Worst version of Apache...EVER
Tuff_Gong
627 Posts
Anybody else heard Apache by the Portsmouth Sinfonia? I was familiar with the group's "stellar" work but I'd never heard their version of Apache. Wow... The Incredible Bongo Band better watch out, this version is the one all the breaks kids are gonna go after now!http://s39.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=03DCYIZH5XVEQ1TBBLRR75ICU0This pales in comparison to their cover of Thus Spake Zarathustra though. That song ranks high up there amongst the worst songs of all times. This version of Apache sounds downright coherent by comparison!
Comments
You bloody minger... I thought you were being ironic... I can never trust you again...
Oh my lawdy me.... This is far too dire to even remotely utter, 'I kinda like it cause it's so bad'...
You sure you didn't pitch this down & wobble the vinyl while you recorded it...
Really though, I wasn't kidding when I said their version of "Apache" is downright coherent as compared to their cover of A HREF="http://s35.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=1LF8UIRCIVBQ31QUCQP28N2EX7"> "Thus Spake Zarathustra" /A>. Listen to the mp3 of that and I dare you to tell me there's a worse song out there. If there is, well, it's probably just another song by the Portsmouth Sinfonia, such as their stirring rendition of A HREF="http://s31.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=3M0GV469MIJT311MG8L4V0P3MV"> The Blue Danube Waltz. /A> Then again, their cover of A HREF="http://s60.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=30QLQFJCGB08O3VC1BVJMJMEZY"> Beethoven's 5th Symphony /A> is no walk through the park either.
Personally i think the original version of apache sucks a fat one.
Seriously dude, what the bejeesus is this...
For real or is this you & your lagered up mates having a jolly old time with some conch shells...
This cannot be on wax???
You can't be accused of underselling it either.
What am i to do now with this emotional scarring...?
i picked up hallelujah (at the royal albert hall) it's some pretty tough listening, all that out of tune stuff kindof grates on your ears...complete with production and clarinet by brian eno
Another intriguing project that you were involved in a few years ago was the Portsmouth Sinfonia. Could you talk alittle about that?
The Portsmouth Sinfonia was founded by an English composer named Gavin Bryars. He started it at Portsmouth College of Art,hence its name. The philosophy of the orchestra was that anybody could join. There was no basis of skill required for joining. The only condition was that if you joined you should attend rehearsals and take it seriously. It wasn't intended as a joke - though it was sometimes extremely funny. The orchestra only played the popular classics, and it played only the most popular parts of thesepopular classics, the bits that everyone knows: Da-da-da dum, da-da-da dum. At its biggest it was about 78 people strong and it had a complete complement of orchestral instruments. Most people when they talk about the Sinfonia talk about it as though everybody in the orchestra was incompetent. This wasn't true, exactly. There was a range of competence, from extremely competent - we had some bona fide virtuosi in there - to completely incompetent. What was interesting about it was this mix. It wouldn't have been more interesting if it had been all incompetent or all competent. It was this particular mix so that in any piece what you heard was a number of approximations of how the piece should be played. You'd hear the melody of whatever it was, hidden somewhere among all those approximations of the melody. It was like a very blurry version, a soft-focus version, of classical music, and it produced some beautiful music. I really liked some of those results. There were some exquisite moments -the mixture of chance and choice, you know? Anyway, the Sinfonia existed, let me see, from 1969 to about 1974 or '75. I joined in 1970, and I ceased to be active in 1974, mainly because I wasn't in England a lot of the time any more.
From that description, it sounds as though the Sinfonia might have had some impact on the way your records sound.
It certainly does. In some quite specific cases. There's a song on Another Green World called "Golden Hours." I wanted the Portsmouth Sinfonia effect on the voices. I wanted a lot of voices that were a little bit off with one another, so I overdubbed the voices myself but I didn't use headphones. The engineer would just give me a cue when to start singing. He was listening to the track in the control room, and when he cued me I would start singing, so that my pitch is deliberately slightly off and my timing is slightly off, to reproduce that effect. Also, on Taking Tiger Mountain I used the string section from the Portsmouth Sinfonia on one of those songs, a song called "Put A Straw Under Baby."
You've been quoted as saying that music played by untrained musicians can be as interesting as music by trained musicians. If an untrained musician wants to take advantage of this idea, can they just do it any old way, or is there a certain approach or philosophy that would be a good idea for them to keep in mind?
I should think there are quite a lot of things it would be a good idea for them to keep in mind [laughs]. Unfortunately, that position of mine has frequently been misinterpreted, and I've paid the price, I can tell you, by receiving hundreds and hundreds of tapes from people who say, "Hey, I'm an untrained musician. I've followed your advice, and I've decided to send this tape." And
unfortunately most of the tapes are really not that interesting, you know? So I've paid for my theory there. But my position was developed from two points of view. First of all, folk music is often played by untrained musicians. Part of the beauty of that music is in the way that variety is achieved, not by people deliberately trying to do something different from one another, but by
accidentally doing something different. For instance, if you listen to group folk singing you often hear strange and lovely harmonies that are actually inadvertent. They result from the fact that somebody can't sing on the register that the main voices are in, so they just find a pitch at some peculiar interval above or below and stay in parallel harmony from there onwards. So in folk music you often have this sense of a limitation being turned into a strength, which was really what I was talking about: Regard your limitations as secret strengths. Or as constraints that you can make use of.
To give another example of this, on the technological level, there are two approaches to going into the studio. Some producers go in, and they say, "Have you got the Lexicon 224 echo? Have you got this, have you got that? Oh, you haven't got that? I can't work here." Suddenly their world crumbles because you don't happen to have the new Eventide D949 phaser, or whatever it is,
and they can't envisage working without this. But when I go into the studio, I look around and see what is there and I think "Okay, well, this is now my instrument. This is what I'm going to work with." Another example would be when you're faced with a guitar that only has five strings. [Ed. Note In fact the guitar Eno owns only has five strings.] You don't say, "Oh God, I can't play
anything on this." You say, "I'll play something that only uses five strings, and I'll make a strength of that. That will become part of the skeleton of the composition." That's really what I mean, that any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on - including your own incompetence.
So, that's one aspect of the untrained musician thing. The other aspect is this I believe strongly that recording studios have created a different type of musician and a different way of making music. In some sense it's so different that it really should be called by a different name. The only similarity is that people listen to it, so it enters through the same sense, but in the way it's made it's really a different thing. When I make a record, very often I work rather like a painter. I put something on, and that looks nearly right, so
I modify it a little bit. Then I put something else on top of that, and that requires that the first thing be changed a little bit, and so on. I'm always adding and subtracting. Now this is obviously a very different way of working from any traditional compositional manner; it's much more like a painting. So it's clearly a method that is also available to the non-musician. You don't have to have traditional technical competence to work that way. You can have it and work that way, but you don't have to. So I was trying to
make the point that if you're working with electronic media in the recording studio, judgment becomes a very important issue and skill becomes a less important issue. If you're working with synthesizers in particular, some things are easier than others, but really you can do almost anything you want to. So what then becomes important is deciding which is the right thing to do. And that's the leap that very few synthesizer players make, I think. They generally just do everything they can.
So the weakness of the tapes you get from untrained musicians is that in addition to not having skill, they don't exercise their judgment either.
That's exactly right. They've gotten over the problem of not having skill, but they haven't moved into the zone of having judgment about what they do. I mean, people would probably be surprised to know my own rejection rate of my work. I must produce a hundred times the amount of music I release. The amount I release is a very small proportion. I reject a tremendous amount. And I don't feel bad about this. I don't think, "Oh, what a waste." The rest of it is sketches, in a sense, of what then comes out, so it's not wasted time, but it's not stuff I would regard a s finished.
tracklisting is:
1. Pinball Wizard
2. Apache
3. Leader Of The Pack
4. A Whiter Shade Of Pale
5. You Really Got Me
6. Uptown Ranking
7. Glad All Over
8 Heartbreak Hotel
9. Telstar
10. Bridge Over Troubled Water
11. Nut Rocker
12. Don`t Cry For Me Argentina
13. Rock Around The Clock
14. You Sould Be Dancing
15. It`s Only Make Believe
16. Night`s In White Satin
17. My Boy Lollipop
18. God Only Knows
19. Satisfaction
20. A Day In The Life
Thats pretty harsh dude. I mean, it wasn't written to be a breakbeatraer b-boy classic. Then again, if you think it sucks then you think it sucks, so who really cares, right? i'm tired.
He said the ORIGINAL... ie: The Shadows version. Cliff Richards band...
Dude, that's way too much thinking in there. I'm no stegasaurous with 3 brains.
How can one not like IBB's version...
I would have such a hard time coming to terms with someone not physically responding to that track.
I don't just mean uprocking, etc...
http://s49.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=01VG64QK4T5BU2X55I7BG0FQNH
Now I just need to be roamin' across the plains in Arizona on a horse or something!!!
then again, my headphones are busted...