February 28, 2015

the Zabriskie Point tapes

Well, well, what do we have here? According to Fahey in "How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life"  this experience made him a lot of money, but he didn't have any fun.

Here's some interesting musical trivia sourced from the IMDB page.

"Fingals Cave", a piano piece composed by Richard Wright of Pink Floyd for the 'violent scene' went unused, but was later reworked by the band as "Us and Them" on their album "Dark Side of the Moon". In its original form it has featured on various bootleg albums.

Remembering the scoring sessions for this film, members of Pink Floyd later commented that Michelangelo Antonioni was very difficult to please, offering vague comments like (quoting the bandmembers, mimicking Michelangelo Antonioni's accent) "Eets nice, but too slow" or "Eets a leetle bit too soft."

Antonioni met with Jim Morrison during early production to ask for a musical contribution to the soundtrack. Morrison and the Doors provided "L'America" which Antonioni then rejected.

Download part I HERE

Download part II HERE

15 comments:

  1. I'm unable to process anything more, this is too good to be etc, My greatest friend only comes home from Tokyo every four years to renew his US drivers licence.He needs to hear this immediately. Thanks for many things,

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  2. Do you care to upload this as lossless files? Fantastic find!

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  3. Thanks for putting this one up Scott. I've been as curious as hell about this stuff for years. Having heard it though... Yeah... Kinda makes Derek Bailey sound like Jose Feliciano. Tech note: there are six takes in all. Very bizarre.

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  4. I remember introducing John Fahey to a friend one night through Zabriskie Point. The next morning I woke up to the sad news that he had passed away. Would have loved to attempt some audio restoration for these recordings, hence my request for lossless. It's a low bit rate diamond the way it is!

    Stephan

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  5. is anyone else having trouble accessing the links?

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    1. I cannot access the links either

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    2. Thanks for that new link. Appreciate your good work here!

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  6. Thanks very much....

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  7. I can't believe it. I'm one of the MQR team that restored the Pink Floyd material for both the lost soundtrack album and the film. Very interesting to see more ZP stuff surfacing.

    BTW the song that became Us & Them was The Violent Sequence, not Fingal's Cave

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  8. Hi
    To confirm, Fingals Cave is a guitar led piece originally released on the bootleg Oenone. This contained 4 outtakes from Zabriskie Point (including FC) and two unrelated live tracks. The Violent Sequence was not one of these and it first appeared on the bootleg the complete Zabriskie Point. It's also been played live on at least one boot.

    Both tracks have subsequently had legitimate releases: Fingals Cave is titled "Aeroplane and is disc 8 track 4 on the box set "The Early Years", whilst The Violent Sequence is titled "The Riot Scene" and is disc 8 track 6 on the same box set albeit it is a much shortened edit of the original bootleg version.

    Additional note: the US Kaleidoscope are also rumoured to have recorded more that the two tracks that appear in the film and LP.
    http://www.phinnweb.org/links/cinema/directors/antonioni/zabriskie/

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  9. Oops: the original bootleg was called Omay Yad not Oenone. The latter was a track on the boot.

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  10. My god, this is great! You can hear that the guitar is stringed differently, as he mentions in the short story.

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  11. Glad this is still up. Just read this chapter in his book and I had to hear it. Thanks a ton

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