vandalism

A little more than a year ago, I happened to dig out the two-disc set Elektra Records put out for its 40th anniversary, Rubaiyat, which featured contemporary Elektra bands covering tracks from the label's catalog. Included was a version of Television's "Marquee Moon" arranged for string quartet and played by Kronos Quartet. I never liked Kronos' version all that much, actually, although moments were intriguing. Somewhere I read about someone either actually combining this version with the original, or just talking about doing so - and I decided that would be a good idea.

Easier said than done. One thing you find out quite quickly is that pre-drum machine rock music has a much more flexible sense of tempo than your ears are likely to pick out. This meant it was much harder to pick out a chunk of the Kronos recording and layer it over the corresponding section of the Television recording each time that section recurs...because the sections might have been played slightly faster or slower each time. Or at least, that would have been the problem...had Kronos not played the whole damned thing way too fast (in my opinion).

Anyway, first I slowed down the Kronos recording so the tempos roughly matched (without altering the pitch, since at least they played in the same key). The doohickey that does this in GoldWave (the software I used) turns out to be not as good as the one in Audacity (but I wasn't aware of that application at the time), so the sound quality got a bit murky. Fortunately, my guiding aesthetic here was to be subtle: I didn't want to try to slather the original recording with wall-to-wall string quartet. My guideline was the subtle way Television deployed keyboards in the original: after the first listen, you might not even remember there were any keyboards on the track, but if you listen for them, you realize they're essential to some key moments of the song. What this meant, in terms of matching up tempos and such, is that I didn't have to match up entire phrases (with one exception); instead, I could cut and paste very short phrases, sometimes single notes, and manually match tempos.

The biggest difficulty was the phrase leading into the chorus. Because the song drops in two bars of 3/4 during that section, and because the feel of the song at that point is flowing rather than the repetitious staccato of the main riff, it wouldn't do to try to put a chopped-and-channeled edit of the string parts there, and I couldn't just set up a loop of 4/4 and let it go. And to make things worse, Kronos decided to play with loads of rubato (for non-musicians: that means letting the song's speed reel about like a drunken sailor) in this section. I was about to give up on this part, when I thought, well, hey, what if instead of trying to sync up the parts at the beginning, I just make sure they end together? I tried that, adjusted the volume of the strings so they nearly fade in...and it worked pretty well, creating a sort of swirling countermelody that finally locks in at the very end of the phrase - conveniently, right when the flowing feel of Verlaine's guitar lines stop dead, before the stiff but off-center rhythms of the chorus come in ("life in the hive...").

The other main head-scratcher? On what I came to call The Big Scale (the scalar buildup to the piano-and-twittering-bird-guitar part, after the lengthy, beautifully architectonic guitar solo), Kronos went all goofy and changed the time to 6/4. Not so bad - I could just double the last two beats of each bar so it matched up with the original.

One other minor bit of creative problem-solving: Kronos' version comes in at a slim four-and-a-half minutes. Now, granted, I wasn't going to use the whole thing (I ultimately used only a few bars, in fact), but Television's original has that huge honking guitar solo in the middle: what should the strings do during that solo? Should they endlessly repeat and double the riff along with the rhythm guitar? Boring. Should they just disappear? That seemed pointless, and an easy way out. So instead, I found a moment in the Kronos track that was just an open fifth (I believe it was double-stopped on the cello) on D and A; fortunately, the note was long enough that I could sand down both edges, layer it atop itself repeatedly, and essentially create a drone. Then I faded that drone in over about three minutes, from inaudibility to being nearly balanced with the rest of the instruments' volume. If you're not listening for it, you don't notice it's there, really.

Happy accident: there's a really nice moment near the end where the parts sync up almost perfectly, then scatter.

Anyway, enjoy. And please don't have the band come and beat me up.

Television "Marquee Moon" (original)
Television/Kronos Quartet "Marquee Moon" (2F'd-Up mix)