Randall Roberts

Columbia

Writer, Editor and Curator at In Sheep's Clothing hifi

Write/Edit/Select: In Sheep's Clothing, Qobuz; ex-LA Times. Insta: @liledit. I develop/implement integrated marketing tactics to actualize key strategic goals.

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Articles

The Spirit in the Form: EM Records from Osaka, In Reach, At Last

3 days ago | insheepsclothinghifi.com | Randall Roberts

“To make a long story short, I will only say something conclusive: EM Records is researching a hypothesis that ‘the spirit may reside in the musical form itself.’”That’s Kōki Emura, founder and guiding force behind Osaka’s EM Records, offering something like a thesis during a recent conversation with In Sheep’s Clothing’s Phil Cho. Since 1998, Emura has followed that instinct across genres, countries, formats and eras, seeking out music that holds weight.
Watch: The Reggae Film That Should Be Canon

5 days ago | insheepsclothinghifi.com | Randall Roberts

In the loose canon of reggae films, Heartland Reggae is often passed over in favor of classics like The Harder They Come, Rockers, and Countryman. Released in 1980 and assembled from concert footage shot in 1978, the film doesn’t follow a narrative per se, but the moment in history seeps into every frame. During the opening sequence, the title appears in flames. What follows never cools off.
Wewantsounds in 2025: Private Press Funk, Cassette Heat, and Jazz That Swings Wide

1 week ago | insheepsclothinghifi.com | Randall Roberts

Wewantsounds is in the middle of a heavy year. The Paris-based label has been moving fast, resurfacing rare and remarkable records from around the world. Already in 2025, they’ve brought back Meiko Kaji’s Yadokari and Roy Haynes’s Hip Ensemble, and announced an upcoming reissue of Warda’s We Malo. They’ve compiled a killer set of electro-Raï cassette cuts with Sweet Rebels, unearthed live heat from Manu Dibango, and spotlighted Japanese funk, boogie, and city pop with Tokyo Bliss.
Time Is the Instrument: John Cage’s Organ²/ASLSP

1 week ago | insheepsclothinghifi.com | Randall Roberts

On September 5, 2001, a performance of John Cage’s Organ²/ASLSP began in a small medieval church in Halberstadt, Germany. Nothing sounded. The opening stretch consisted of a planned pause that lasted 17 months, time measured not in notes but in waiting. For Cage, silence wasn’t an absence. It framed whatever came next. When the first tone finally emerged in February 2003, it didn’t mark the beginning. The piece had already started. Cage wrote ASLSP in 1985 for piano.
5 Vintage European Turntables That Matter

2 weeks ago | insheepsclothinghifi.com | Randall Roberts

Most of what matters in a turntable lives at the tip of the stylus. The cartridge does the real work by drawing music out of plastic. Bolt a good one to a strip of plywood and you’ll still get something worth listening to. That said, the turntable matters. Not because it’s collectible or cool, but because the thing holding your records steady has a job to do. The motor needs to be quiet and the speed stable. No hum, no static. Turn it on and let it run.
Mati Klarwein’ Psychedelic Record Covers Still Dazzle 50 Years Later | In Sheeps Clothing

3 weeks ago | insheepsclothinghifi.com | Randall Roberts

Few album cover artists reward gobbling LSD more than Mati Klarwein. His remarkably precise paintings of mystical visions, which were commissioned for two-dimensional LP covers, will transform into heaving, breathing journeys after a few drops of acid. The sleeves reject the notion of branding. They feel like sacred texts. Klarwein painted like someone decoding a message pressed into the grooves: Look long enough and something inside them starts to pulse.
Gal Costa’s Lost 1972 Studio Session Finally Surfaces | In Sheeps Clothing

3 weeks ago | insheepsclothinghifi.com | Randall Roberts

In 1972, Gal Costa was riding high. Her live album Fa-Tal – Gal a Todo Vapor had just cemented her as one of Brazil’s most electric performers, a fearless presence who could pivot from tropicalia radicalism to torch-song intimacy without breaking stride. She was already a central figure in the countercultural wave that swept through Brazilian music in the late ’60s and early ’70s, but Fa-Tal put her in a different category: a star with range, danger and total command.
Excavated Shellac Digs Into the Roots of East African Music

1 month ago | insheepsclothinghifi.com | Randall Roberts

The first lines of Jonathan Ward’s new writing on early recordings from East Africa zoom from general to specific in a few brief words: “The year 1930 was an extremely active one for multinational record companies. The situation in East Africa was no exception.”The Los Angeles-based Ward is one of the most authoritative writers and researchers on early African records.
New BBC Footage Uncovers the Sacred Rituals of 1950s Hi-Fi Culture

1 month ago | insheepsclothinghifi.com | Randall Roberts

“You must have one of these better-class units which has ultra-linear output stages. The distortion factor on it is very, very low indeed. Somewhere in the region of 0.11% at 10 watt output,” explains one of the high-fidelity faithful in Hi-Fi-Fo-Fum, a 1959 BBC short that drills into the psyche of the early audiophile. Recently uploaded by the BBC Archive, the film profiles men who turned their living rooms into tangled shrines of walnut, wire and snootiness in pursuit of the perfect sound.
Listening Wasn’t Background Noise: How 1975 Made Room for Music

1 month ago | insheepsclothinghifi.com | Randall Roberts

In 1975, music didn’t just hang around in the air. It owned the room. People built their lives around stereo systems the way they once built them around fireplaces or dinner tables. In most homes, the television had already taken over as the main attraction, but for a growing middle class with disposable income and a little space to spare, a stereo was something worth building a room around. A good hi-fi wasn’t decoration. It was an altar. Music wasn’t portable.