Ein Kommentar von MOB bei YEESHKUL!
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I bought the Immersion box set last Friday in Belgium.
Disc 6 (CD3 with rarities) is a MUST HAVE !
The December 1972 mix of the album is really interesting:
– the voices were not yet inserted (I guess Roger did the interviews late in the process)
– all the instrumental parts were already recorded at the time (e.g. so you won’t have „alternative solos“, these are the final solos), but this early mix is full of surprises though
– Speak To Me did not exist at the time
– On The Run has the footsteps and breathing very loud in the mix (and there’s no Roger The Hat yet)
– Great Gig In The Sky is fabulous: it’s an instrumental version before Clare Torry came, and Rick’s organ can be heard in its full glory ! This is my favorite song of the 1972 version !
– Money has some abrupt transitions (e.g. at the end when the 4/4 section switches again to 7/8) that were reworked and smoothed for the final version
– Us And Them begins very quietly, the drums are totally edited out during the intro, you just have Rick’s piano, Dick’s sax and Roger’s bass lines; this is a really nice alternate mix
The Hard Way (from Household Objects) was recorded in October 1973 and is very surprising and funny. But you understand why the band decided to abandon the project, this kind of experiment could not have become a full album.
Us And Them demos is the version from the Zabriskie Point sessions (I can hear some NR artefacts in that version, but it’s very well mastered anyway).
The 3 live tracks from Brighton June 1972 sound fantastic, and when you hear them, you wonder why they didn’t add the full 1972 live version of DSOTM. The sound is much clearer than the Wembley 1974 version, and the band is really on fire in Brighton, while they are a bit tired on the Wembley concerts.
The big surpsise for me is the studio version of The Travel Sequence. I thought it would be an early version from 1972, before they decided to replace it by On The Run. But I was wrong: The Travel Sequence was recorded in studio in October 1973, i.e. after Dark Side of the Moon was released. So it seems they intended to include it on the next album. This 1973 studio version is much better than the semi-improvised live renditions from 1972. A true rarity !
Money demo is the Roger’s demo with acoustic guitar that we all know, but it is complete. It ends with the cash register noises, and it’s not the final loop that appears on the album, it’s an early montage from Roger that we never heard before !
Now for the visuals (DVD and BluRay)
I’m very disappointed with the quality of the Brighton footage. It’s not really better than what we had before. Harvested’s version on the latest Anhthology has similar quality. It’s a pity because on various documentaries (1994 Omnibus, 2003 Dark Side of the Moon Classic Album) we can see footage from Brighton with sharp image and wonderful colours. Here it’s not as good as the footage that leaked in the documentaries. But at least it’s in 4:3 (well, the DVD/BD are 16:9 and they added black bands on left and right to keep the 4:3 ratio of the video).
The concert films are wonderful ! Curiously, they start with the films from the 1974 British Tour (which was Nov-Dec 1974), and then they show the films from the French Tour 1974 (June 1974), finishing with the films from the 1975 US Tour. I think it’s better to watch the films chronologically, starting with the French Tour, then the British Tour and at last the US Tour. The Great Gig film from French Tour has the priest, the cross and the flames, while they replaced it with the Crystal Voyager footage on the 1975 Tour. The films for Money are different for each tour (even if they use the same basic footage, they continued to improve it and complete it tour after tour).
The audio used for the concert films is generally from the album, except for Speak To Me and On The Run, that have each time a special audio, different from tour to tour (I think they simply put the backing tape they used during the various tours).
The Dark Side of the Moon 2003 EPK has a big problem: it’s 16:9, but they did something wrong when they authored it: they cropped the 4:3 image to fit the 16:9 EPK, so the image is 16:9 inside a 4:3 inside a 16:9 mpeg: it is letterboxed all sides (up, down, left and right). Why didn’t they author the 16:9 EPK properly in the 16:9 mpeg is a mystery to me !
To summarize, the highlights of the Immersion edition are Disc 6 (rarities CD) and the concert films.
Cheers!
MOB
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Wenn ich meinen Hund beleidigen will nenne ich ihn Mensch. (AS) „Weißt du, was ich manchmal denke? Es müsste immer Musik da sein. Bei allem was du machst. Und wenn's so richtig Scheiße ist, dann ist wenigstens noch die Musik da. Und an der Stelle, wo es am allerschönsten ist, da müsste die Platte springen und du hörst immer nur diesen einen Moment.“