Alan Parsons Project
I can still remember every word of this whole album
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I do like the original over the remix though
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Last edited Mon Oct 7, 2024, 07:14 AM - Edit history (1)
There was an LP version released by a Portuguese label which added a little narration by Orson Welles. It fit. The rest of the recording was basically untouched, IIRC. (Wikipedia doesn't mention this; it does document a 1987 remix and a deluxe Anniversary Edition.)
I seem to recall Andrew Powell -- the classically-trained member of the original project -- did not participate in the remix, with disastrous (IMHO) results. Some of the remarks in the liner notes show an appalling ignorance of music history and other fundamental aspects of music, which any classically-trained musician would never have excused. "The Tell-Tale Heart" suffered especially, with the suspense of the Ligeti-style shifting, dissonant choral 'curtains' being broken by some ill-timed, utterly out-of-place, weepy synthesizer and some guitar work that crossed over into pure vandalism. Worst of all, the cack-handed guitar solos by Ian Bairson were utterly out of sync with the original atmosphere, stylistically and tonally -- at least as out of place as a bulb horn in a Beethoven sonata.
Others may disagree. 
The thing I liked so much about the original was that it eschewed so many rock stereotypes, added orchestral (string, brass, woodwind, and percussion) elements (as did some later APP works), and included long segments with no vocals at all, with the usual monotonous guitars pushed into the background while the orchestra let rip, giving a much richer, much more varied, overall sound. I'm guessing that was all, or at least mostly, Powell's contribution.
