Hello, Hrrm....for some reason I keep feeling like I should talk about Belle & Sebastian, and nothing else I can seem to think of feels like I should blurt it on out, you know? At 6:06 PM +0100 7/7/00, the original pixidustlady wrote:
if anything, i think tony doogans production of B&S is not right. it's too perfect, too rounded, too balanced. there aren't enough rough edges. like the bit at the start of tigermilk when you can hear stuart zipping up his cardigan before he starts to sing. thats so nice because its so personal. so in that case, i think tight production is wrong.
Okay, this is just plain wrong. I can see what you're getting at, but I really don't think Tony Doogan had anything at all to do with it or with that zipper. I mean, I don't *know* but there are some ink polaroids Stuart David wrote discussing Struan recording an ice cream bell during a song in Tigermilk. I think when they did Tigermilk, the band liked doing things like throwing in odd ambient noises...and they continued doing it, too, just look at "If You're Feeling Sinister," which sometimes I think is the best song they've ever done, just because of those kids in the beginning. Obviously that mysterious recorded party was one another attempt at throwing some ambient noise into a song, I wonder why they decided against it. Could the song be on a Loneliness of the Middle Distance Runner single? ;) Ambient noises really do add a lot to the atmosphere of songs, though, just have a listen to Let the Snakes Crinkle Their Heads to Death by Felt. One song features some seagulls and another features...guess....some people talking as if at a dinner party ;) Wonder where B&S got the idea... Anyway, I've always adored ambient noise in songs, and I'd go ahead and include samples in with that category. I tried to incorporate ambient noise into one of my own songs, and I think it really did a lot for it. I have this idea that someday I could make an entire album and go out and record various ambient noises to give the songs character, and write songs about the places or the people I recorded. But I'd need one of those DAT recorders I think, and those cost an arm and a leg. Someday, maybe. On to production values...tight and otherwise. I think people who don't know anything about the recording process tend to get caught up in the lo-fi versus hi-fi debate, decrying production and such. Myself until relatively recently included. But having actually recorded myself with shitty equipment, not by choice, I find myself wishing I had some better stuff. It's true that amateurish things in the recording process add to the intimacy of it, but these are more aesthetic values of the musicians recording than they are of which knobs are twiddled. Like when people talk at the end of a song and start asking one another what's going on. Cheap equipment, on the other hand, just tends to make everything sound muffled. I think in the end it's an aesthetic choice of what sort of production you're doing rather than hi-fi vs. lo-fi. Certain slickly recorded things have a certain nauseous feel to them, I agree, but certain records with really high production values sound fantastic. I just think it has more to do with the sort of production the producer is trying to achieve. And to this end, I think Tony Doogan does a magnificent job producing Belle & Sebastian, and Mojave 3 for that matter. I see the problem you're getting at though...a lot of Belle & Sebastian's newer songs tend to go for the soaring giddying heights rather than the intimate depths. And you probably miss that, as I guess we all do. Sometimes songs from Sinister seem like they're talking right too you, and to no one but you. FISHYCLAP, on the other hand, seems to make me think more of lots of strings and crescendos, and my life doesn't seem like it's about strings and crescendos, my life is laughing children and zippers. So on some level I guess it's hard to connect with these songs in the same way we used to. Anyway, I feel like I was on to something there, make your own conclusions. -- Brian Pennington, aka Mick McMick | cellophanesky@mac.com | ICQ# 39021436 Sandcastle Records: <http://www.indiepages.com/sandcastle/> the Cellophane Sky:<http://home.earthlink.net/~cellophanesky/the/index.html> "Better a tear of truth than smiling lies." - Duncan Browne +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the undead Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "tech-heads and students" +-+ +-+ "the cardie wearing biscuit nibbling belle & sebastian list" +-+ +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "peculiarly deranged fanbase" "frighteningly named +-+ +-+ Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+