Crashed firefox about 50 times. Not worth the trouble.
Works just fine in Chrome. On my machine, anyway.
I listened to “Discreet Music” SO MUCH in the eighties.
for i in `seq -w 1 10`; do wget -r -l4 -e robots=off -HDcentro.org.mx,ubuweb.com -A mp3,jpg http://www.ubuweb.com/sound/obscure_$i.html; done
(assuming bash, dunno if this will work in other shells.)
Edit: TIL about the -w flag to seq
Did you try to stream the music? I simply downloaded (using Firefox) and it worked fine for me.
Tried to download #3. Crashed every time I just went on the page, before I even clicked anything.
Aren’t a number of these still in print? And presumably collecting (however miniscule) royalties for their creators?
I dunno. I just rechecked and it works fine for me.
Firefox is getting increasingly flaky. On my laptop, it won’t load the comments on Slate (no great loss) but on my desktop it will. Same config, same version, same add-ons. Go figure. I’d switch to Chrome but it offends me to force installing it on the C: drive in a data folder.
That’s strange, I remember a different album cover. Was there a Volume 2?
There was a re-release by E.G. Records:
Virgin re-re-released it later using the original Obscure art.
The Pavilion of Dreams. Perhaps one of my top 10 favorite albums.
I take that back. EASILY one of my top 10 favorite albums.
The secret of these albums is that if you listen to all ten simultaneously it turns out to be Pet Sounds. Eno was way ahead of his time.
Wow- just listened to the 1st one, bloody haunting and incredible. Even more so having read the story behind “Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet”. I look forward to soaking up the rest of these records.
In 1971, when I lived in London, I was working with a friend, Alan Power, on film about people living rough in the area around Elephant and Castle and Waterloo Station. In the course of being filmed, some people broke into drunken song - sometimes bits of opera, sometimes sentimental ballads - and one, who in fact did not drink, sang a religious song “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet”. This was not ultimately used in the film and I was given all the unused sections of tape, including this one.
When I played it at home, I found that his singing was in tune with my piano, and I improvised a simple accompaniment. I noticed, too, that the first section of the song - 13 bars in length - formed an effective loop which repeated in a slightly unpredictable way. I took the tape loop to Leicester, where I was working in the Fine Art Department, and copied the loop onto a continuous reel of tape, thinking about perhaps adding an orchestrated accompaniment to this. The door of the recording room opened on to one of the large painting studios and I left the tape copying, with the door open, while I went to have a cup of coffee. When I came back I found the normally lively room unnaturally subdued. People were moving about much more slowly than usual and a few were sitting alone, quietly weeping.
I was puzzled until I realised that the tape was still playing and that they had been overcome by the old man’s singing. This convinced me of the emotional power of the music and of the possibilities offered by adding a simple, though gradually evolving, orchestral accompaniment that respected the tramp’s nobility and simple faith. Although he died before he could hear what I had done with his singing, the piece remains as an eloquent, but understated testimony to his spirit and optimism.
I highly recommend the expanded versions of both of these pieces, especially Jesus’ Blood.
Cor, I thought 25 mins a piece was already pretty expanded. How would I find those?
They were both released on individual CDs via Point in the early '90s. They’ve been expanded to a bit over 70 minutes.
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