BJMarsh
Active Member
I would prefer English Settlement but I think the multis are missing. Either way, keep them coming.
Next XTC 5.1 Release - Apple Venus (Cancelled)
- Thread starter sjcorne
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This is wonderful news....but where is English Settlement!!? 
That is a masterpiece and the timbres in that album need hirez love and care, let alone surround love and care. Oh well, as has been said already:
"You want another XTC surround release?" "I'd like thaaat".
That is a masterpiece and the timbres in that album need hirez love and care, let alone surround love and care. Oh well, as has been said already:"You want another XTC surround release?" "I'd like thaaat".
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blue.monk
1K Club - QQ Shooting Star
Yes, Andy confirms that the multis for English Settlement, Mummer and Big Express are still missing. He talks about that and much more in the latest episode of the Vinyl Guide podcast:
http://www.thevinylguide.com/episodes/ep255-andy-partridge-of-xtc
http://www.thevinylguide.com/episodes/ep255-andy-partridge-of-xtc
This is great news, really happy to see the series move forward. Apple Venus 1 is the only XTC I don’t have in a digital format, so that is also welcome. I think it would have made a lot of sense to make a full Apple Venus sessions set. That would have also made the two albums a bit more diverse. In a way I think both of them both benefit and suffer from the attempt to «stremline» them, Vol 1 being the baroque orchestral pop one and Vol 2 being the brash pop-rock one. Both of them fall just short of being perfect, but the best moments are phenomenal.
van1
Senior Member
Not sure if the contents has been speculated yet but i recall Andy saying on twitter that Chris Difford had returned the initial tapes for the Apple Venus sessions. Even though Andy is gone from Twitter, i did find something from Chris Difford so these tracks may end up on AV 1&2, so potentially something previously unreleased for those who think they have all the content.
Chris Difford
@chrisdifford
·
Dec 19, 2013
@xtcfans
Im well thank you and remembering with fondness the great songs we put together one crafty day! The tapes are on their way home Cd
AV1 always cried out for surround treatment. So I'm ready to buy this as soon as its available. I'm bemused that 'tapes' from 1999 require 'restoration', though.
Jim the Oldbie
My right elbow hurts.
Yeah, that puzzled me too. Maybe they were stored badly (wouldn't be the first time). I would think if they needed baking or something serious like that, they would've digitized them immediately afterward instead of risking any shipment?
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Plan9
800 Club - QQ All-Star
I would bet they are actually an unsupported file format on a hard drive, or an old sessions project in a DAW, that would need to be converted or transferred to a more modern format to be usable.
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Plan9
800 Club - QQ All-Star
I would prefer "English Settlement" or "Mummer" but it is what it is.
Apple Venus is a mixed bag for me.
Andy's compositions are basically all great.
Colin's compositions on the other hand are amongst his very worst IMHO.
Same is true for "Wasp Star".
Andy's continually reaching for brilliance on certain tracks, but Colin is clearly slipping into mediocrity.
Still, this is definitely a day 1 purchase for me!
Aw I think Frivolous Tonight is pretty good. Kinda like the so-called "granny music" from Paul McCartney (When I'm 64, etc...), it has its charm.
Aw I think Frivolous Tonight is pretty good. Kinda like the so-called "granny music" from Paul McCartney (When I'm 64, etc...), it has its charm.
I just listened to the album again. That song is definitely the better of the two Colin songs on the album. I really don't feel like "Fruit Nut" has any redeeming quality to it whatsoever.
Plan9
800 Club - QQ All-Star
Yeah I can't say I remember anything about Fruit Nut.
Time to break out that first vinyl pressing again, It's been lingering on the shelf far too long, in the hope that there would be a remix announcement all these years since the reissues started!
With the release of The Big Express in Atmos, I got curious and search for threads with XTC in the title and found this.
It seems the name of this thread changed to "Cancelled" one day with no explanation. Does anyone know the story? Apple Venus 1 & 2 would be fantastic in 5.1 or Atmos.
It seems the name of this thread changed to "Cancelled" one day with no explanation. Does anyone know the story? Apple Venus 1 & 2 would be fantastic in 5.1 or Atmos.
Not all the multitracks could be found after all, IIRC.
Yes. According to SW, all the vocals are missing:
It almost makes one wonder if the vocals were somehow accidentally erased when they prepared the Instravenus and Waspstrumental releases...
I don't know what format it was recorded on, I would think it's more likely that the slave reels are simply missing.
With 2" multitrack tape the maximum number of tracks you get is 24 (and I think the same goes for that 3M digital system that Donald Fagen's Nightfly was recorded on, amongst others) so the way they'd get around that limitation is by dedicating one of the tracks on the multitrack to a sync pulse, which is basically a series of audible beeps and boops that allow that multitrack to be connected to another multitrack machine that also has one of its tracks devoted to a sync pulse, bridged by a device that converts this audio into timecode data. This allows you to run and control two or even three machines as if they were one big one, giving you either 46 (24 tracks x 2 machines minus 2 tracks for sync) or 69 (24 x 3 minus 3 sync tracks) or more, depending on how many machines you ganged.
In my younger days when I was wasting my money on really dumb things I once had my eye on an eBay auction for a safety copy of the multitrack for the Jamiroquai song 'Cosmic Girl,' which was recorded in 1996. It was spread across three 24-track 2-inch tapes as well, and they were labelled 'master,' 'slave 1' and 'slave 2'. I can't remember how the tracks were split exactly but my recollection is that the master reel was basically the main rhythm track and then the overdubs were spread across the two slaves, so it wouldn't surprise me if Apple Venus was done on the master reel and then the missing vocals and orchestration on one or more subsequent slave reels.
It also wouldn't surprise me if those slave reels were either accidentally discarded or stored separately by a tape librarian or asset management company - everyone knows a tape labelled "master" is important, but the same can't be said for a bunch of tapes labelled "slave," especially when they probably look like duplicates, backups, safeties or work-in-progress versions of the master tape unless you open the box and look at the tracking sheets.
With 2" multitrack tape the maximum number of tracks you get is 24 (and I think the same goes for that 3M digital system that Donald Fagen's Nightfly was recorded on, amongst others) so the way they'd get around that limitation is by dedicating one of the tracks on the multitrack to a sync pulse, which is basically a series of audible beeps and boops that allow that multitrack to be connected to another multitrack machine that also has one of its tracks devoted to a sync pulse, bridged by a device that converts this audio into timecode data. This allows you to run and control two or even three machines as if they were one big one, giving you either 46 (24 tracks x 2 machines minus 2 tracks for sync) or 69 (24 x 3 minus 3 sync tracks) or more, depending on how many machines you ganged.
In my younger days when I was wasting my money on really dumb things I once had my eye on an eBay auction for a safety copy of the multitrack for the Jamiroquai song 'Cosmic Girl,' which was recorded in 1996. It was spread across three 24-track 2-inch tapes as well, and they were labelled 'master,' 'slave 1' and 'slave 2'. I can't remember how the tracks were split exactly but my recollection is that the master reel was basically the main rhythm track and then the overdubs were spread across the two slaves, so it wouldn't surprise me if Apple Venus was done on the master reel and then the missing vocals and orchestration on one or more subsequent slave reels.
It also wouldn't surprise me if those slave reels were either accidentally discarded or stored separately by a tape librarian or asset management company - everyone knows a tape labelled "master" is important, but the same can't be said for a bunch of tapes labelled "slave," especially when they probably look like duplicates, backups, safeties or work-in-progress versions of the master tape unless you open the box and look at the tracking sheets.
Plan9
800 Club - QQ All-Star
The album was recorded digitally and edited on ProTools, with a lot of all-important overdubs recorded at Colin's home studio.
A lot of the digital files and the work done on computers seem either corrupted or in obsolete formats...
Huh, interesting, never mind my hypothesis then, haha.
For some reason I thought this album was 1992 and not 1999 so the digital workflow makes a lot more sense. I was working in video postproduction back then and I'm sure we were using similar storage mediums for data transfer like ZIP and JAZ drives, Sony MO (magnetooptical) discs, burnt CDs, etc. all of which were finicky when they were brand new, let alone 20 or 25 years down the line.
If there's data corruption I presume they've looked into whatever data recovery is within their production budget but if not they should, there are some companies out there that do amazing work recovering data from physically damaged or otherwise unreadable hard drives and other storage media.
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