Stockfisch
24K Gold

The first thing that makes Stockfisch 24K Gold interesting to me is the range of music it manages to fit into just under an hour. This is not simply a collection of soft singer-songwriters chosen because they sound pleasant on an expensive system. The 2018 Japanese release, officially issued as Stockfisch Reference (24K Gold CD) by Silk Road Music, catalog number SRM047GCD, brings together fifteen recordings from the Stockfisch catalogue, moving from Carrie Newcomer and Allan Taylor to Chris Jones, Kerstin Blodig and even Vivaldi played by La Folia Barockorchester. That mixture makes much more sense once I start listening, because the common factor is not musical style but the way Stockfisch presents musicians. Voices and instruments are given room, arrangements remain easy to follow, and the recordings invite me to listen to the performance instead of constantly thinking about the technology behind it.

Fifteen tracks, but a clear Stockfisch identity

Carrie Newcomer’s The Slender Thread is a very good place to start. Newcomer’s Stockfisch album of the same name was recorded with musicians including Gary Walters, Ian Melrose, Jean Kelly, Jens Kommnick, Lutz Möller and Hans-Jörg Maucksch, and the title track immediately shows why her voice suits this label so well. Her vocal has body and warmth without becoming heavy, while the instruments remain clearly separated around her. What I like most is that I can hear small differences in pressure and phrasing without the presentation feeling enlarged just to impress me. On revealing speakers or headphones, the midrange transparency is obvious, but more importantly I can follow the song naturally without being distracted by excessive detail.

Sea of Dreams by Steve Strauss changes the atmosphere while keeping that sense of intimacy. Strauss returned to Stockfisch roughly a decade after Just Like Love, and his later material used a broader group of musicians including Don Ross on guitars, Lutz Möller on piano, Hans-Jörg Maucksch on fretless bass and Beo Brockhausen on wind instruments. The song has more colour and movement than the opening tracks might lead you to expect from a Stockfisch compilation. I particularly enjoy the relationship between the vocal and the acoustic instruments because neither has to fight for attention. There is good depth between the speakers, but it is the easy placement of the musicians and the natural decay around individual notes that makes the track convincing for me.

Then there is Roadhouses & Automobiles by Chris Jones, and for me this is one of the strongest selections on the disc. Jones was both an excellent guitarist and a convincing singer, and the original Stockfisch album used a large supporting cast with electric and fretless bass, fiddle, mandolin, pedal steel, Hammond organ, piano, trumpet, tuba, percussion and drums. That could easily become crowded, yet the title track remains wonderfully organised. I can follow the guitar, hear the weight underneath it and still pick out the character of the accompanying instruments without the song turning into a clinical demonstration. This is exactly the kind of reference music I like because the recording quality helps me understand the arrangement rather than replacing it.

More than another singer-songwriter sampler

One reason this compilation works better than I initially expected is that it does not stay in the same comfortable acoustic mood for the entire disc. Allan Taylor’s Down The Years I Travelled strips things back dramatically. Taylor wrote the song especially for his retrospective collection and recorded it at Stockfisch with Lutz Möller on grand piano. There is nowhere for the recording to hide here. Voice and piano have to carry everything, and that simplicity makes the track particularly useful for judging vocal realism, tone and the relationship between direct sound and the acoustic around it. I hear Taylor as a physical presence rather than a flat image between the speakers, while the piano has both the initial strike and the body that follows it. It is a simple performance, but simple recordings often tell me more about a system than spectacular ones.

The biggest change arrives at the end with Vivaldi’s “Winter”, Allegro non molto, performed by La Folia Barockorchester. This recording was made in August 2014 in the banquet hall of the Palais im Großen Garten in Dresden, with Robin Peter Müller directing from the solo violin. Stockfisch describes the hall as having a reverberation time of roughly three to four seconds, and that acoustic is easy to understand when listening. The strings have space around them, yet the ensemble remains focused and rhythmically alive. I like this track because it tests something completely different from close vocals and guitars: speed, separation, transient energy and the ability of a system to reproduce a real acoustic space without turning reverberation into a vague cloud behind the musicians.

That contrast also prevents Stockfisch 24K Gold from becoming one of those audiophile compilations where every track seems to be chosen from exactly the same musical template. There is certainly a strong emphasis on acoustic instruments and singer-songwriters, and listeners who want rock, electronic music or large-scale orchestral spectacle will not find much of it here. But within its chosen territory there is enough variety to keep me interested. McKinley Black, David Munyon, David Roth, Brooke Miller, Sara K., Kerstin Blodig, Paul Stephenson, Carl Cleves and Parissa Bouas add different voices and textures, while The Spirit of GAMBO and La Folia Barockorchester push the programme beyond contemporary songwriting altogether.

I also think it is worth separating the 24K Gold presentation from the music itself. A gold CD may be attractive as a physical collector’s edition, but I do not need claims about precious metal to explain why these recordings are useful. What matters to me is the quality of the original Stockfisch productions and the consistency with which this compilation presents them. A good DAC, amplifier, pair of speakers or headphones will reveal the fine detail, stereo imaging and low-level information very easily, but even then I would rather concentrate on Newcomer’s voice, Jones’s guitar, Taylor’s piano accompaniment and the energy of La Folia than spend an hour listening for technical effects.

For me, that is the real strength of Stockfisch 24K Gold. It works as an introduction to several important Stockfisch artists, but it also shows why the label became so closely associated with audiophile recordings in the first place. The best tracks do not sound impressive because everything has been made bigger, brighter or more dramatic. They work because voices retain their character, acoustic instruments have believable size and weight, and the space around the musicians remains part of the performance. Most of all, I value the fact that this compilation can move from the quiet humanity of Allan Taylor to the drive of Chris Jones and finally to a lively Baroque ensemble without losing its identity.

HiFi’ve, Ronald – Your EarFluencer