Re: New Massacre

The new Massacre CD "Love Me Tender" (Tzadik 2013 - TZ 7642) certainly is yet another great one. You can put onto a CD anything Massacre and it's mostly impossible to fail. It goes without saying that the chazuke status for this release is a "blind buy no fail" or 6 of 5 stars at the established terms. For fans of the Massacre the question therefore is not what it is, but what it is not.

The release is not the hoped for box of the comprehensive archive of recordings of the project. There remains a huge volume of great stuff, most of it confirmed to be captured in HQ, none of some of which released here.

It gives a small insight into what may have been the live sound which the few privileged people had at the time of the performance. It has to be noted that Massacre sometimes happens to be performed in front of random festival audiences who are in the majority completely uninformed … The outcome then of Fred Frith's or Tzadik's or whoever did it's choice is a selection of great tracks assembled together in a way which is similar to Frank Zappa's style: track, overdubs, segues which never happened … very nice to hear. But they're not in every case real and the original performances were already great and did not need any editing. It is like with "Tinsel Town Rebellion" and "You Are What You Is", nice to hear an edited CD album, but the truth is yet to be heard. The truth about the Moers performance for instance is that already during the live performance, already at least 2 guitars were there. Mind-blowing. Of course Fred Frith did not operate several instruments simultaneouasly all the time there, but they somehow managed to provide the sound of several - on stage. Of course Bill Laswell's amp was broken during the Ferrara one as the live experience showed and the CD release confirms, but they did the best out of it. It is nice and miserable to hear he result on CD, but one needs to know the way of its construction and the events. The original recordings will remain an essential need.

It has no Paris 2008. Fred Frith is in possession of good sounding source recordings. The 2013 Tzadik has no Vandœuvre-les-Nancy 1999. Not sure if Fred is in possession of a source recording which sounds better than the only available amateur recording of this excellent show. It has no Bologna 1999. Good sources exist.

For me, having heard most of the stuff played and recorded live and compared to these released post-edits, I'd say, well done, it's interesting editing work on the basis of excellent source material. But I say, please do give me the real stuff later too, same as the zappateers do.

Tokyo was just played a few hours ago. Good show. The story is not over. Massacre!


--- In [email protected], haas alain <alain.haas@...> wrote:
>
> I've just received my copy of Massacre "Love me tender" and it's (as 
> usual !) a killer one, especially tracks from the 2008 Ferrara show.

...




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