While compiling the data for Recommended Components, I came across High Water Sound's new website. Stark, black backgrounds are broken by quiet images of strength and beauty, New York City's Brooklyn Bridge taken from so many lovely angles, presenting all of its long lines and promises. Brick walls, cold air, and hard work. 2-channel with attitude. It's always a nice surprise to find a good-looking audio website, so I congratulated High Water's Jeffrey Catalano on a job well-done.
He told me he'd been developing the site for three years. It sometimes takes that long, yes, when you've got a certain vision.
The bridge, Catalano says, is his muse. He's "been living in its shadow for almost thirty years." The story is built upon so many tightly wound strands, he hardly knows where to begin. Charlie Patton is involved, and so is Bob Dylan. There's high water everywhere, and it's rising.
Catalano, who holds degrees in both music and painting, says he looks at everything in life as art.
Ah, art. That thing which has to do only with itself, purposeless and perfect and alone.
"I started High Water Sound not just to be another dealer, and certainly not to get rich." What he wants, he says, is to get people to listen to music. "Audiophiles listen to gear, non-audiophiles listen to stimuli. How many people listen to music as art?"
Like the lines of the bridge, Catalano would like the arts to also mingle and mesh. "Art is art," he says.
In time, he would love to hold poetry readings and live performances at the shop. The website also features a forum, which should be up and running in a week or two. A blog has just gone up, and, if you click on "Friends," you'll soon find anything from photographs of people's systems to photographs of their pets.
"The bottom line, without being too corny," he says, "is that the High Water Sound site is about art and humanity with some commerce thrown in."
