Slim Slow Sacrilege

I've been on a Van Morrison kick lately, dragging out my old cassettes and enjoying them on my new state-of-the-art, $59 stereo ... which, oddly for these techno-toy times, came with a cassette player. (The acquisition of such oldfangled gadgetry is a story in itself—I recently bought a light box and found I could only fit it on my night table by downsizing the stereo from mini-system to boombox.)

Anyway, that muffled, hissy sound of magnetic tape through two-inch speakers got me thinking that perhaps it's time to ditch the cassettes in favour of remastered CDs. Surely by now, I figured, classics like Astral Weeks have been upgraded to the pristine quality they deserve. Not that I have anything decent to play the CDs on, but still.

To my horror, I discovered that though much of Van's back-catalogue has been remastered, Astral Weeks has not. A Japanese remaster is available at the usual hefty price for imports, but the most recent domestic CD dates from 1987.

Allowing Astral Weeks to languish with substandard sound is the rock 'n' roll equivalent of letting The Bible go out of print. It's sacrilege—a damning encapsulation of the music industry's malaise.