I hope I’m not the only person who finds tonight’s music interesting.
Neil Young
Sample And Hold (Dance Remix)
Sample And Hold (Single Version)
Sample And Hold (LP Version)
Mr. Soul (Dance Remix)
You have no idea how happy I was to find this single.
Quick backstory (which I’ve covered multiple times here). In 1982 Neil Young released Trans. It was a radical departure for him, abandoning the rock style he was known and acclaimed for and replacing it with a strongly electronic/synthpop sound. Not only that, many of the songs found Young experimenting with a vocoder, which distorted his voice to near unrecognizable levels at times (as someone who has never been a fan of Young’s voice, I don’t consider this to be a bad thing).
It’s a brave, crazy and entirely original record (with a few amazing “traditional sounding” Young tracks too), but it was a massive bomb both critically and commercially. It also wound up being the first in a series of intentionally obtuse and experimental albums that led to Young being sued by his label at the time for releasing music that was too uncommerical.
The album was out of print forever. I even shared the entire thing here twice. But now it’s back in print digitally and I highly recommend buying it. The version on digital storefronts is the CD version, which is remixed and significantly altered when compared to the original LP mix.
I don’t know which came first, the CD mix or these single mixes for “Sample And Hold” and “Mr. Soul,” but it’s obvious that one influenced the other. All the changes that are present on these mixes are also present on the CD version. The guitars are muted, the cymbals are removed, and the beat is punched up to the front of the mix. Both just feel substantially more “electronic” in about every way you can imagine. The CD version of “Sample And Hold” is still the best though, largely because it’s a ridiculous eight minutes long.
Seriously, buy Trans. That album is nuts.
Thanks for that! The LP Version though was the 5-mins-version.
Interesting stuff you may not know about ‘Trans’ (and the previous album, ‘Re-ac-tor’:
Young created this sound as a result of experimenting with synths and vocoders, as a means of therapy for his son, who was born with cerebral palsy.
More info here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_album
I have looked everywhere for these tracks. Thanks for the share!
This ‘take’ on Kraftwerk is probably one of the worst examples of the use of vocoder and all things electronica. It pains me to listen to ‘Trans’, but every now and again I do, just as a way of helping me realise that some music is to be loved, and some is to be detested. A bit like mistakingly tuning into a commercial radio station and catching Maria Carey or some other anal pomposity