Why make an album out of ten versions of 2 songs?
I saw someone posting about how years of song skipping through the spotify swamp had exacerbated her already intense general-anxiety-induced need for constant stimulation, and that she felt she had let her ears and attention atrophy to a point where she knew that she wanted and needed to be intentional about relearning how to listen deeper. Her plan was partly to listen to albums as albums rather than single songs, and to let them play through without skipping. I love this.
Reading her experience, it occurred to me that listening to this set of songs straight through in one sitting could serve as sort of a fun spotify detox/brain rehab session. I realized it could work nicely as subtle ear training/music appreciation pleasure bath.
Spending a lot of time with songs is how I always listened to music for some reason, partly because I’m from cd era, but even when napster happened (“free music” year zero, 1998?), I was obsessive about collecting every single live or otherwise bootleg thing, but only from a few bands, and I listened to all of it endlessly. There was a site called indiepoplive that had bootlegs of Modest Mouse and Built To Spill and I’d get hours of pleasure out of watching the download bars grow bit by bit.
The urge to have everything was in full effect, it just didn’t hit in the same unfocused way that it seems like Spotify life has encouraged. My consumer’s ache was the same as it is for a person lost in spotify, but it was focused tight enough that I could satisfy my consumption urge but still maintain obsessive attention to the things I was consuming.
I like living with songs and albums this way. Shit is deep. 20 year 25 year relationships are important. Perhaps oddly, I haven’t used headphones outside since I was like 15. I carry the songs around with me in my memory, singing silently to myself. (I think I got into this habit when I got sent off to TN as a teen and had no music choice and not much music at all for a whole year and would recite modest mouse songs to myself under my breath while doing various activities. The only music other than that was when we’d take a van to an AA meeting offsite once a month, and I’d get to hear some new Nickelback and and Linkin Park and even that last Nirvana song they released in 2001 that sounds kinda like that one Rihanna(?) song that’s good. Oh and that last good No Doubt song about “feelin hella good” was a jam. And that was it for music. It was enough to make a man appreciate some Nickelback).
On top of the headphonelessness, I also refused to get a smartphone til like 2022 and never did spotify, so that was pretty different from a lot of other people’s experience as well.
All of which makes me wonder about how other people relate to music they love, and whether it’s different for people who “practice” music in comparison to those who “just” listen. Since I spent my life getting into learning how to make music, and then record etc, I had all the reason to obsess and listen deep and try to pick out every element of a recording and understand how music works, but i’m not sure whether that’s universal or more of a “learning music” phenomenon.
When I was 16 and first learning bass, my teacher showed me how to pick out the bass, note-by-note, by listening close and pausing and rewinding the cd really fast over and over. At the beginning, he’d teach me the bass line first, and then I’d play along, and then eventually I learned how to learn by ear on my own. First it was picking out the bass in Beatles songs and then jazz, and then picking out the rest of the instruments, and then learning how to tell the players apart by their tone and technique, and eventually having fun picking out my various friends’ individual styles from them playing on years and years of nyxy nyx recordings.
I remember the fun and focus of learning to dig through the sounds and listen to all the various layers of a recording that were revealed as I isolated my attention on each different element, and I wonder whether people who love music but don’t play it find their way into close listening that way. I think everyone can benefit from having a deep, long relationship with a song.
Thinking about an entire generation of newly free, post-spotify, atrophied-but-hungry-for-exercise refugee ears, emerging from a decade of soothing and smoothing, wondering “what next?”, it makes me start to appreciate the concept of “music appreciation”, which had always seemed like vegetables to me. But our purpose here in Artworld is to nourish each other and ourselves, so the more meaning we can squeeze into and out of our art, the better. The trick is to make it tasty. So here I will explain to you the pleasurable usefulness of a 10 song album with 6 versions of one song and 4 of another.
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the fighters: a trip through 4 versions:
Spending time with 4 versions of my recording of “the fighters”, you can hear the various major differences that result as I distort or remove elements of the original mix.
Listening to 4 mixes of one song might sound tedious, but getting to hear the layers of a recording be peeled away or distorted or rearranged around the same skeleton of a live take and improvisations, really is pretty fascinating.
We can consider “the fighters (dust cover)’ to be patient zero. I love these guitar leads. Just put distortion and chorus on anything and it will sound beautiful and iconic. The sustain makes it very easy and fun to play with. I let the 2 leads dominate on this version.
From there we go to the “(stripped version)”, I muted the loud leads, so you can hear the dreamy drums a lot better; and with some of the more distorted organs muted, you can hear the bass moving more clearly. I like how it feels with the leads stripped. It lets the mix swell and bounce in a much dreamier way than the original version. I can hear more depth. Like it actually feels like I’m seeing the layers of distorted sound down in the murk, blurred shadows on the bottom of the lake, cast by the school of cymbals swimming by. Feels very “deep dark serious mysterious”.
Also I can feel the way the rhythm hesitates and leans backward a bit into the beat, the tension/release feeling of which I like. It adds to the wobbly “walking underwater” feeling.
Then we have the “(nude version)” which is just the live acoustic/voice take, plus 2 overdub acoustics and 3 overdub voices. I like the chorusy effect that the out-of-phase acoustics produce, and also how loud you can hear the birds in the tree outside the open window. I can feel the space, the lack of confinement. When I put this one through the compressor to master it, those birds really jumped to the front, I love it.
(I’m realizing a lot of what I’m talking about is the perceived 3d space presented by any recording. And that’s part of what we play with when making obsessable sound worlds. It really is a physical place it puts you into if you listen close enough.)
Finally, the “(burnt version)”. I love heavy. I turned the distortion way too hot on one of the acoustic overdubs, put one of the leads back in with the bends and bumped up the distorted drums as well. Can you hear the missing lead? Ok class, we’re done sorting through the murk. What do you hear?
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Table of Contents/explanation:
Listening straight through feels pretty fun, and I’ve heard these tracks A LOT. It’s “The Fighters” in 2 senses, as in, like, the versions are all duking it out and also, these “look at my knife” remixes were the submissions to the “knives of the people” remix “contest” I did during turkey season. And also, we are The Fighters, surviving pigworld.
The album starts with the original version of my “the fighters”. Then there are the 2 alternate versions Ben did in 2010 for the Marble Memo extras, there’s the folky strum version that I copied from, and then the other one is like this sick dark jungle jam w a bell. Feels kinda Beck somehow. The original album version on Marble Memo is just him walking around outside, singing the words into a tape recorder, it’s kinda a deep flex he went with that utterly stripped version for dust’s bigtime corpo album, when you consider how good both these versions are. I love it.
Then I threw Benji and Curt’s Knifes in the middle there to palette cleanse, before hitting you with 3 back to back versions I made by muting or blowing up the original elements of “the fighters” mix, nu blus style.
Then it’s two more reimaginings of “look at my knife”, dust alumnus Michael S w/ the far-out melancholy technosexual disintegration and Darren in Wales taking us out on psychedelic waves of wah and endlessly echoing mel and me.
In conclusion:
It’s an interesting artifact. I am in my “versions” era, enjoying toying with scraps like a cat in a fabric factory. And the “knife” remixes everyone did are incredible. Trust me, it doesn’t feel like work. Just let the different versions wash over you and you’ll notice more and more tasty morsels. Have fun.
This album will be included on the upcoming cd:
PIGWORLD 3: Pigworld vs. The Fighters.
links:
darren in wales : https://tomviolence4.bandcamp.com/music
marble memo extras : https://musicalfamilytree.com/bands/dust_from_1000_years#album_2340
benji : https://idiotmambo.bandcamp.com/album/last-summer
cuht: https://fauxfetus.net
dust from 1000 yrs : https://shyb.bandcamp.com/album/moon
ben photos : https://benrector.bigcartel.com/
BENefit link to get The Fighters/Pigworld 3 CD: https://fathistorymonth.bandcamp.com/album/the-fighters
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