Miles Davis, “Rated X/Billy Preston,” from “Panthalassa: The Music Of Miles Davis 1969-1974,” 1998.
September 6, 1972: “Rated X” session at Columbia Studios, NYC: Miles Davis organ, Cedric Lawson synth, Reggie Lucas guitar, Khalil Balakrishna electric sitar, Michael Henderson electric bass, Al Foster drums, Mtume conga, percussion, Badal Roy tabla.
December, 1972: “Billy Preston” session at Columbia Studios, NYC: same personnel
Paul Tingen interview with Bill Laswell from “SOS,” 1998:
Overall, the sound of “Panthalassa” is so fresh and contemporary that one wonders whether Miles’s ’70s music was really this prescient, or whether Laswell has re-interpreted it with the sonic and aesthetic perspective of someone living in the late ’90s. So was Laswell trying to bring out the music the way he thought Miles might have wanted it, or did he do a ’90s re-interpretation? Via transatlantic telephone Laswell comments: “It was both those things, and more. The first thing to realise about his records from those years is that they are interpretations of original performances. What’s on those records does not necessarily correspond to the way things were played. The records were the result of a day’s work in the studio, of lots of tape editing and manipulation. They weren’t representing a particular performance. From 1969 onwards there was a tremendous amount of tape recording going on. The tapes were rolling, hours and hours of them were being filled, and then producer Teo Macero determined what ended up on the record and how it would sound. Macero is from a classical and jazz background, and I can’t imagine someone with a background like that having a clue what to do with the kind of stuff Miles was producing. To me, the music Miles was making at the time had nothing to do with jazz; it will therefore always be controversial from the perspective of jazz people. So one of my prime objectives was to remix and reconstruct Miles’s music from a non-jazz perspective.”
“When I was putting ‘Panthalassa’ together, I was trying to imagine how people with a jazz and classical music background would have tried to make sense of this music. And I don’t think they got it. It was too new for them. These were people who had been involved in making classic jazz albums like ‘Kind Of Blue,’ and all of a sudden the music got a lot denser and darker and there were new and weird instruments to deal with. How was all that supposed to sound? There was simply no reference point. Also, I talked a lot with Miles during the ’80s, and I was aware that he didn’t have a lot of control over the records as they came out. Teo and Columbia determined the results, and in some cases I don’t even think that Miles had access to titles, artwork and so on. Teo worked as a producer for Columbia, and his work was to get the job done, get it edited and get it out quickly, because in those days records were coming out very frequently. People were, to a large extent, controlling music for which they didn’t have a fitting vision. Miles’s music was dealing with repetitive rhythms and repetitive bass lines, the same things that you would hear being developed at the time in rock and funk and R&B and reggae, and the same thing that you hear today in drum and bass and techno. You have to approach that kind of music with more of a rock sensibility. You want to make the bass big and heavy, you want the drums to be powerful and hard-hitting, and in a piece with very dense rhythmic patterns you want clarity, so that you can hear what’s being played.”
“Agharta” and “Pangaea” are both live double albums, and both were recorded on February 1st 1975 in Japan. “Agharta” is a future Utopian spiritual centre of power, situated somewhere underneath the earth, “Pangaea” is the primordial continent, and “Panthalassa” the one primordial ocean. Laswell explains that, despite the reference to the names of these two live albums, he didn’t use any material from them, because “live albums are a whole different universe: their timeline is largely linear, and I don’t think it would make sense to alter it. There is very little editing in those works: they are what they are, whereas all the studio stuff was extensively manipulated and so does lend itself to a process of re-manipulation. Macero’s editing and cut and paste methods were in some respects quite innovative and pioneering, and the remix culture caught up with them some 20 years later. But Macero’s approach was also often more of a kind of shuffling process, trying to construct something that could be put out as a record. It wasn’t really comparable to the way people now use recording studios and technology creatively to make new music. The studio wasn’t used as an instrument. It was more a matter of intuitively trying to determine a result, fairly quickly, and in some cases fairly sloppily. It could have been done better.”
Some 30 years later Laswell also caught up with Macero, in more than one sense. He explains that the whole point of his “reconstruction & mix translation” process was to apply a similar process to the original master tapes as did Macero — but from a different perspective. And this influenced both Laswell’s working methods and his choice of pieces: “‘In A Silent Way’ was the classic transition period for Miles, and I knew that it had been chopped and changed, so I was very curious as to what had really been going on. I was also interested in the slow, melodic, ambient potential of the piece. ‘On The Corner’ was always the beginning of mutant hip-hop for me. It was a favourite record; I could hear that there had been a lot of editing going on here as well, and I wanted to find out what really happened. The same with ‘Get Up With It,’ which contained some very radical pieces for the time, such as ‘Rated X’. In all these cases I was curious about what I could bring to the music though a continuation of exactly the same process as Teo had applied, and, believe it or not, I used a very similar technique. I didn’t want to dump all the information in a computer and then manipulate it in there, so I decided to do it in exactly the same way, transferring material from one tape format to another and then editing everything on analogue half-inch tape, before finally transferring it to a DAT master.
“I wanted to edit on half-inch tape, using razor blades, because I wanted to encounter the same kind of problems, I wanted to arrive in the same areas where one thing automatically leads to another. When you put musical material in Pro Tools or something like that, you’re immediately embracing endless options and possibilities. Things can go anywhere. I felt that there was an essence to the music, even in the versions that Teo did; it holds together in a particular form that you don’t want to pull apart too much. You don’t want to do a complete recondition, but you want to improve the ideas, clean things up and keep the same flow going. But to keep that flow going you have to speak a similar technical language. Just to have a million options will not necessarily produce great results, nor will it produce anything related to what Miles Davis was about during that period. By limiting my options and working with a similar method as when the music was made, I was holding and continuing a flow that was already naturally established in the music. The other aspect of this was that I did not add anything to the material that was on the multitracks. I processed and re-positioned sounds, and used parts from out-takes that have never been heard before on previous releases, but no sounds or instruments were added by me. Everything you hear on ‘Panthalassa’ comes from the information that is on the multitracks.”
“The ‘In A Silent Way ‘sessions were 8-track and came on two reels of 24-track tape. They were recorded with the tapes rolling at a lower speed, which gives you about 30 minutes per reel, and a great deal that was played, especially the central theme of the piece, is not on the original record. Nor is it on the version I did, because it never quite came together in the performance. But surrounding that are sections and phrases that do work, and from which the record is built. On the original album a piece of tape is repeated twice, purely to get enough length to justify an album and have a product. I repeated that section too, but treated the repeat a little differently, by featuring certain instruments that were not audible on the original. The thing to realise is that all those original sessions were recorded really well. They were miked up by professional engineers, everything was done with state-of-the-art equipment for the time, so there is a clear signal on tape. It was easy for me to bring the drums and bass up-front and give them a more dynamic, bigger sound that suits repetitive parts. The bass on ‘In A Silent Way’ was an upright, and I tried to make it sound more like an electric bass by using effects such as the dbx 120x Subharmonic Synthesizer to enhance or synthesize the bottom end. This is an incredibly cheap box that brings out low end in a kind of synth way that I really like. I also took some bass drone and bowed bass, and looped and processed this and used it in different places to get an ambient or atmospheric texture.
“The drums and bass are pretty static but there is some very fractured playing in the keyboards, and the original ‘In A Silent Way’ contained some pretty brutal edits. So I tried to build up more of a composed piece with a flow, using that bowed bass as an opener. There were also some loud sounds which we ducked, such as a bottle falling on the piano and some talking that no-one had bothered to edit out 30 years ago. The album ‘On The Corner’ was basically two basslines with short one- or two-minute pieces being pulled in and out in a very chopped-up way. I’ve got six reels of that session, and I think a really coherent album could be made, with a flow and a sequence that would bring people into the music. The tracks ‘What If’ and ‘Agharta Prelude Dub’ were out-takes from sessions recorded around the time of ‘On The Corner,’ with John McLaughlin playing some pretty primitive and aggressive guitar on ‘What If’. One of my main jobs in remixing and reconstructing the ‘On The Corner’ sessions was to bring clarity into the rhythm tracks.
“The same went for the rhythm track on ‘Rated X’. It’s very, very dense, and on vinyl it always sounded unbelievably bad and muddy, with an organ sound taken from some other session pushing everything else into the background. But the rhythm tracks were recorded very well — it’s just how they were EQ’d and balanced at the time. They clearly didn’t have a clue how to deal with these dense rhythms, but for today’s ears their density and detail makes them sound very modern. I also mixed the organ very low, to make space for the details in the rhythm track. Finally, the version of ‘He Loved Him Madly’ on the multitracks was even longer than 30 minutes. That track could be a whole CD by itself, but I felt I had to shorten it for this project. I had to think about the overall experience and continuity of hearing all four sections from beginning to end, starting with an ambient idea at the beginning and ending with an ambient idea, while putting more rhythmic information in the middle. The edits I did on ‘He Loved Him Madly’ were relatively straightforward. Of all the tracks it was least tampered with. We just EQ’d the sounds, brought out the drums and bass more, and used treated organ and sitar parts to create a certain ambience.”
(Source: sashafrerejones)
‘Concerto in A Minor for Four Keyboards and Strings BWV 1065 - Movement 1’ by Lee Ritenour & Dave Grusin [Two Worlds, 2000]
Einstürzende Neubauten - Sabrina
Memories of internally-hideous girls obsessing in the high school bathroom mirrors…
moderne/vers l’est
Adele - Someone Like You
For you, kid …
(Source: jottingthoughtsdown, via intellectualxbeauty)
Wake Up Alone - Amy Winehouse
Run around just so I don’t have to think about thinking
always loved this song. ♥♥♥
(via intellectualxbeauty)
Karen Elson / The Ghost Who Walks
telephone moi