{"id":870,"date":"2007-09-18T04:39:19","date_gmt":"2007-09-18T08:39:19","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2008-12-10T16:41:58","modified_gmt":"2008-12-10T16:41:58","slug":"lou-reed-as-his-music-was-meant-to-sound-15","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/lou-reed-as-his-music-was-meant-to-sound-15\/","title":{"rendered":"Lou Reed&#8230;As His Music Was Meant to Sound!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/kXgbN81zNG8?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.pitchforkmedia.com\/article\/feature\/45431-interview-lou-reed\" title=\"http:\/\/www.pitchforkmedia.com\/article\/feature\/45431-interview-lou-reed\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Pitchfork<\/em> interviews a kinder, gentler Lou<\/a>, who speaks of Germans covering <em>Metal Machine Music<\/em>, his own music&#8217;s influence on himself, and his quest for the perfect sound. Mad props to <strong>Oats<\/strong> for passing this along.<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Pitchfork:<\/strong> &#8230;And then this year, you released <em>Hudson River Wind Meditations<\/em>, which many have described as both antithetical to and an extension of <em>Metal Machine Music<\/em>. Are you finding yourself less and less interested in traditional verse-chorus-verse songwriting?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Reed:<\/strong> Funny you should ask that. &#8220;Fire Music&#8221; came after 9\/11, and I was [living] just a couple of blocks from [Ground Zero]. And I was talking to some <strong>gearheads<\/strong>, some tech guys&#8211; I wanted to know if you could do certain things that I was able to do on <em>Metal Machine<\/em> because it was analog. In digital, they said, &#8220;You can do this, you can do that, but you can&#8217;t do that, it will lose punch. You could technically do that, but it wouldn&#8217;t sound too great.&#8221; I thought that was kind of fascinating. So I wanted to do this little piece with a <em>Metal Machine<\/em> approach. It&#8217;s only two or three minute long. That&#8217;s &#8220;Fire Music&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;Fire Music&#8221; just kills me.<\/strong> We mastered it&#8230;if you ever get to hear it on a big system, cause it&#8217;s only two or three minutes long, but that thing, about two-thirds of the way through, rises up and advances out of the speakers, and I swear to you, it is amazing. I was up at [producer] <strong>Bob Ludwig<\/strong>&#8216;s where he listening on these huge, God knows what&#8230;and that thing just rises up like this huge sonic wave, it&#8217;s amazing. If there wasn&#8217;t a wall to catch you, you&#8217;d still be heading south! It&#8217;s just so astonishing. I started doing this other kind of music, and I was running these programs through guitar pedals. And it wasn&#8217;t meant for guitar pedals. I found out lots of people do that.<\/p>\n<p>But that&#8217;s what I was doing, and that led into what became <em>Hudson River Wind Meditations<\/em>. That happened because <ins>I started getting this sound, and I&#8217;ve tried to get the sound back, but I can&#8217;t get it back&#8211; it&#8217;s the one on the record, but I can&#8217;t reproduce it.<\/ins> I was using some stuff by <strong>Line 6<\/strong>, and I don&#8217;t know, coupled with a virus. I&#8217;m not sure what exactly did it, but I&#8217;ve never been able to get it back, because I didn&#8217;t write it down and it wasn&#8217;t MIDIed. But I had this thing and I really loved it and it was really good for meditation, it was really good for doing certain physical workouts, like Tai Chi. I took it to my class and the class liked it so we kept it there and used it. I would practice my routine to it. And I also did meditation to it. And then some people said, &#8220;Can we borrow that thing?&#8221; and I thought OK, I will move out of the rock thing because I don&#8217;t want rock people thinking that there are rock&#8217;n&#8217;roll songs here, like they did with <em>Metal Machine Music<\/em>. It&#8217;s for someone who wants it and knows what it is.<\/p>\n<p>But you know, &#8220;Fire Music&#8221;, I hadn&#8217;t gone back to <em>Metal Machine<\/em> in a long time, but on <em>The Raven<\/em>, there are all these little electronic pieces in between the songs, and that built up to &#8220;Fire Music&#8221;. I&#8217;ve got another one that I&#8217;ve got that I haven&#8217;t released. It&#8217;s the other side of the meditation music, it&#8217;s called <em>Purity<\/em>. It&#8217;s really amazing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pitchfork interviews a kinder, gentler Lou, who speaks of Germans covering Metal Machine Music, his own music&#8217;s influence on himself, and his quest for the perfect sound. Mad props to Oats for passing this along.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[68],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=870"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}