Love
The Beatles

This came out last Christmas, right? George Martin got it together and mixed and juxtaposed all sorts of Beatle stuff…in a way it’s the perfect end to the Beatle binge (which I’ll confess had a huge gap and pause within). At first I had thought this would be a real mix, in the style of the Gray Album (DJ Dangermouse? He’s part of Gnarls Berkely I think…) in the sense of “new” songs being made from the remnants, and to some extent this happens but not everywhere…it’s more like the same songs but with embellishments taken from others…I’m sure the tracks have been cleaned up a little too. Or like the version of Strawberry Fields, the mix of which I recognise from that amazing South Bank Show/George Martin thing where he sat and mixed and remixed all those songs we knew so well to bring out this part, or draw attention to that line…I think that taught me an awful lot about how to mix a song, even though I’m constantly catching up with machinery and the more tech-y aspects of it all…the elements of music, the Lego blocks of it stacked and regulated in the right colour at the right time is always the starting point of it all – I’ve been mixing nuclear war songs at the mo and thinking about how tempting it can be to disguise or hide a weak musical moment or element with effects. The technology that allows the act of recording in the first place is, I suppose as ambivalent a force as all technology (Edward Bond)…I mean this isn’t to turn into a good or evil weighty thing, it’s just bloody Beatles songs remixed (not in the style of stars on 45 which I have had much fun reading about over the years in a book about the history of sampling which, in honour of Jive Bunny, titles the chapter about such party mixes as “Myxomatosis”) and it’s so nice the way that the chronology is artfully fucked with…hence you get “I want to hold your hand” coming after “While my guitar gently weeps”… Strawberry Fields is incredible again (so many of these songs are in danger of being dulled to nothing but jingles through overuse) and nearly overwhelms me to the point where I’m late for work on one of my morning walks to Southmead. It seems strange that this should be so good, it should have been terrible by the law of whatever these laws are…