Category: [Music]

Terrace of… MiniDisc?

So I just got an email from the Projekt Records mailing advising they have a Kickstarter for a rerelease of one of Sam’s 90s albums with Dirk Serries in three physical formats. LP, CD, and MiniDisc.

MiniDisc?

I’m not kidding, I looked at this message and just said “…MiniDisc?” because my brain couldn’t conceive of anything else in that moment. MiniDisc. The Kickstarter page advises they’re doing an edition of 500 copies each for the CD and vinyl and only 30 of the MiniDisc (MINIDISC!), so obviously Sam knows there’s not exactly going to be many people able to play that one… but why is he doing a MiniDisc release at all?

MiniDisc.

Honestly. Like the cassette revival wasn’t enough. What’s next, eight-track cartridges?

RIP Mother Bernadette Mary

Ah Sinead, you complicated woman. I can’t honestly say I was ever a fan as such, and, frankly, I’ve probably been as judgy towards her over the years as anyone. I like to think I’ve become a bit more understanding as I’ve got older, and I think as she got older we all realised Sinead’s complications weren’t entirely under control or her fault. She was a difficult woman in a time when that was even harder to get away with than it is now, and she kept going through all the bullshit that came her way.

And we should’ve known right from the start that she would be difficult. I watched the video for “Troy” after I read the news this afternoon, not the first time I’ve done that but I can only remember seeing it once on TV many many years ago… what a fucking berserk choice of a song to release not only as a single at all, but the first single from your debut album. Holy shit.

I don’t think I ever heard this at the time, my own first memory of Sinead was “Mandinka” which followed this, and that seemed singular enough back in 1987. Looking at this all these years later… Christ. She was nothing if not unto herself and true to herself. And she definitely wasn’t wrong about the Catholic Church. 56 is no age to be leaving us.

We are not the robots. No, really.

My favourite photo of Kraftwerk:

Not sure of the exact year, but obviously around the time they picked up Bartos and Flür, so probably 1975 or ’76. In any case, the spectacular unnaturalness of this picture just fills me with absolute joy. It just has this marvellous vibe that I can only describe as “we are normal human beings behaving like normal humans”. I’ve often felt their music (at least the later stuff) sounded like someone had described pop music to them, and they set out to make that sort of thing but they weren’t really successful at it, and this photo gives me a similar impression. Like, “people smile in photographs and we are smiling, we are normal… ja?”

Pauvre con

Have you noticed how much I tend to use the word “cunt” here? It’s not something I’m really proud of, but it’s a thing I do… I first heard it when we went to Scotland in 1981, I was 6, and we were visiting the rest of the family over there, and I recall one of my cousins saying it about someone else. I didn’t know what it meant—I thought maybe it was just a Scottish word people didn’t use here in Australia (wasn’t I wrong!)—but I had a feeling it was a Very Bad Word and I decided against letting anyone know I’d picked it up.

Anyway, it’s still a Very Bad Word but Malcolm Knox here reckons it’s becoming a lot less so, maybe not in the eyes of the law (don’t call a policeman one, even when he’s being one) but it’s certainly cropping up a lot more than it once did (my own earliest memory of it being used on TV was the legendary Blue Murder back in 1995). He is, however, wrong about one thing:

The French, epic lovers of obscenity, had normalised their word for c— to such a degree that when used by Serge Gainsbourg in Je t’aime Moi Non Plus, his 1968 duet with the late Jane Birkin, it sounds a little sexy.

I mean, maybe it would if it did in fact appear in the song, but it doesn’t, unless Malcolm has heard a different version to me. On the other hand, Serge Gainsbourg did write a song called “Requiem pour un con”… maybe that’s what Malcolm was thinking of and the recent passing of Jane Birkin made hm confuse them? Then again, “Je t’aime” is a lot more (in)famous, so maybe not? I don’t know. In any case, I also don’t know about the word being “normalised” as such…

…that being the record sleeve for the single release of “Requiem” in 1968; the record company might’ve tolerated the word in the song but not on the record sleeve, apparently. And “con” can actually be used much more mildly as “jerk” or “idiot” as well, indeed when I ran the French lyrics through Google Translate those were the words it gave me… but given that the record sleeve mutes the word “con”, that suggests Gainsbourg intended the Bad Meaning.

Talking of what Serge may or may not have meant: the recent passing of Jane Birkin put me in mind in a roundabout way of this one time on Celluloid Dreams, the film show on 2SER I used to be part of (let’s not discuss, I’m still a bit angry about that too), when we were interviewing a French lady called Catherine Chauchat… the latter had made a short documentary on the history of the vibrator that must’ve been showing somewhere in Sydney, and she stuck around with us for drinks after the show. So I decided to take the oppprtunity to ask a native French speaker (my own French was no longer good enough for me by then to confirm or deny) if something I’d read online was true, namely that a certain line in the chorus of “Je t’taime” (“Je vais et je viens/entre tes reins”) meant “I come and go between your kidneys”. Which she thought was HILARIOUS; apparently that is what it literally means, but in practice it’s more of a slang idiom pour le bumsex. I still hope Gainsbourg meant it literally…

Out of the river all ugly and green

Anthem of the Sun, then. I’ve owned this fucking album for 30 years and I’ve only just realised it’s actually Pigpen who sings “Alligator”. I should probably be ashamed of that. I’ve also been terribly confused about it for much of that time, cos I was under the impression that the CD I bought way back in early 1993 was the remixed one… in the early 70s both Anthem and Aoxomoxoa were remixed for reissue, and I’ve spent years thinking the older CD releases of both of these were those versions. Then on a music forum I used to be a member of, someone was offering a vinyl rip of original 1968/69 pressings of both, which I obtained, was duly impressed by the differences… then I recently discovered the original mix had been the one on my early 90s purchase all this time and this purported original pressing was actually the 1971 remix after all. Years of misapprehension for some reason…

Anyway, NEVER MIND THAT, but tonight I opted to give both versions a back to back listen on headphones… I remember reading somewhere the Anthem remix was undertaken to make it sound more commercial or something, as if this could made to sound like anything of the sort. Anthem was an infamous experiment in combining live and studio recordings and it really is the sound of a band that didn’t really know what they were doing and going a bit mad in the process… producer David Hassinger quit the project allegedly when Bob Weir asked him to produce the sound of “thick air”, and one Warners executive apparently called it “the most unreasonable project” the company had ever been mixed up in. And “unreasonable” is possibly the best description of the whole thing, 55 years after the fact there’s still something preposterous about it… the remix certainly has a different character to the original, maybe a bit less muddy but also the editing seems kind of cruder and blunter, and I think I like the 1968 mix better. Either way, fucking great.

Toot toot

Ah, 1980s Miles Davis. To be honest, post-70s Miles is not something I’ve explored much, indeed this and Star People are the only 80s Miles albums I’ve heard, and tonight was my first listen to this. This (his first Warners album after nearly 30 years with Columbia) was actually mostly the work of Marcus Miller, who’d been his bass player on some of those comeback albums; Miles himself only has one co-writing credit and apart from the cover versions Marcus Miller wrote everything here and played most of the instruments.

Apparently it was Miles’ biggest hit in years, and also one of his most critically divisive at the time… which I can kind of understand, cos even by his electric period standards Tutu is a long way from conventional jazz, much as Bitches Brew had been in 1970… except Tutu sounds like 1986 in a way that Bitches doesn’t. Hard to explain, except maybe to say that Bitches obviously sounds of its time and yet also not, whereas Tutu is 100% of its time. On this first hearing what I heard most prominently was 1986. It was screamingly 1986. And the music, not just the production, sounds like 1986. It’s recognisably 1986-era R&B/funk. It’s good at being that, I think, but I need to give it more listens before I can really hear past all that 1986…

Speak… not?

Music-related story of the year so far is the amazing “crossover” between Taylor Swift and Cabaret Voltaire:

A Taylor Swift fan in Staffordshire got a creepy surprise when she tried to play her brand new, orchid-coloured vinyl copy of Taylor Swift’s Speak Now.
Instead of hearing Swift’s re-recorded versions of Back To December and Sparks Fly, Rachel Hunter was confronted with a collection of dark and disturbing British electronica.
The opening song contained messages about “flakes of flesh” and “endless rows of sardines”, while another sampled cult the 1960s horror series The Outer Limits.
“There are 70 billion people on Earth, where are they hiding? Where are they hiding?” intoned a husky male voice over a sinister, droning synth.
“At first, I thought maybe the vinyl had a secret message from Taylor,” Hunter tells the BBC.
“But when I flipped to the b-side it started saying ‘There’s 70 billion people on earth, where are they hiding?’ I started to get a little scared.
“I was alone and it was late and my vinyl was playing creepy messages.”

It transpires that the tracks on sides A and B of this version (which now has its very own Discogs entry) are actually sides A and B of a compilation of 90s weird British electronica called Happy Land which came out a couple of months ago, which was pressed at the same French vinyl plant as Tay Tay’s “new” album, which I suppose at least partly explains how this happened, but even so… I know there’s been notable examples of this happening in the past, but something about this almost feels deliberate—if only because the disjunct between what the listener would expect and the actual “cursed” product is so great—and in any case clearly no one was doing quality control at the pressing plant. Wonder how many of these “crossover” copies actually got made? It’s got me interested in hearing Happy Land, anyway…

…And bass for all

This is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen: a bass tablature book for Metallica’s …And Justice for All album, a record that (in)famously has bugger all bass on it. I’ve no idea how good it is or isn’t (our host finds it kind of dubious), I just think it’s conceptually hilarious.

The story of how and why the bass vanished from the album varies a bit, but Steve Thompson, one of the engineers, describes it as beginning with Lars Ulrich bringing in his preferred EQ settings for his drums. These were duly applied and Thompson thought they sounded like shit, so he remixed everything to what he thought they should sound like, Lars objected to the results and told him to turn the bass down until it was hard to hear. Then turn it down even further. Thompson thought everything sounded like shit now, but did as he was instructed. As he says, they were the artists, not him, even if they didn’t know what.

James Hetfield has also said the way his guitar was recorded (i.e. with no mid-range) meant Jason Newsted’s bass playing clashed with his sound cos he was largely doubling Hetfield’s guitar and the two instruments were hard to distinguish. Hetfield’s also more recently said that what really happened was, they didn’t turn Newsted down so much as they turned everything else up. Whatever it was, I don’t believe them when they say they weren’t just being cunts to the then-new band member, who I don’t think anyone could’ve blamed if he’d quit as soon as he heard the final mix.

But there’s one odd thing about this video, i.e. when it mentions isolated bass tracks being available in the Guitar Hero game. Cos I’ve seen another video with Steve Thompson where he says the AJFA multi-tracks are so riddled with edits and splices (which I always thought was generally considered a no-no with multi-track tapes) that they’re probably unplayable now. Someone else says in the comments there’s no fewer than five AJFA songs available in game format… so if the tapes are unusable, where are the isolated bass tracks coming from?

Seek Hetfield land?

One of my Mastodon friends (hi Tom) mentioned he was listening to Paradise Lost’s 1995 album Draconian Times, and that inspired me to do the same. I’m not a megafan of this band, but I do have quite a few albums by them and I used to give them a spin on my old long-gone radio show (yes, 2SER, I am still kind of bitter about that)… and it’s been so long since I’ve played this one that it was really nice to get reacquainted (maybe sags a bit in the second half, but on the whole super solid). And one thing Tom said about them doing Metallica better than Metallica themselves were in ’95; I’d hesitate to go that far (I don’t think Gregor Mackintosh’s guitar work sounds that much like them) but damn me if Nick Holmes doesn’t sound like he’s channelling 80s-vintage James Hetfield voice over much of the record. Never really noticed that before, though now I think of it that sort of tone definitely also appears on much later recordings too…

Yes? Maybe not…

Chris Squire woke up one morning in the 80s, took one look at how his bandmates in Yes were adapting to that decade, and chose violence. I mean, there comes a point where “but it was 1984” ceases to be an adequate excuse. At least in the second photo he’s only playing a single-necked bass, not that triple-necked monster I’ve seen in other photos of him…

Also, FUCKING HELL Jon Anderson is short. Three inches shorter than me if Google is accurate…