Strawberry Hotel - Dirty reviews

[ultradave]

Originally Posted by TheBang

Shin-kan-sen (pronounce kan as Khan)

Thank you for the phonetics. I was totally mispronouncing it! . After some more time I do have to say it's growing on me because of its solid tracks. Will this be a go to album for me? No, but the standouts will be on regular rotation for sure. In whole it does make sense for me in a way that none of their other albums have, especially mid-album from Lewis to Harlem with Hilo right there in-between. As far as the vocals on some of the tracks - I feel it's totally intentional because Karl can still hold a solid note. King of Harlem has totally grown on me - the lyrics are catchy and at first I was like WTF... but that bouncy beat - gotta love it! Ottavia is so different I give it to Esme for the emotion in that track. That shriek in Lewis feels more like agony and pain than an O, but that's just me, it's still unsettling. It will likely fall to the wayside. I find it interesting that they decided to close the album with an acoustic number, but it really closes out this album.

[aphasein]

And as a follow-up here's my final album cover that I'll be using for my gently remade SH. I use the artist's own work of the period, sometimes swapping out completed covers from a related single release (actually pretty rare compared to swapping audio, and haven't done this for UW before apart from letting the Drift single covers be their album collection covers).

For this one, it's a still from their Denver Luna video that had the same colors as the actual album cover and with the magenta circles pattern kind of suggesting an abstract strawberry. Couldn't get the source resolution above 1000px due to this, but think it's good enough for digital use. The title stack is based on the back of their new album shirts and placed similar to the single covers. Your mileage will vary...

[dubman]

Originally Posted by aphasein

IDK, I think the genie has been out of the bottle for a while now on remaking music - with it mainly being a digital form now for most of the audience, the democratization and easy availability of digital editing tools, and internet culture being what it is, it's definitely going to happen and often more extremely. The good news is it's generally done by passionate fans who are engaged and excited by the work (that's who is going to put in the effort and want to share it), but I also get the questionable nature and ambiguity of it.

I also see it as an extension of mixtape/playlists/DJ-culture (which Underworld is a huge part of), with DJ's making their own edits/selections/remixes. Autechre famously started out in the 80's by making pause-button edits at home to "tighten-up" (as they said) their favorite tracks to play to friends, which led to deeper remixing, then inserting their own compositions in their mixtapes and later DJ sets. The electro culture lent itself to this, but it also just happened anyway by people finding their own means and stepping up. Autechre are about to drop a new collection of live sets in place of an album (their words) and some fans will soon be chopping them up and enjoying that as well.

I know for myself it's something I really enjoy both the process of and end results of, and is something I probably can't turn off easily. I don't really consider myself a musician, but as a music producer I've done a ton of editing of my friends' work and collaborate mainly by suggesting or physically making edits (and I have written a few albums worth of tracks solo, but they've still mainly felt like editing as well). I'm a creative director in my day job, so spend the day recommending, deciding or physically making edits to other designer's work. And as an avid collector, I really love curation, which sometimes extends beyond the initial object into related items, and making decisions about fit and relevancy.

I think I have probably remade about 1/4 of my favorite albums, generally just dropping tracks, re-sequencing for better flow, and/or occasionally pulling in b-sides from same sessions to replace tracks when seems to fit better. Already re-sequenced the new Pixies album which also dropped yesterday to give it more energy upfront (and does our loose cultural/narrative preference for energy to kick things off and quiet/beautiful/slower endings stem actually from the limitations of vinyl, which preferred denser more bombastic songs physically be placed first and quiet songs last on the more limited inner bands, or is it more inherently intrinsic?) Is the album version definitive or the single edit that more people will probably hear and know? Or the live version that gets refined and settles more into itself sometimes from the comparatively early on album one?

I don't participate in any other online communities, so please forgive the occasional diatribes, but obviously something important to me that I care and think a lot about. I have totally redone Drift as I shared here, but other than that, for the albums, I've only adjusted Barking by replacing Diamond Jigsaw with Downpipe and dropping Louisiana (which really makes the whole thing quite a stomper). I've been there for every new release since Second Toughest and love the surprises (and still love most of SH), but I'd be lying if I didn't take stock of it feeling and fitting oddly different this time. IDK, still very exciting overall.

I feel like we're talking about different things if we're comparing this to DJ edits and remixes. those embrace the original and rearrange the furniture so that it'll fit a set, or reveal its compatibility to other genres.

I'm also not saying that rearranging or cherry-picking tracks is off-base. I have playlist folders for bands like Underworld that constantly de&re-contextualize and build a vision of an era as I understand & love it. I hate certain tracks like Boy, Boy, Boy, but I never thought to fuck with it to make it fit. I just ignore it. They can't all be winners.

What's going on here is taking ones antipathy to a track and making it more digestible. It doesn't even try to get inside of it, it doesn't respect it with the time it deserves, it just rejects the difficulty and starts aligning it with what we're comfortable with. it's depressing, a waste of dialogue, and frankly embarrassing that we get more inflexible with age than the band themselves.