band also got some crucial help from Bowie, who appears on the shimmering slow-burner “Province.”
Bowie had been following TV on the Radio since 2003, when Sitek sold Bowie’s doorman a painting and passed along some of the band’s recordings. After surprising the group with an adulatory phone call, Bowie kept in touch with the band members, advising them on everything from how to deal with record executives to what to do with “Dry Drunk Emperor,” a Bush-bashing single that they recorded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. (They released the track online, per Bowie’s suggestion.) “They have a strong link with the great body of American poetry, especially Beat poetry,” Bowie says. “The sampling, multitracking and mashing identifies them as the spawn of a techno-industrial society. I love the new record. I play it about three times a week, which is, like, saturation level for me.”
Adebimpe, 31, spent his childhood in a Pittsburgh suburb and in Lagos, Nigeria, the son of a pharmacist mom and a psychiatrist dad (who died unexpectedly last November). A student of stop-motion animation at New York University’s film school, he moved into a large Brooklyn loft in 1997; it was there that he met Sitek, an aspiring producer and painter who specializes in what he calls “children’s art with adult themes — like matadors falling in love with bulls.” While Adebimpe worked as an illustrator for MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch, the pair collaborated with their buddies in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Sitek produced the band’s Machine EP, and Adebimpe directed a creepy stop-motion video — complete with a gratuitously abused Karen O doll — for the single “Pin.”
Around the same time, Adebimpe and Sitek made a series of messy four-track recordings and began playing shambolic live shows that regularly featured a doo-wop cover of Hall and Oates’ “Maneater.” In 2003, they enlisted Malone, and later added bassist Gerard Smith and drummer Jaleel Bunton, a lanky Kentuckian who had played in hip-hop bands. “It’s amazing how many people ask us if it feels weird to be black people playing rock music,” says Malone. “That’s the most absurd cultural amnesia you could imagine.”
When they’re not on the road, the members of TV on the Radio don’t exactly take it easy: Sitek is producing the new Massive Attack record, Malone takes portrait photographs, and Adebimpe has been discussing collaboration with indie rapper El-P and directing a series of short “commercials” for the band’s Web site that feature comedian David Cross.
Despite all this activity, the band seems genuinely unclear about where its recording career is leading — despite the fact that it is now part of the biggest record company in the world. “We’re constantly surprised,” Sitek says. “That’s the beautiful thing about this band: We can sustain our sense of wonder.”
