chrysler wrote:I'll lob a compliment to Albini for some of the best studio banter ever committed to vinyl: "I said, 'You fuckin' die!' to her." This is the sort of stuff that is magical and can't be faked.

That's one of the things I like about his recordings...is that extra stuff (i.e. Andy laughing before 'Goodnight Mr. Maugham', asking Josephine Wiggs is she's going bald on 'Pod' and so forth...)--it makes it all the more real

/mw/

toomanyhelicopters wrote:are there people out there who can't listen to music, but rather have to listen to production value?

I'd like to know how you separate the two. Surely the experience of all types of music and the emotional response it evokes is bound up in its production?

i was wondering if there was anybody here who could not bear the regular way of recording/mixing anymore (every instruments recorded track by track, in dead rooms with close miking, compressors everywhere, warm & punchy mastering...). This person would only listen to album recorded and mixed at EA or by any other studio/engineer following the same dogma.

matthieu

re this original question, it will be hard to find anyone willing to admit to that kind of snobbery

whatever our obsessions, most of us are punk rockers at heart, which pretty much rules out being that much of a tightass

however...there are definitely some records, probably with good music on them, that i can't bear to hear b/c the production is so offensive

an excellent example would be _car wheels on a gravel road_ by lucinda williams

i love lucinda williams' voice. i totally love at least one of her albums. i think she has written many very good and great songs. some of them are probably on this record. but it has that beefed-up-but-lite, squished to hell, strummy strum acoustirock sound that i absolutely hate. i tried several times to get past it, but i couldn't.

you know, i might be able to listen to it in the car. maybe i'll try that.

toomanyhelicopters wrote:
are there people out there who can't listen to music, but rather have to listen to production value?


I'd like to know how you separate the two. Surely the experience of all types of music and the emotional response it evokes is bound up in its production?

it's really easy for me to separate the two. granted, if the production is *so terrible* that it's impossible to pick out the instruments being played and what they're doing, sure, you can't listen to the music. but whereas most normal joe average humans don't listen to production at all, don't even understand what it means, and don't know how to listen to the music even (only the "beat" and the vocals), there are also people who are so completely in tune with the production aspect that an album that is poorly recorded is completely unlistenable to them. i've found this, in my limited experience, to generally be the case with people with extremely expensive and kick-ass hifi systems.

for example, my roommate listens to music on a boombox that's a little bigger than the size of a toaster. it cannot reproduce any recording with any semblance of accuracy. he listens to a lot of tapes, too. production value means absolutely nothing to him. he only listens to the music.

then there are the exact opposite end of the spectrum, people who, as they've said here, will buy and listen to an album where they don't really like the music, but rather they're listening to the production element.

i understand your question, but i don't think music is always taken on an emotional level. i can't speak for anyone else on this, but for me, some stuff certainly evokes an emotional response, but other stuff is much more about a cerebral response. different music affects me differently. i think that for me at least, it's very easy to separate the music from the production. and i can listen to stuff with good music, regardless of good or bad production. but i personally can't listen to bad music just because it has good production. i mean, i can, but i won't.

tmidgett wrote:however...there are definitely some records, probably with good music on them, that i can't bear to hear b/c the production is so offensive

i can't listen to most of leonard cohen's records for this very reason. like death of a ladies' man and everything from various positions to the present. i like most of the songs an awful lot, but the production (and instrumentation) is incredibly tacky and doesn't suit the music. that's the only really glaring example i can think of...