The "Danseparc"/"Mystery Walk" CD
The Next Echo Beach
Treehouse follow-up
On-Line Music/"Ice Age" CD
Garden music
RUN DMC cut cut
Found sounds
Martha's German echo
It was a somber millenial turn at the Gane residence as Mark's dad passed away just before the holidays. As things settle into the new year, we can expect interesting turns in the creative life of M+M. Mark has been so kind to answer a few questions.
Of course, a topic of great interest to fans was the release of a new CD on One Way Records, incorporating two classic albums, Dansparc and Mystery Walk. I asked Mark how this came about and got this answer
We only found out about the Danseparc/Mystery Walk compilation CD when a fan alerted us to its existence last Oct. While it's good news in that it makes those two albums available on CD format, we had no control or say over the remastering or cover artwork. There were also some rights clearance issues which have now been resolved to our satisfaction.
On a happier note, Mark gives a rundown of current projects.
For the German label Echo Beach's tribute CD to the song of the same name,
Martha and I have come up with a new song called "On A Silent Summer
Evening" which is an 'echo' of "Echo Beach". While it contains fragments
of the original song, it's much slower/darker - perhaps indicative of our
40 something perspective.
Martha's started working on that elusive second children's album again - we
just mixed a song called "You" which we recorded mainly in '96 but just
finished off recently. Our kids will be way too old to appreciate this
album by the time it gets out!
We're working on a couple of deals with .com distributors with the eventual
aim of making individual songs of the entire MatM catalogue directly
downloadable to fans' computers. We're hoping the income from this will
help to fund the reissuing of select CDs (like "Ice Age") that would have
extra tracks and additional liner notes.
The Garden Music Project continues to slowly move ahead as well. I've got
some really creepy tracks assembled for a composition called "Deadly
Nightshade" - definitely not for the kids! At about seven minutes in
length, it just slithers along...
(See newsletter #2 for more details on the Garden project)
On another note, we just found out [January 29] that "The Beginning (No
Further Delay)", the RUN DMC track which used a sample of "Black
Stations/White Stations" didn't make the final track sequence on their new
album "Crown Royal".
Some time ago, I had asked Mark whether he ever considered remixing old live material into newer compositions, a technique which I thought was performed to great effect by Frank Zappa in the past. Mark had this response:
Well no, but what a great idea. I finally transferred a number of really old tapes of early Muffins gigs and rehearsals from '77 to '79 and there would be lots of great stuff to sample/combine. We used to do a live version of "Daytripper" (among other things), before we had enough of our own material and the intro to that would make a great loop.
After visiting the German "echo beach" site (<http://www.echobeach.de>) I had a question about something I read there. Mark cleared things up:
You also asked whether Martha had been on a previous release on the German label Echo Beach. The answer is yes. In 1998 they released a CD called "Faraway In Time" Cat.# EB016 (not to be confused with the Virgin compilation of the same title), which included a dub/remix of "Echo Beach" by Reverend E.C.H.O. featuring new vocals by Martha which were sung over a long distance phone line to an answering machine and then sampled.
Well, that wraps up the first M+M online newsletter of the new millenium!
Thanks for stopping by!
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