My Musical Nightmare

[Adam Blake]

and the second side featuring the greatest hits of Quintessence (who I seem to remember once sung without the slightest trace of irony: "Things look great in Notting Hill Gate, we all sit around and meditate"!).

I loved that song, but thought the lyrics went "lie around and fornicate." That's why I went to Notting Hill Gate in 1971, anyway. I suppose I missed the good old days of innocent non-ironic meditation. I still have the Quintessence album In Blissful Company with that song on. I bought it at the Ipswich Music Centre before going up to Notting Hill Gate and falling into a life of depravity and more fun than meditating. Perhaps I shouldn't admit to owning that album in this forum for fear of ridicule, or someone asking me privately to please make a copy for them — but, you know, I haven't listened to it for at least two years! Yeah, I'll digitize it but whoever wants it will owe me — and I'll own them.

I've got "In Blissful Company" too, I bought it for 50p in 1973 and it's been my faithful friend ever since. With the booklet full of photos and pictures of Shiva and everything. Were they the only hippie/Hindu band? They certainly made Notting Hill Gate sound like the place to be but by the time I got here (1981) most of that kind of activity had given way to getting stoned and lounging about in squats pretending to be radical. Quintessence may have had risible lyrics but they could definitely play better music than Hawkwind and one suspects that they would have shared their brown rice and lentil curry more readily. There's some lovely flute playing on that record by Raj Ram (who's actually an East End Jew named Ron...)

[Gordon Neill]

Jammin’! , by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair
A Tribute to Val Doonican , by Bono, Elton John, Eric Clapton, etc…..
Anthology , by Yoko Oh No
Goth Anthems , by Youssou N’Dour
For Folks Sake - Box Set Anthology of Every English Folk Song Ever Recorded By Anyone
Bueno Vista Supper Party , by Nigella Lawson and the Master Musicians of Jajouka
I'm Going To Heaven And You're Not, by Cliff Richard
Punk Party - the Songs of the Sex Pistols , by Ladysmith Black Mambazo
Now That’s What I Call Dads Singing At A Christmas Party , by Various Dads (with sleeve notes by Rob Hall)

[joel]

For Folks Sake - Box Set Anthology of Every English Folk Song Ever Recorded By Anyone

Do you mean this: The Voice of the People

[Gordon Neill]

Joel said:

Gordon Neill wrote:

For Folks Sake - Box Set Anthology of Every English Folk Song Ever Recorded By Anyone

Do you mean this: The Voice of the People

Oh no! Quite apart from the risk of Sony executives reading these lists and thinking 'hmmm, not a bad idea that...', I was aware that some of these suggestions might already exist. In fairness, it's only (!) 20 volumes of English folk music, with a mere 500 songs. Just a sampler series, really. But the individual CD titles are the stuff of my nightmares:

IT FELL ON A DAY, A BONNY SUMMER DAY
FIRST I'M GOING TO SING YOU A DITTY
COME All MY LADS THAT FOLLOW THE PLOUGH
RIG-A-JIG-JIG
TO CATCH A FINE BUCK WAS MY DELIGHT
THEY ORDERED THEIR PINTS OF BEER & BOTTLES OF SHERRY

[howard male]

Much as I'm enjoying reading about imagined compilation albums (a friend and I used to waste many a stoned hour thinking up the most unlikely artists to cover certain songs) I'd like for a moment to get back to the original post in this topic (and my tradition role here as Devil's advocate.)

I think an Ethiopiques Remixed album could be quite good fun. But having said that I don't imagine many of those Ethiopiques recordings exist as multitracks so I wouldn't get too worried, Jonathan - though I could be wrong!

But as for fearing the very idea of dabbling with the original transcendental recordings, I have no problem with that - it's not like when a painting is restored and the original is lost - the master tapes remain untrammelled. And a good remix gives you an insight into the original record by stripping it down, poking around in its engine room, and then getting it up and running again. But, this time, letting you see (or rather hear) what makes it tick, thereby shedding new light on the original.

Obviously, having said all that, a bad or even mediocre remix is something which has no right to exist. Remixers who just do a quick cowboy job - by welding on a dodgy four-four bass drum and pushing it up high in the mix - are despicable criminals who endanger the very ears and minds of the young who, tragically, don't know any better than to listen to such shoddy work.

But if you still have your doubts about the very concept of the remix, my world music buddies, it's worth remembering that dub reggae tracks were effectively the first remixes, and I know most of you have no problems with that form.

By the way, if any of you are wondering what to get me for Christmas, a bottle of Devils Advocaat would be greatly appreciated (if such a drink doesn't exist, surely it should.)

[Dominic]

By the way, if any of you are wondering what to get me for Christmas, a bottle of Devils Advocaat would be greatly appreciated (if such a drink doesn't exist, surely it should.)

(Re-)Mix your own!
http://www.cocktail.uk.com/db/viewCocktail.asp?ID=467

[Dayna]

Salif Keita has a very good remix.

Calculcer remix.

[Ian M]

Howard, I don't want to encourage anybody, but you don't necessarily need the multitrack for a remix! Of course there are some which are successful re-imaginings of the original but they are very few and far between. I think their dodgy reputation is down to the marketing dept who think remixing means re-engineering money out of your pocket for another version of the same thing. Or, as the apocryphal baffled customer said to the record store assistant, when asked which mix he wanted out of a plethora of versions, replied, "er, just give me the one where they got it right".

[howard male]

Ian M wrote -

Howard, I don't want to encourage anybody, but you don't necessarily need the multitrack for a remix!

True enough, but the kind of remix where stuff is just added are usually disasterous - less is more, as they say.

Ian M wrote -

Or, as the apocryphal baffled customer said to the record store assistant, when asked which mix he wanted out of a plethora of versions, replied, "er, just give me the one where they got it right".

That is a perfectly appropriate response and one the idealist in me relates to. There really should be a perfect version, a definitive version, of a song.

But in a sense the remixes are the sketches for the finished masterpiece - it's just that unlike when an artist makes sketches for a painting, remixes generally occur after rather than before the finished product has been created. But they can - in good hands - be as interesting as Turner's rough oil sketches are in relation to his more refined finished works.

[Ian A.]

I think their dodgy reputation is down to the marketing dept who think remixing means re-engineering money out of your pocket for another version of the same thing. Or, as the apocryphal baffled customer said to the record store assistant, when asked which mix he wanted out of a plethora of versions, replied, "er, just give me the one where they got it right".

There's a big difference between remixing to simply get something better out of the original multi-track than the studio facility allowed at the time of the original recording (as I would like to think we did with the original international release of Baaba Maal & Mansour Seck's Djam Leelii), and adding lots of DJ repetitive beats bollox in order to fit some imaginary notion of yoof kulcha (as Salif K suffered), often by remixers with backward facing baseball caps who are old enough to be the dads of said yoof. General rule - anything remixed by somebody who feels it necessary to have a "cool" DJ nom-de-studio is best avoided (only recent exception I can think of being Gaudi with his dub Nusrat CD, but that's more using samples in a new creation than remixing)

Having said that, I made the mistake of once buying one of those godawful Verve jazz remix compilations and it ended up with me buying a boxed set of original Anita O'Day recordings, simply because her voice transcended the indignities inflicted on it by the remixers to the extent it reminded me how good she was. So possibly some remix clouds have silver linings . . .

[Ian M]

Ian A: that sounds more like remastering, which has a different aim to remixing, has it not?

Howard: sounds like the demo versions you are talking about. But I am not disagreeing that there can't be creative remixes, just that there are so few worthwhile around. But you lost me with this curious oil sketches thing, let's name names: do you have some examples in mind?

[Ian A.]

Ian A: that sounds more like remastering, which has a different aim to remixing, has it not?

Well, I'm no expert but I thought remastering was all about getting the best possible sound out of the original finished mix, whereas the sort of basic integrity remixing I was talking about takes it back to an earlier stage in the process involving decisions on levels, individual EQs, individual track effects, stereo placement etc. (We're not talking about wholesale destruction of/ additions to the original recording in this case, which is another kind of remixing entirely - but then these terms change and mutate over the years as have done things like "R&B", "dance" and "folk" which all mean something entirely different now to what they did when I first encountered them!)

[howard male]

Ian M wrote -

do you have some examples in mind?

Too many to mention - Constable, Degas, Klimt, Picasso - almost any figuritive artist you can name reveals more about themselves in their sketches, oil or otherwise. But, yes, the demo tape would perhaps have been a better analogy. Though having said that, it's still that thing of stripping away which can offer new insights into the music - a sketch is like that; the bare bones of the idea. Didn't Lee Scratch Perry once call dub 'XRay music'?

[Dayna]

I can see how the songs on Manu Chaos CD are really like sketches. He did different versions of the same songs.

[Ian M]

Er, I meant musical examples, Howard, outside of dub, that you might consider good remixes.