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Song Premiere: Beck Remixes Philip Glass With ‘NYC: 73-78’

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From NPR Music: "The latest tease from this fall's upcoming collection of remixed Philip Glass tunes comes from Beck. The 20-minute song, "NYC: 73-78," includes snippets from more than 20 Glass songs, which Beck cut together and re-imagined…."read more

19 thoughts on “Song Premiere: Beck Remixes Philip Glass With ‘NYC: 73-78’”

  1. ‘NYC: 73-78’ is like one of those vivd dreamscapes in which disparate locations all seem to coexist in the same (psychological) space; both disconcerting and familiar all at once!
    I recognised most of the pieces that were remixed but there was one section (around the 4 minute mark) I couldn’t identify; not as Glass but it did remind me of ‘The State We’re In’ from The Chemical Brothers 2001 album ‘Come With Us’.
    Looking forward to the release date.

  3. Tom,
    I believe you are referring to the music from Neverwas. The soundtrack was release on OMM as part of the from the Philip Glass Archive recording. Good stuff. Not so good film. It never even got a theatrical release despite its amazing cast.
    Richard

  5. Believe it or not, I haven’t actually bought the album yet (I’m 8 weeks behind on my rent so buying music is a bit out of the question, for now!), when I posted my earlier comment it was in response to the online “preview” I had heard. Luckily the NPR track is still up so I had another listen to it for you; these were the tracks I was able to identify (in the order they occur) but there may have been a few that I missed hidden in the mix:
    In the Upper Room – I
    Les Enfants Terribles – Scene 6. The Somnambulist
    The Hours – Morning Passages
    The Witches of Venice – The Fairies
    (possibly Another Look at Harmony Part 4 mixed in with a track I can’t identify; with the vocal “people in the street” being sung over it, but I’m not sure)
    Animals in Love – The Bath
    Aguas da Amazonia – Purus River
    Undertow – Chris and the Model Airplane
    Dracula (solo piano) – Journey to the Inn
    The Witches of Venice – Gondolas Bringing Guests
    Animals in Love – The Gaze, the Scents
    Aguas da Amazonia – Tapajos River
    Animals in Love – The Bath
    (things get very layered here, with tracks overlapping considerably, but I think I heard something from Foday Musa Suso in the mix)
    North Star – Anges de Orages
    Book of Longing – Puppet Time
    Monsters of Grace – My Worst Habit
    Neverwas – title theme
    … there were probably a few others which escaped my ear/memory, (or which I may be confusing with other tracks) but those are the ones I can identify.

  7. It might appear impressive but I’m not sure I got them all correctly; I suspect I may have confused a few tracks with each other. It would be nice to see a list of the actual tracks that were remixed; the article states that there are more than 20 tracks used and I’ve only identified 16, and there’s a lot of music mixed in there that I haven’t been able to identify.

  8. Even if you got some of the tracks wrong, the range of works you were able to reference is still quite impressive :).
    Guess work is almost unavoidable since most of the tracks mixed in here are not as well known.
    Around the 11:20 mark I heard what I thought was sounds from 1000 Ariplanes on the Roof but it might have been something else instead.

  9. Of course it helps if you have over 100 Glass albums in your collection! I’m guessing that all the tracks on the remix album are from OMM releases; licensing issues etc., so I’d be surprised if ‘1000 Airplanes on the Roof’ is in there. Although, the more I think about it, the less convinced I am about ‘Gondolas bringing Guests’ from ‘The Witches of Venice’; I listened to it again recently, but I wasn’t able to find the track I thought I had identified in the remix!
    I wonder if the CD liner has credits for all the tracks used in each remix?

  10. Yes, sometimes having a massive collection is not enough to completely narrow things down.
    Interesting point about OMM though I’d like to think they have access to Glass’s back catalogue as well. The part that I referred to may well be from something like “A Descent into a Maelstrom” or “Fog of War” as well. Having a list of track would be really useful.

  12. Thanks for the link, Donald T. West!
    (I’m listening to ‘Prashanti’ and being thankful that the world was blessed with Ravi Shankar; his music, and the music he inspires in others, will live forever!)

  14. Yes, ‘The Hours’ – ‘Vanessa and the Changelings’, I had misidentified as ‘Morning Passages’!
    And the piano part, overlaid on ‘In the Upper Room’ does sound like ‘A Gentleman’s Honor’ but it’s hard to be sure because, if it is, it has been pitch-shifted downward considerably (which, to my untrained ears, makes the intervals sound slightly different as well!).

  15. At first I thought The Somnambulist from Les Enfants Terribles was the beginning of A Gentleman’s Honor, but the music remixed is on the Orange Mountain Music label.

  16. I had thought it might be a “stripped down” sample from part of ‘The Somnambulist’ (perhaps just one of the piano parts in isolation?) but, after listening to ‘A Gentleman’s Honor’ and the start of ‘NYC: 73-78’ back to back for comparison, I now think Donald T. West is right; it does sound the same as ‘A Gentleman’s Honor’, even if it is not a direct sample as such.
    While I don’t think that ‘The Photographer’ is part of the OMM catalogue of recordings (I don’t know), the fragment is so “minimal” it probably escapes any claim of licensing issues; it’s essentially 4 notes rising in a combination of 5ths and 8ths (which is something you could just as easily “claim” as the piano introduction to ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’!) and when you start pitch-shifting it about you move further into creating, arguably, a new musical piece.
    ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’; ‘The Photographer’ killed his wife’s lover; his photo-studies gave birth (in their own way) to cinema; movie musicals gave rise to music videos! The mind Buggles!

  18. Yes, I think you’re right.
    There’s a brief moment in the sample from ‘My Worst Habit’ that has a similar see-saw between two notes as well, but the instrumentation (and emphasis) is different.
    From what I can find, none of the tracks used in the remix are identified in the CD liner notes.

  19. I have Monsters Of Grace, so I recognized the keyboards when it got to that part in ’73-’78. When it’s remixed with a drum kit, it sounds really good!

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