Ugo
Group: Members
Posts: 5495
Joined: April 2000 |
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Posted: Aug. 27 2011, 06:48 |
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@ nightspore: there's no doubt that Mike's overall attitute is that of a very spiritual person - I can easily see that. But then he did sign a deal with Universal/Mercury. A deal always involves money. Maybe I was wrong in suggesting that he is making lots of money from the reissues, maybe he actually doesn't care anything about money. But, considering everything that happened with the first pressing of the Incantations remaster, with its very obvious glitch, I tend not to think that there was a very high amount of care from Mike himself - i.e. he most probably didn't give the same amount of care to the remaster as he gave to the original release. Where the sleeve says "supervised by Mike Oldfield", my view of this is that someone (Adam Barker and Daryl Easlea?) made the remaster, then they sent the tapes to Mike; Mike, on his side, knowing perfecty about the disastrous state that the original tapes are in, may have listened to the tapes just once and thought "This is the very best they could do to salvage the bulk of the music, I shall give my approval." Maybe he did not even listen to Incantations all the way through. Maybe he did not even listen to the obvious glitch, because, if he did, he'd have probably been very angry towards Universal and/or the people who did the remaster for butchering up his music and he would have acted immediately to fix the problem. Instead, the problem stayed as it was, and we listeners had to take the trouble of writing to Universal, highlighting the glitch and asking for a replacement. And when the replacement has come, we've all seen that the problem hasn't been fully fixed because, of course, Mike is not involved any longer in the remaster and its fixing. So, in conclusion, if it's not a matter of money, I don't think I can honestly say that there was as much care involved with Incantations, on Mike's side, as there undoubtly was with TB and HR. Ms. Jenkins got shirty (to use a mild word) with Universal because they did nothing but repackage her old stuff without her involvement; Mike didn't, because he is somehow directly involved in the repackaging of his old stuff (he did sign a deal with Universal/Mercury which explicitly involved reissuing his back catalogue), but also because his interest in his old stuff has progressively diminished. This, of course, is just my opinion.
By the way, my vinyl copy is 204 of 500. The signature says M-k- o---ield, noticeably fuller than usual. 
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Ugo C. - a devoted Amarokian
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Seems that the analogue master tape was seriously damaged at that edit point in part 4 - the problem is that it's not possible to "repair" analogue tapes when the information on the tape is lost. There may be two possible reasons that the previous CDs didn't have that "error" on them: 1. A copy of the original master tape was used for those releases (actually many CDs from the 1980s were not mastered from the 1st generation tapes but simply transferred from 2nd or 3rd generation copies that were originally used for cutting the vinyl records) or 2. The edit point on the original tape was still ok when it was digitised 25 years ago but has deteriorated since then. Maybe now Universal have put a piece from a copy of the master tape into the gap - that may be the reason for the increased tape hiss...
). But then the new 2011 remaster is presented on the CD box and on the CD label as being 'supervised by Mike Oldfield' - this, IMHO, is where the real glitch is. If I were Mike and heard the first, obvious omission, I would not have given my permission for the remaster to be released with such a mistake, and I'd have done everything I could (yes, even re-record that particular bit - after all it's one second!!