Reverb and Echo

william_kent

Well-known member
Was the guy out of Rattles wasn't it?
That's the guy!- made a fortune from the Rattles, bought an echo box, smoked a load of weed ,dropped some acid. went to some orgies, jammed with his mates, released a couple of undercover classic German Psychedelic ("krautrock" if you're racist ) albums, then totally disowned his past because he became Germany's equivalent of Tom Jones and didn't want to piss off the "straights" by acknowledging his druggy past.. but weirdly enough 45 years ahead of his time: he released an album of sea shanties in 1976...
 

william_kent

Well-known member
The early 1970s seem to have been a confusing time for German easy listening artistes, witness "Hansi" and his big band tackling UK cosmic boogie:


(edit) Also, Hugo Strasser channeling the sounds of the UK underground:

 
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william_kent

Well-known member
This always struck me as an unusual (but good) cover... though I imagined the dog that so terrified the Baskervilles as being a bit bigger somehow.

That's perhaps the least scary "hound" I have ever seen! But fantastic cover version - although checking on discogs and seeing the cheapest 7" is £55 then I might have to stick with the Sabs version..
 

Woebot

Well-known member
***spiel alert***

reverb and echo are such important sonic markers in recorded music because they signal clearly the understanding/concept that the recording is a manifestation of something that EXISTS as a STRUCTURAL SPACE. that's to say that it EXISTS rather than DESCRIBES.

it goes back again to my favourite john chowning quote (sorry to repeat it):
“Some of the music involved loudspeakers. Hearing what some of these composers were doing was life-changing — Karlheinz Stockhausen had a four-channel electronic piece involving [pre-recorded] boys’ voices. The spatial aspects caught my attention: that one could create, with loudspeakers, the illusion of a space that was not the real space in which we were listening.” John Chowning hearing Stockhausen in Paris at Le Domaine Musicale
chowning could hear that Gesang Der Junglinge made manifest a previously impossible-to-describe space. but really ANY recording of sound has this quality - however we have, in our "civilised" manner, got used to fudging the fact intellectually.

again - ALL recorded music has this quality - but we are accustomed to SUSPENDING DISBELIEF that this is true (which is ironic because SUSPENDING DISBELIEF is usually tooled the other way around - we are supposed to SUSPEND DISBELIEF when something which is FAKE is presented as REAL)

but reverb and echo in musical recordings - make it much harder to SUSPEND DISBELIEF - and therefore they reveal the fundamental psychic and emanationist quality of music.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Perhaps there's a connection here with what Pynchon says about different air quality affecting the relative speed of sound within them.

He says lots of mist in the air has a direct effect on how sound is carried in that air, which directly effects our perceptions of reality.

Reverb and echo are probably magnified or dustirted even more when you add smoke or haze to the equation.
 

Woebot

Well-known member
Perhaps there's a connection here with what Pynchon says about different air quality affecting the relative speed of sound within them.

He says lots of mist in the air has a direct effect on how sound is carried in that air, which directly effects our perceptions of reality.

Reverb and echo are probably magnified or dustirted even more when you add smoke or haze to the equation.
yes.

my big memories of switzerland as a child are the soundspaces in the snow

i wrote a piece about it long ago - i will dig it out.
 

catalog

Well-known member
In snow you get that crunch in the air.

With smoke, there's the obvious connection to "spatial" dub music through the haze of ganja smoke.

60s love ins pioneered innovative visual backdrops but the good clubs now sack that off. Total darkness, red light, lots of smoke.

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