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Philip Glass letter


boris

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does anyone have the scan of the letter RDJ supposedly wrote to Philip Glass for the Icct Hedrel orchestration? I can't seem to find it and I googled and everything!!

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I think I read an article on it in NME back in the day, I guess that's where the scan is from.

 

Edit: or maybe it was select magazine, I can't remember.

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if anyone turned as many knobz as richard haz, they would right lyk that 2.


if anyone turned as many knobz as richard haz, they would right lyk that 2.

that was probably the 1st time he's ever used a writing utensil

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  • 3 months later...

 

Philip Glass: They were interested in the same things that I was. But not only that, but someone like Richard James, that would be of Aphex Twin. He didn't have that kind of education but he had those kinds of instincts. I was very interested in what Richard James [was doing]. We did some things together, I think it was in the '80s, maybe we may have done three or four tracks together, that's all we did. But he would come over to [my house]. Do you all know who he is? He would come over, he was about 22 or 23, very young guy. I was easily twice his age, if not older. And we started doing a record together. What was interesting about him, he had no formal training, but then again, a lot of people don't have formal training who come into music from a cultural tradition, which doesn't have a notated tradition of music. They have a tradition of performance music. And Richard was kind of like one of those guys. And I asked him what instruments did he play? He said, well, he didn't really play anything. I asked him where his ideas came from. He said, "Well, I just go to junk stores and buy whatever electronic junk there was and I would see what made sounds and I made music out of it." That was his explanation. I thought it was a pretty good explanation, when I listened to his music it sounded like that. So one time with him, what I did, he gave me one of his tracks. In those days there would be 16 tracks, maybe 24, but 16 would have been a very normal amount then. And basically, I listened to a track and I would replace that track with another track, which was based on the track that he had done. And by the time I got done with it, I had replaced all the tracks. So that it sounded both like him and like me. It was a very interesting experiment. We did a couple experiments like that. So with someone like Richard, he was willing to do anything. We didn't have any rules about what we were doing. We had a studio. At that point, I was down in SoHo, at a place called the Big Apple Studio. It was in the basement at 120 Greene Street. I still remember the address. And we had a studio there and when we weren't there, there was some kind of dance band guy writing music for... there was some other thing going on. It didn't sound that different from what we were doing anyway, but we did a lot of work there. Michael Riesman, who was my music director, he actually ran that studio for a while. He was a part-owner of that studio and he finally gave it up. But we were working side-by-side, and with the same technology.

RBMA: What struck you about Richard's music? I mean, what did you hear in it that was interesting to you?

Philip Glass: What I liked about it was that I liked it and I didn't understand it. I'm always attracted to things that I can't understand. It's a fundamental aspect of curiosity. When I don't understand something, I get curious about it. And I liked his music, and I didn't know what I liked about it. I wanted to hear more of it. And I wanted to fool around with it. You know who else is very much like that? David Byrne was like that. We did some things together, too. I remember once, I was writing some songs and I asked David if he would write some lyrics for me, because I couldn't write lyrics but David could write lyrics. He was very good at that. And so he came to my house and he had a couple notebooks full of sentences, here and there. He said, "Well, here, what do you think of that?" And I said, "Well," I said, "Let me take that sentence, and that sentence," and I went through it and I made a song out of it. I said, "What do you think of that?" He said, "That's what I thought you would do." (laughs) Now, I had no idea what he thought, but, uh...

 

 

From this red bull lecture: http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures/philip-glass

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I wonder if rdj really just wrote him a letter.

 

He's done it before. He was fond of faxing for some reason. It was the same way he got in contact with Pierre Bastien.

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I wonder if rdj really just wrote him a letter.

He's done it before. He was fond of faxing for some reason. It was the same way he got in contact with Pierre Bastien.

it would be cool to be sitting in an office with a cup of coffee when a fax comes in, you roll your chair over, tear it off the dot matrix printer, lean back and read COME ON YOU CUNT LETS HAVE SOME APHEX ACID

 

*sips coffee*

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I wonder if rdj really just wrote him a letter.

He's done it before. He was fond of faxing for some reason. It was the same way he got in contact with Pierre Bastien.

it would be cool to be sitting in an office with a cup of coffee when a fax comes in, you roll your chair over, tear it off the dot matrix printer, lean back and read COME ON YOU CUNT LETS HAVE SOME APHEX ACID

 

*sips coffee*

 

 

The dot matrix printer would bump it to brilliant. Maybe even have it print out to the main melody for 'On'.

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im fascinated by what Glass said about sixteen tracks. ''oh in those days we did sixteen tracks''. huh? ok, pro studios with a reel to reel maybe. i know pro tools was in its infancy. you could do sixteen tracks of digital i guess, but it would have sounded awful. not that aphex early stuff was high end sounding. i just found it odd that he talked like everyone was doing 16 track. like aphex is like all the other musicians doing things by standard rules.

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Glass might have been mixing up his decades. Afx might have had a 16 track Studer. Who knows? I was under the impression he was recording full live stereo mixes to tape with little to no track separation in the early 90s.

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