SOUNDTRACK: SIGUR RÓS-Von brigði [Recycle Bin] (1998).
After releasing their first album, Sigur Rós was approached by Icelandic musicians to remix the album. And thus came Recycle Bin. I realized too late that I really just don’t like remix albums all that much–they’re mostly just faster drums plopped on top of existing songs. And such is the case here. Despite the interesting musical pedigrees of the remixers, there’s nothing anywhere near as interesting as on Von itself. There are ten tracks, but only 5 songs.
”Syndir Guðs” gets two remixes:
Biogen keeps the bass but adds some more drumlike sounds.
Múm removes the bass, adds some wild drums and trippy textures and reduces the 7 minutes to 5. It is quite pretty but very far from the original.
“Leit að lífi” gets three remixes
Plasmic takes a spacey 3 minute wordless noodle and turns it into a heavy fast dance song with speedy drums, big bass notes and with spacey sounds.
Thor brings in some fast skittery drums and keeps the spacey sounds (which sound sped up). And of course bigger bass noises.
Sigur Rós recycle their own song into a dance song by adding funky bass and drums.
“Myrkur” gets two remixes. the original is a fast-paced groovy track.
Ilo begins it as a spacey non-musical sounding piece. After two minutes they add a beat of very mechanical-sounding drums. It’s probably the most interesting remix here.
Dirty-Bix adds big, slow drums. It keeps the same melody and vocals as the original but totally changes the rhythm and texture of the song, (removing the guitar completely).
The remaining three songs get one remix each.
The original “18 Sekúndur Fyrir Sólarupprás” is 18 seconds of silence. Curver turns it into “180 Sekúndur Fyrir Sólarupprás” and makes a muffled drum beat and some other samples from the album, I think. It constantly sounds like it is glitching apart until the end where it practically disintegrates–an interesting remix of silence.
“Hún Jörð” 7 min Hassbræður increases the drums and adds a more buzzsaw guitar sound and makes the vocals stand out a bit more.
“Von” has delicate strings and Jónsi voice. The remix by Gusgus adds low end bass and drums making it a thumping rather than soaring track.
I prefer the original, but I much prefer their next album to the first one.
[READ: end of October to early November 2013] original articles that comprise Both Flesh and Not
As I mentioned last week, I decided to compare the articles in Both Flesh and Not with the original publications to see what the differences were. I had done this before with A Supposedly Fun Thing… and that was interesting and enlightening (about the editing process).
This time around the book has a lot more information than the original articles did. Although as I come to understand it, the original DFW submitted article is likely what is being printed in the book with all of the editing done by the magazine (presumably with DFW’s approval). So basically, if you had read the original articles and figured you didn’t need the book, this is what you’re missing.
Quite a lot of the changes are word choice changes (this seems to belie the idea that DFW approved the changes as they are often one word changes). Most of the changes are dropped footnotes (at least in one article) or whole sections chopped out (in others).
For the most part the changes were that the book version added things that were left out or more likely removed from the article. If the addition in the book is more than a sentence, I only include the first few words as I assume most readers have the book and can find it for themselves. The way to read the construct below is that most of the time the first quote is from the original article. The second quote is how it appears in Both Flesh and Not. At the end of each bullet, I have put in parentheses the page in BFAN where you’ll find it. I don’t include the page number of the article. And when I specifically mention a footnote (FN 1, for example), I am referring to the book as many times the articles drop footnotes and they are not always in sync.
Note: I tried most of the time to put quotes around the text, but man is that labor intensive, so if I forgot, it’s not meant to be anything significant. (more…)
SOUNDTRACK: lions.chase.tigers: To Their Blood EP (2009).
I learned about lions.chase.tigers from the Dromedary compilation 
SOUNDTRACK: DARK WAS THE NIGHT-That Disc (2009).
The second disc in this set is a somewhat more raucous affair than the first (which was pretty much all acoustic performances). On the surface, this seemed like the better disc of the two. I like so many bands on this disc: Spoon, Arcade Fire, My Morning Jacket, The New Pornographers, Stuart Murdoch, Blonde Redhead.
SOUNDTRACK: SONIC YOUTH-SYR 7: J’accuse Ted Hughes/Agnès B Musique (2008).
I Just Read About That... 