Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: Mar. 09 2003, 11:42 |
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Quote | i take it granted that the question considering the degree of authenticity you hold in your music has troubled you |
Hmm...interesting thought (and as I consider it, I begin straying off topic - it might be better to move over to the discussion forum in the fan music section if we're going to take this further). I can't say I ever worried myself over such things as authenticity, just over whether I like what I've created or not. If I do like it, then I'll be enjoying myself too much to be concerned with how authentic it might seem to others, and if I don't like it, it'll have been consigned to the scrapheap, or altered, long before any more complex thoughts over it have come to mind.
On artists being those who create art...
Quote | this is a tautolgical sentance. it doesn't mean nothing, and doesn't say anything about the essence of art. if you say you can't define art you can just as easily say that there isn't such thing. |
The sentence means what it says (and was, incidentally, there to add logical conclusion to the point I was making...not really what I'd call tautological) - that the person creating the art is the artist. It wasn't meant to say anything about the essence of art...I'm saying that if art is hard to define, then the role of the artist becomes equally hard to define as a consequence.
On Van Gough...
Quote | did he paint the same picture? |
Yes, he did - take a look at these:
http://www.vangoghgallery.com/painting/p_0457.htm http://www.vangoghgallery.com/painting/p_0454.htm http://www.vangoghgallery.com/painting/p_0458.htm
Three separate paintings, and they're in my view far more similar to each other than the three Tubular Bells albums - I'd go as far to say as they're as close to each other as the re-recorded Tubular Bells is to the original. Van Gough created even more paintings on a very similar theme, and like with Mike and Tubular Bells, the image of sunflowers in a vase is the one which first comes to mind for a lot of people when Van Gough is mentioned.
Quote | ever heard of drop-ins? if it bothered him so much, why didn't he fix the problem when he first lay hands on it in 1975's BOXED? he made a quadro version, went as long as adding the original sailors hornpipe but forgot to erase the out of tune guitars and replace them with good ones? |
Making successful drop-ins relies on a number of factors, the first of which is having everything set up in exactly the same way as when the original recording was made, if the sound's going to match at all (though this of course depends whether the aim is to just replace a few notes in a passage, or replace the part entirely - for the latter, exact matching is less critical). Three years and a change of mixing desk at The Manor could have been enough to make that more difficult. The other big factor is having all the parts on their own discrete tracks, otherwise replacing one part is going to write over others as well. This would be the case with Tubular Bells, as in some sections, tracks have been bounced down on top of each other in order to overcome the 16 track limit, making replacing some individual parts a rather tricky business. A couple parts did get replaced, though - namely the reed and pipe organ in the Viv Stanshall section (which had somehow disappeared), and the Tubular Bells (replaced because they were distorted on the original...which I don't think was anywhere near as bad as the fact that the new bells are out of tune...). It would of course have been possible to have gone on and replaced other bits, even replacing sections where heavy bouncing down had gone on...and after a while in those situations, a sensible musician ought to look at it and realise that it might actually be easier to start again from scratch. I think that re-recording Tubular Bells in 1976 would have been an even worse career move than doing it in 2003... The Quadrophonic version wasn't Mike's doing, though - it was mostly Phil Newell's work, with Mike apparently being quite uninterested in it (it seems he was more concerned with perfecting Hergest Ridge, removing the parts which jarred with him to create the definitive version which quickly replaced the original version on shop shelves the world over).
Quote | i write "hate" or "love", does that make you feel anything? does that answer answer your question? |
To take the joke more seriously... The words on their own carry only a hint of their full meaning - good communication would place them in a sentence, usually together with a subject and an object. Say 'hate' and people might make a few associations in their mind as to what hate means to them, but it's referring to nobody, and so loses any kind of real personal element. Say 'I hate you' and you've communicated how you feel towards someone, and it's likely to have made them feel something too (at a guess, not very happy ). But no, it's not 'art', though it could be said that communication is an art, with art being a skill (with the word art coming from the latin 'ars', meaning skill)...unless, of course, somebody finds this expression of dislike to be of some kind of value...
What I'd say about the re-recording of Tubular Bells, is that if it's being done as a kind of business move, then it's not a terribly good one - Mike gets enough stick for releasing bells albums every few years as it is. I think he'd do far better if he celebrated the 30th anniversary by an album as 'Tubular Bells parts 3 and 4', something intended to be reminiscent of the original, but continuing where the other left off, rather than following the formula of Tubular Bells 1, 2 and 3. That's not his chosen path though, and so we just have to sit back and either ignore what he's doing, or make the most of it. I do still find worth in his music, even if it's not on such an epic scale as the likes of Amarok (an album which I suspect is a once in a lifetime kind of thing - the amount of creative energy involved there is huge). If Mike had stopped recording albums when he felt he didn't have anything left in him, he'd never have recorded Hergest Ridge...and Ommadawn might not have followed either, and so on (speculation, of course - no doubt the ideas would have surfaced when he really felt ready to record them, though they may have taken a less favourable form).
By the way, liron, seeing as you appear to be posting here quite a bit, you might like to take advantage of the benefits you'd get by registering...
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