They weren't Eno's first box. Working backwards 1983-1973 was a vinyl collection of 11 albums that included a couple of rarities: an EP with singles (RAF and 7 deadly finns) and some instrumental tracks. And music for films 2. Luckily for me (who had all the main albums) Impact records in Canberra broke the sets up, so I could buy the missing disks and the box.
This set was rumoured for a while, and was going to be called Familiar strange and Strange familiar (as in making the familiar strange - an oblique strategy). But eventually there were called I and II, or Instrumental and Vocal.
Instrumental has Music for Films 1 and 2, a couple of tracks from Another green world and Before and after science on disk one, collaborations (such as Fripp, Budd, Bowie or Cluster) on disk 2 and long Eno pieces on 3 (some in edit).
Vocal has almost all of the four 'song' albums across the first 2 disks (with some frustrating omissions) and the singles, then the third disk is again collaborations (Cale, Cluster, Byrne) and the grabber - some tracks from My squelchy life - the almost released album which circulated in review copies but was then pulled. Some tracks were reworked for Nerve net - but this was a sought after item at the time.
The material was reproduced using Sony's Super-bit mapping - to give higher fidelity 20 bit sound instead of the standard 16 bit on most CDs. Wow!
But it was great to get all of this on CD. The quality control on some aspects of the packaging was iffy: I remember I had to return one disk which was duplicated, and it was probably made harder in the plants because the screen-printing on the disks seemed to put I or II almost randomly (2 of the disks in Box II have ENO I on them). So enough rarities, better production, plus the fantastic content. A great pair of boxes.
This link to discogs has some nice images of Eno Box I to give you a better idea!
1 comment:
Very nice box sets, all 3 that you mentioned. Great to see these mentioned.
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