Friday, May 9, 2014

The Smashing Pumpkins - Glass and The Machines of God

The Smashing Pumpkins – 
Glass and The Machines of God

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Disc One:
1.  If There Is A God
2.  Cash Car Star
3.  The Imploding Voice
4.  Wound
5.  The Sacred + Profane
6.  Stand Inside Your Love
7.  Real Love
8.  Innosence
9.  Let Me Give The World To You
10.  The Crying Tree of Mercury
11.  White Spyder
12.  Raindrops + Sunshowers
13.  Glass + The Ghost Children
14.  Go

Disc Two:
1.  Glass Theme
2.  The Everlasting Gaze
3.  Dross
4.  In My Body
5.  Speed Kills
6.  Lucky 13
7.  Heavy Metal Machine
8.  Blue Skies Bring Tears
9.  I of the Mourning
10.  Here’s To The Atom Bomb
11.  Try, Try, Try
12.  Home
13.  This Time
14.  With Every Light


This is a reconstruction of the proposed double-concept album originally meant to be The Smashing Pumpkins’ fifth and final proper studio album in 1999.  Originally conceived as a rock opera, the concept was dropped because of band member disintegration and disinterest as well as record label pushback.  The album was eventually released as the massive commercial failure MACHINA/The Machines of God in 2000, with most of the leftover tracks released posthumously by the band without their label’s consent as MACHINA II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music later than year.  This reconstruction attempts to cull the best possible sources (including the Machina pre-master and the best vinyl rip of Machina II), unifying their respective volumes and organize them into a cohesive double album that follows the Machina storyline.  Specific alternate versions of some tracks were utilized to give the album more of an organic “live band”-sound as opposed to the overproduced Machina album.

The Smashing Pumpkins were no strangers to turmoil.  Firing their drummer Jimmy Chamberlin in 1996 for perpetual drug use, the band made a 180-turn from their patented guitar sonics that made 1995’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness a landmark double album to an unusual combination of acoustic and electronic for their follow-up, 1998’s Adore.  Despite having superior songwriting and inventive arrangements, the album was less of a success as their previous efforts.  The tour in support of the album showed the band re-interpreting the soft-spoken material for a live rock-band, and the eventual re-hiring of Chamberlin in late 1998 showed promise that The Smashing Pumpkins were back to what they did best: loud fuzzy guitars pared with some of the best drumming of the decade. 

By April 1999, the band reconvened for their Arising Tour, meant to showcase the return of the original lineup.  Most of the set featured all new material, effortlessly written by head-Pumpkin Billy Corgan within the four months prior.  These tunes were part of a larger song cycle that would fill two CDs of a double-concept album tentatively called Glass and The Machines of God which concerned a rock star named Glass , his true love June, their rise and fall and Glass's redemption.  Most notably, the four members of The Smashing Pumpkins were to portray the characters of the concept album—Glass and his band The Machines of God, who were literal parodies of the public personas of the four members of The Smashing Pumpkins themselves —in promotion of the album. 

Unfortunately the machine was never switched on.  Halfway through recording the album, bass player D’Arcy Wretzky was dismissed from the band due to alleged erratic behavior; how could the band portray a convincing parody of themselves without the key members?  The situation worsened with guitarist James Iha’s increasing ambivalence to the band itself, as well as a record label unwilling to promote a convoluted double-album follow-up to the commercial failure Adore.  The solution was to scrap the concept and release the best material as MACHINA/The Machines of God, much like Lifehouse became Who’s Next 25 years earlier (a reconstruction also featured on this blog).  Machina was even more of a failure than Adore and by the end of the tour in support of the album, Iha wanted out.  The Smashing Pumpkins played their final show that December.  In one final rebellious move against the record label that had abandoned him, Corgan released the outtakes from the Machina sessions as a limited edition vinyl release, Machina II, with the explicit instructions to share and pirate it, making the album one of the first to be freely distributed on the internet by a major artist. 

Reconstructing Glass and The Machines of God is no easy task.  Corgan has been extremely vague and cryptic about how it would have been constructed, in as much as leaking false numerical codes allegedly forming track sequences.  Point of fact, of the 30-or-so songs recording during the sessions, Corgan has only divulged the narrative context of “Blue Skies Bring Tears”, “Speed Kills” and “With Every Light”.  Luckily Corgan has leaked a blueprint of the song cycle itself with a list of 17 of the cycle’s songs, all offering varying ways the songs could fit into the cycle.  Using this map, as well as song lyric interpretation matched with the synopsis of the album’s story written in Corgan’s typical superfluous prose, we are able to chart out a track sequence.  Both Corgan’s chart and his synopsis are included for reference. 

The only issue left is what sources should be used.  To avoid the terrible mastering found on Machina I, I used a rip of the leaked pre-master, featuring a larger dynamic range as well as subtlety different mixes.  As for the Machina II tracks I used the best possible source, the Virgin promo rip.  I then re-EQd the entire rip to match the EQ parameters of the tracks that were officially released (since those few were sourced from a non-vinyl master).  Since we also have a number of alternate versions of many of the songs, I specifically vied towards the versions of the songs that featured more of an organic ‘live-band’ and stripped-down arrangement and production, as that was allegedly how Glass and The Machines of God would have sounded.  The bootlegs Machina Acoustic Demos and The Original FEMM Tape were used, they were not the "th13rteen remasters" but original CD rips.  Setting a 28-song limit to ensure that this not become too overblown, a few songs were left on the cutting room floor: “The Age of Innocence” is excluded from this reconstruction as the song was written and recorded at the last minute and tagged onto the end of the Machina album, having nothing to do with the song cycle at all; “Slow Dawn”, “Vanity” and “Saturnine” all seemed too unfinished, skeletal and unneeded to communicate the story; “Soul Power” was a cover; and “Le Deux Machina” was already an element of “Glass + The Ghost Children”.  By the end, I have arranged two nearly 60-minute discs of 14 songs each, which seemed to be The Standard Smashing Pumpkins Album Length. 

Disc one beings with Glass establishing his character as a rather agnostic rock star, leader of The Machines of God, utilizing Corgan’s acoustic demo of “If There Is A God” which overlaps into the pummeling “Cash Car Star”; although most reconstructions of this album begin with “Glass Theme”, I chose this alternate route because this was how the band often performed the two songs live.  It was also quite reminiscent of the first two tracks from The Smashing Pumpkins’ 1994 b-sides compilation Pisces Iscariot, which always struck me as an extremely dynamic opening.  “The Imploding Voice” represents ‘The Voice’ of God speaking to Glass through the radio and instructing him to spread the word of love to the world through his music; “Wound” is Glass’s reaction to the sudden realization that he is a modern-day prophet and with “The Sacred + Profane” Glass begins to change the message of his band’s music with heavenly divination. 

The next part of the song cycle involves Glass’s love interest June and so all of the ‘love songs’ are grouped together—“Stand Inside Your Love”, “Real Love”, “Innosence” and “Let Me Give The World To You”.  Following this, Glass reaches a ‘crossroads’ in trying to balance his hedonistic rock n roll life with June vs. what he believes as his spiritual duty, articulated in “The Crying Tree of Mercury”, “White Spyder” (the spyder being a symbol for June’s drug use) and “Raindrops + Sunshowers.”  Following is the standard Smashing Pumpkins epic 10-mnute track, “Glass + The Ghost Children” in which the dictaphone middle section now actually makes sense as it specifically deals with Glass confessing his holy charge to June but fearing he may be instead mad.  James Iha’s “Go” has been problematic as it didn’t seem to fit in with the Machina concept at all, so it is sequenced here to close disc one, much as his “Take Me Down” closes disc one of Mellon Collie.  Perhaps it is sung from June’s point of view?

The second disc opens with what Corgan revealed as the ‘live set’ of the album, in which several songs would be grouped together as a mock live performance of The Machines of God.  Opening with actual audience ambience from a soundboard tape of their 9/20/2000 performance, Glass has grown cynical from his fans’ perceived betrayal of ‘rock n roll’ in “Glass Theme” and questions if ‘The Voice’ was even real in “The Everlasting Gaze” as his own band’s record sales plummet.  June becomes alienated from Glass and her resent is stated in “Dross”, following by increased drug use and a withdrawal inside herself in “In My Body”.  After an explosive fight, June is killed in a car crash as depicted in “Speed Kills”, using the ‘live-band’ version from Machina 2.  Glass blames himself and this sends him over the edge in “Lucky 13”, finally deciding to break up the band in “Heavy Metal Machine”.  

The night before the final show, Glass has a terrifying dream as heard in “Blue Skies Bring Tears”: a vision that without God, love, fans or even a band, he is now completely alone.  Here I chose an early arrangement of the song as performed on the Arising Tour to avoid the overproduced album versions.  Abandoning all belongings, Glass takes to the streets as a beggar, as depicted in “I of the Mourning”, and “Here’s To The Atom Bomb” (the mellow version from Machina 2).  In being alone and with nothing, he realizes that love, God, etc was there in his heart all along in “Try, Try, Try” (the mellow version found on the "Untitled" promo CD), “Home” and “This Time”.  The album closes with “With Every Light”, as Corgan had claimed, some sort of happy ending. 

An interesting side note is that within 6 months to a year from now, Corgan plans to release a remixed and remastered Machina featuring his originally-intended double-album tracklist as a part of the remastered series of The Smashing Pumpkins’ discography.  Will it appear and sound as I have offered here?  That is anyone’s guess, and I am curious to see how close I am to his vision.  But keep in mind Billy Corgan’s penchant for historical revision, as well as the recent fan dissatisfaction with the remasters’ quality control issues.  Whether this reconstruction is truly what the artist intended, it will always be here as an 'album that never was' just in case the real deal is crushed underneath Corgan’s own heavy metal machine. 



Sources used:
Rotten Apples/Judas O (2001 Virgin Records)
The Original F.E.M.M. Tape (bootleg 2003)
MACHINA/the machines of God (pre-master, 1999)
MACHINA II/friends and enemies of modern music (Virgin Records-sourced needledrop, 2001)
Machina Acoustic Demos (bootleg)
Untitled (Virgin promo CD 2001)


flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR and Audacity--> flac encoding via TLH lv8
*md5, artwork and tracknotes included

Sunday, April 13, 2014

Pink Floyd - The Massed Gadgets of Auximenes


Pink Floyd – The Massed Gadgets of Auximenes
(soniclovenoize studio album reconstruction)





Side A – The Man:

1. Daybreak, Pt I

2. Work

3. Afternoon

4. Doing It!

5. Sleep

6. Nightmare

7. Daybreak, Pt II



Side B – The Journey:

8. The Beginning

9. Beset By Creatures of the Deep

10. The Narrow Way

11. The Pink Jungle

12. The Labyrinths of Auximenes

13. Behold the Temple of Light

14. The End of The Beginning





In doing research for my previous Pink Floyd album reconstructions I discovered an overlooked “album that never was” that I found intriguing conceptually and challenging logistically.  This is a reconstruction of an all-studio version of Pink Floyd’s experimental performance piece “The Man and The Journey”, often titled The Massed Gadgets of Auximenes.  This reconstruction attempts to present a version of the performance that would have taken the place of the Ummagumma album, only utilizing studio recordings and condensing the performance down to two sides of a vinyl album.  Note that this reconstruction is conceptually not a part of my other two Pink Floyd reconstructions from this period, Vantage Point and Soundtrack To The Film Zabriskie Point; not only are there song overlaps but all three belong in different continuities of my blog. 



Musical soul searching was the predominant mindset in 1969 for Pink Floyd.  The previous year had seen the band attempt to mimic their former bandleader’s singles-oriented approach to psyche-pop with their second release Saucerful of Secrets as well as the single releases “It Would Be So Nice” and “Point Me At the Sky”.  After the failure of the two singles to make any significant chart impact, Pink Floyd switched gears and focused on what the remaining four members could do the best without Syd Barrett: sprawling, experimental psychedelic jams. 



Pushing this envelope to its fullest extent in 1969 gave birth to a series of performances sometimes entitled The Massed Gadgets of Auximenes but usually titled “The Man and The Journey”.  Arranged as two 40-minute movements, the first set seemed to follow the events of a typical person throughout his mundane, British, post-Industrial life—this segment was called “The Man”.  The set included the members of Pink Floyd actually building a table on-stage (to represent ‘Work’) and being served tea (to represent ‘Teatime’).  The concept of the second is less clearly defined and seemed to be largely instrumental and improvisational.  Called “The Journey”, the piece seemed to center around an individual’s journey for… well, who knows?  Pink Floyd has never given any hints of what the prize of the conceptual journey was, and the task is apparently left to the imaginations of the listeners.  My own interpretation is that “The Journey” is the evolution of agricultural mankind into industrial mankind, the quest for knowledge and technology; while there isn’t an actual Greek name Auximines, it could be stemmed from the Latin auxiliāris (to help) and the first pharaoh of Egypt, Menes (whose name translates to “he who endures”), literally a metaphor for the king (of humanity) who is assisted by gadgets (our technology) as he endures (history). 



Both sets included songs that had been featured on the Soundtrack To The Film More, released earlier in 1969: “Cymbaline”, “Green Is The Colour” and “Quicksilver”.  Just as well, the sets contained songs that would eventually appear on Ummagumma later that year: “Grantchester Meadows”, “The Narrow Way” and elements of “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party”.  The performances also contained an Ummagumma outtake “Biding My Time” and a 1968 single b-side that had created the template for this new era of Pink Floyd, “Careful With That Axe Eugene.”   Amongst these more formalized songs were improvisational jams that included elements of “Saucerful of Secrets” and “Interstellar Overdrive” as well as a few drum solos that varied from performance to performance, which would later emerge in various places as “Up The Kymber”, “Party Sequence” and “Heart Beat, Pig Meat”.  And as aforementioned, Pink Floyd were also served tea and built a table. 



Although this was a wonderful performance—best memorialized as a stereo bootleg sourced from a BBC recording & broadcast of their May 12th 1969 performance—the band could not fathom how to make a studio recording of the conceptual performances and release it as a commercial product.  Pink Floyd instead chose to release Ummagumma in its place, a double album that featured a disc of live performances and a second disc of experimental studio recordings, that were essentially collected individual solo recordings by each member.  In many ways, Ummagumma seemed to be the commercial product version of “The Man and The Journey”, sharing much of its aesthetic but without its incomprehensible concept and untranslatable performance pieces.  That is, until now... 



For my construction, we create an alternate timeline in which Pink Floyd never abandoned Massed Gadgets for the somewhat streamlined Ummagumma, and present it as Pink Floyd’s third studio album.  But we have two challenges: Firstly, my goal was to avoid using any actual performances of “The Man and The Journey” and stick exclusively to studio recordings.   While this seemed to work for almost all of “The Man”, it worked for only half of “The Journey” since studio recordings simply don’t exist for those missing segments.  I felt that substituting in the fantastic BBC May 12th recording would be ‘cheating’, so in these instances I’ve used approximations and substitutions that will be explained later.  The second challenge is time length: while each set ran approximately 40 minutes, this reconstruction, unedited, seemed to run 60 minutes once all studio recordings were sequenced.  Utilizing my own “less is more” ethos, the decision was made to edit each of the sets down to two 24-minute sides of an LP.  The results were obviously less sprawling than their live counterparts, but my reconstruction appeared more concise, focused and in my opinion more enjoyable.  Which leads one to the question: if “The Man and The Journey” had actually been a studio album, would it have been a single album or double?  Based on the results of my reconstruction, I believe it would have been a more abbreviated single disc. 



Side A of my reconstruction—“The Man” segment—begins with “Grantchester Meadows” from Ummagumma, here titled “Daybreak pt I”.  This represents The Man waking and beginning his day, the song concluding with him running to work.  In the original live performance, this is followed by the members of Pink Floyd constructing a table to represent The Man’s day at work.  There is obviously no studio recording of this, so instead I substituted “Sysyphus” from Ummagumma as “Work”; the track seemed, to me, to sound like a chaotic work day at a factory!  The original performances followed with “Teatime”; no studio recordings exist and there really is no plausible substitution for the sound of Pink Floyd being served and drinking tea, so "Teatime" is the only song excluded from my reconstruction.  The studio outtake “Biding My Time” from Relics is “Afternoon”, The Man’s leisure after a hard day’s work.  Following is “Doing It!”, a representation of sexual intercourse.  While the band used different drum solo patterns for this track throughout the tour, I chose “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party” as it had the best flow in-between “Afternoon” and “Sleep”.  An edit of “Quicksilver” from More is used as “Sleep”, and “Cymbaline” is used to represent the nightmare The Man has during his sleep (this being the second appearance of the track on my blog!).  The night turns to day and the never-ending cycle continues as The Man wakes in “Daybreak, pt II”, an instrumental reprise of “Grantchester Meadows”.



Side B—“The Journey” segment—is conceptually ambiguous.  Unlike the previous suite, “The Journey” concept is not self-evident, and the band has given absolutely no clues to the meaning.  Pretensions aside, we can only gather the meaning of this piece through the song titles and the mental images the music invoke, which was probably their intent.  Aptly beginning with “The Beginning”, “Green is the Colour” from More is used.  Following this is “Beset by Creatures of the Deep”, which was usually performed as “Careful With That Axe Eugene”.  Instead I used “Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up” from Zabriskie Point (for the third time on my blog!!) as the song is essentially “Eugene” played in a different key, Em instead of Dm; because of this, it follows “Green is the Color” (in G) more harmonically as well as matching the following “The Narrow Path” (which begins with an Em drone) and staying within the same chordal family.  “The Narrow Path” from Ummagumma seems to be the start of our protagonist’s journey into the next track, “The Pink Jungle”.  Here, Pink Floyd alternated between a jam of the intro to “Pow R Toc H” or a jam originating from the brief time both Syd Barrett and David Gilmour were in the band, entitled “Nick’s Boogie”.   Since we know “Nick’s Boogie” was eventually incorporated into the second movement of “Saucerful of Secrets” (retiled “Syncopated Pandemonium”), I will utilize an August 9th, 1969 Hilversum 3 radio broadcast recording of that segment, taken from the remastered bootleg Celestial Instruments.  Our protagonist seems to exit the Jungle and enter “The Labyrinths of Auximenes”, performed as the improvised jam sections of “Interstellar Overdrive”, again taken from the Celestial Instruments bootleg.  Upon reaching the center of the maze (either literally or metaphorically, take your pick), he can only “Behold The Temple of Light”, which was a unique improvisational jam of the intro to “The Narrow Way”.  There are no studio recordings of this piece, so a loop was created from the song’s intro on Ummagumma.  Harnessing his prize, the protagonist reaches “The End of The Beginning”, here as the fourth segment of “Saucerful of Secrets”, “Celestial Voices”, taken from the Celestial Instruments bootleg. 



Sources used:

Celestial Instruments (2007 bootleg, MOB remaster)

Relics (1996 remaster)

Soundtrack to the Film ‘More’ (1987 remaster)
Ummagumma (1994 remaster)

Zabriskie Point (1997 remaster)





flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR and Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8
*md5, artwork and tracknotes included


Saturday, March 22, 2014

Van Morrison - Contractual Obligations


Van Morrison - Contractual Obligations
(soniclovenoize reimagination)



Side A:
1. Savoy Hollywood
2. Hang On Groovy
3. Twist, Shake and Roll
4. Stomp, Scream and Holler
5. Jump, Thump and Jive
6. Walk, Wobble and Roll
7. Freaky If You Got This Far

Side B:
8. The Big Royalty Check
9. Blowin Your Nose
10. Want A Danish?
11. Shake It Mable
12. Ring Worm
13. The Story of Dumb George




This admittedly is one of my more bizarre album assemblages, originally began as a joke by a friend of mine that morphed into a dare.  He jested that it couldn’t be done; challenge accepted!  Thus, this is my ”reimagination” of what could have been Van Morrison’s second album, recorded solo for the sole purpose of fulfilling his contract with Bang Records in 1968.  Aptly titled Contractual Obligations, I have taken the 31 “revenge songs” that Van Morrison recorded, organized them by musical key and lyrical theme, and edited the fragments together to create thirteen more-or-less complete songs and sequenced them into a semblance of a an album. 



Let Van Morrison be an example of the plight of young artists by the hands of corporate greed and exploitation.  Hastily signing to himself to Bang Records in 1967 in order to avoid literal starvation, Morrison recorded an album’s worth of material he didn’t feel amounted to an actual album.  He left the March 1967 recording sessions thinking that those eight songs—one of them his immensely popular hit “Brown Eyed Girl”—would be released as four separate singles.  Instead, Bang Records collected the songs and released them as Van Morrison’s debut album, Blowin Your Mind.  Not only was this done completely without his consent, but Bang promoted the album in full psychedelic fashion, an image Morrison himself detested.  To make matters worse, label head Burt Berns’ passing in December allowed for his widow Ilene to impose ridiculous performance restrictions on Morrison, all which were allowed by the contract that he himself signed.


Van Morrison’s salvation lied within a simple loophole in his contract: deliver 36 original songs to Bang Records.  And so sometime in early 1968, Van Morrison entered a recording studio and performed 31 intentionally half-assed bullshit songs in order to escape the clutches of Ilene Berns.  The songs were all musically simple--often I-IV-V progressions in E or G—and the lyrics presumably improvised, meaningless, random, inane.  Some were even gibberish.  Morrison had farted out over thirty nonsense songs that were all completely unusable in an act of musical revenge, which fulfilled his contract.  Bang Records refused to release them at the time but the collection eventually appeared as rare bonus material on legally-questionable international anthology releases throughout the years.



For my reimagination, we will postulate how Bang could have assembled these throwaway fragments into some sort of cohesive album.  A listen through the material will tell you that Morrison did not put much thought into the “compositions” musically and they follow similar chord sequences, all standard open chords within the same harmonic family.  We are thus able to easily group most of the songs together by key.  Even luckier, many of those musically-similar compositions share similar lyrical qualities, further identifying possible associations.  Although this was undoubtedly unintentional by Van, we can exploit this tendency and edit these similar fragments together, creating full songs from the fragments.  Using the 31 fragments I was able to create eleven complete songs, leaving two fragments to remain their own stand-alone songs. 



Side A begins with “Savoy Hollywood” which is a combination of the songs “Do It”,"Go For Yourself” and “Savoy Hollywood”.  The beginning tape wow opens the album up mid-song and prepares us for Van’s bumpy ride with strumming and vocal stutters.  Follows is “Hang On Groovy” which is a combination of “La Mambo”, “Just Ball” and “Hang On Groovy”, less a mockery of the classic songs “La Bamba” and “Hang On Sloopy” but more a mockery of Bang for expecting something more than pop-song contrivance for this album.  The next four songs gather together Morrison’s inane send-ups of movement-centric 1950s rock n’roll classics: “Twist, Shake and Roll” (a combination of “Twist and Shake” and ”Shake and Roll”), “Stomp, Scream and Holler” (a combination of “Stomp and Scream” and “Scream and Holler”), “Jump, Thump and Jive” (a combination of “Jump and Thump” and “Drivin Wheel”) and “Walk, Wobble and Roll” (a combination of “Walk and Talk”, ”The Wobble” and “Wobble and Roll”).  The fact that these song are all in a row should drive home how ridiculous this album is, and without the proper mindset is a very painful listen.  Van Morrison himself agrees, as the closing song on side A is the stand-alone “Freaky If You Got This Far”, which it truly is.



Side B starts with an explanation of the album itself: “The Big Royalty Check”, which is a combination of “Big Royalty Check”, “Thirty Two” and “All The Bits”.  Following is “Blowin Your Nose”, a combination of “Blow In Your Nose” and “Nose In You Blow”, a mockery of the first album that Morrison never approved of.  “Want A Danish?” (a combination of “Want A Danish” and “Chickie Coo”) is followed by more silliness in “Shake It Mable” (a combination of “Shake It Mable”, ”You Say France and I Whistle” and “Up In Your Mind”).  The most noteworthy of the “revenge songs” follows, the stand-alone ”Ring Worm”.  To end Contractual Obligations, I united all four songs about the character Dumb George and sequenced them in a logical and presumably chronological order, called “The Story of Dumb George” (a combination of “Here Comes Dumb George”, “Dum Dum George”, “Hold On George” and “Goodbye George”).  The icing on this distasteful cake is the original artwork by EAB, in which Bang Records’ contrived psychdelicism is literally consuming Van Morrison.



Is this a good album?  Oh, God no, this album is fucking awful!  But intentionally awful, for good reason, and thus worth a listen.  It is an absurd album, especially knowing who this is—this is Van Morrison, a genius who combined folk, jazz, soul and pop on his legendary Astral Weeks album, recorded under a year later from Contractual Obligations’ horrific nonsense.  With this in mind, itin t is a fascinating look at the effects of big business on artists, relevant even today.  Sometimes, cause is more relevant than effect and the context of the music is more interesting than the music itself.  Contractual Obligations shows us this as it lies somewhere between pain and pleasure but as an album that never was.  


Sources used: 
Van Morrison - New York Sessions 67 (1997 Recall Records)


flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR & Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8
*md5, artwork and tracknotes included