____twoism

Been a BOC fan for a few years but never got the chance to really hear this. What am I missing? What makes it different from the rest of their work and how does it sit with other pieces of work they have done.

Learning every day.

Well it'll be good to hear them! You're talking another 4 hours of BOC here, or something like that anyway. The best source for finding out about the tapes is the "boc pages" link above!

Welp it's different because it's from the years when they were still searching for their style. Expect lots of different themes.

Old Tunes/R35TT are VEERY different from the LPs, EPs and singles. There's a lot of fucking around with the sound on the early releases.

Some very unique sounds mixed with some stuff that developed it's way onto the albums. There are some fantastic tracks scattered about worthy of a bit of sunlight. A large pallet of great sounds meshed together in a style unique to BoC.

I've never been able to grasp where Old Tunes ends and everything else begins.. Especially since following this forum over the past year, I think it's actually made it even less clear. One reason for my confusion being I didn't realise Random 35 Tracks Tape and R35TT are the same thing! (duhhh)

Also, everyone seems to lump R35TT and Old Tunes vol. 1 and 2 together (awkwardly and confusingly, all under the umbrella of 'Old Tunes'.)

Then there is Closes vol. 1 and Hooper Bay...

Najlepsiejszy wrote:Welp it's different because it's from the years when they were still searching for their style. Expect lots of different themes.

Old Tunes/R35TT are VEERY different from the LPs, EPs and singles. There's a lot of fucking around with the sound on the early releases.

I love its unfinished-ness.

It's like art collectors stumbling across a quick sketch van Gogh did on a napkin before deeming it not worthy and throwing it away.. now valued at millions

oh, and another thing, I hate to bring up the recently locked Doors_Of_Perception thread in another thread, but in regards to the 2009 rip, I struggle to understand how if someone HAD the original tapes and ripped them why they wouldn't be in a high quality. I mean.. how does one record something NOT in high quality in this day and age?

I also was curious about that. Because these rips have been around since 2001 so I'm not sure what changed 09.

Old Tunes Vol. 2 is a very easy way to get into the whole cycle. It's the last put out, in my opinion it's also the most consistent and interesting, though A Few Old Tunes is fantastic too.

There was a lot of confusion about R35TT because no one knew what to call it. They still don't really.

Years ago, some people thought R35TT was really Old Tunes Vol. 1, there was Old Tunes Vol. 2 and the theory then was that A Few Old Tunes could have been "Vol. 3"

Turns out that "A Few Old Tunes" is really just Old Tunes Vol. 1 after all, I believe that was clarified officially...at some point.

MDG also authenticated R35TT but says BoC never compiled the tape themselves, and that it's a mixture of songs from "different sources". That's led to speculation that it's a hodge-podge of songs put together from the back catalog, like Acid Memories, Hooper Bay, etc. That's what I tend to believe...there is a song on there that was floating around on file sharing networks as "Godever" a long time before the rest of the tape was released...BoC also has the fanmade video for "5D" (which is track A07 on R35TT) on their Youtube playlist. Is that a hint that the video creator has it right, or is the video just too cool to not include on the playlist?

To my ears, most of the material on R35TT sounds more fully developed than Old Tunes, but older somehow, and using different song styles and instrumentation than was typical for BoC circa Twoism/Maxima. Both Old Tunes volumes are more ambient sounding - they were known to be compiled around the same time as Maxima, so its likely that they took their less developed material that was thematically similar to the music that they were shopping around to record labels.

There is your Old Tunes/R35TT education.

Techboy wrote:I also was curious about that. Because these rips have been around since 2001 so I'm not sure what changed 09.

Good catch there, I remember getting my hands on all of this stuff for the first time around 2003-2004 myself. I don't know where 09 came from either.

Cool. Cheers for the insight guys.

i-the-wayside wrote:oh, and another thing, I hate to bring up the recently locked Doors_Of_Perception thread in another thread, but in regards to the 2009 rip, I struggle to understand how if someone HAD the original tapes and ripped them why they wouldn't be in a high quality. I mean.. how does one record something NOT in high quality in this day and age?

with not high quality gear

re-phaelam-ed wrote:

i-the-wayside wrote:oh, and another thing, I hate to bring up the recently locked Doors_Of_Perception thread in another thread, but in regards to the 2009 rip, I struggle to understand how if someone HAD the original tapes and ripped them why they wouldn't be in a high quality. I mean.. how does one record something NOT in high quality in this day and age?

with not high quality gear

Still, even good source with a bad mp3 encoder or low bitrate, 'fuhgetaboutit'

i was deprived of enjoying these fine creations till today. that's an explanation for my aberrant behavior. old tunes vol 2 actually reminds me of perfuse 73 (in a good way). old tunes vol 1 is surprising with all the initial versions of tracks... and "trapped" with that synth "underlining" is just incredible, easily one of my fave top10 boc tracks.

as for digitizing, you have the source (the cassette), you have the deck playing the cassette (a quality one, with at least an amorphous head, professionally calibrated, cleaned and all that), you have the analog-digital converters (which don't come cheap by any standard)... after that you have noise reduction which has a lot of interdependent parameters which you need to juggle, somewhat like "dancing on the edge of a knife" (i.e. it is very easy to overdo it and lose too much audible material... and you don't even need to overdo it in order to have some really really nasty artifacts... noise reduction is ALWAYS a lossy method).

only after that comes the part which you really have to be stupid to fsck up (like normalizing and encoding...)

and all this without mentioning any hint of software knowledge... Audacity may seem a right choice but i wouldn't trust it with as much as normalizing (e.g. it can't handle inter-sample peaks)

lukalukaluka wrote:Been a BOC fan for a few years but never got the chance to really hear this. What am I missing? What makes it different from the rest of their work and how does it sit with other pieces of work they have done.

Learning every day.

their old tunes catalog is some of their best work, unpolished and kind of messy and sloppy but in a traditional boc way.

check it out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdDGdC0eZ44

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXu_NNj6Xmg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXu_NNj6Xmg

damn, i wish i still hadn't heard these tracks,
as a boc fan, i have to reverse their soundtrack now since I've already heard everything,
lol

Thanks gang

It just doesn't get any better than Old Tunes. It's the purest BoC you will ever hear.

if nothing else you've gotta hear sequoia