Beatles - Carnival of Light
 

Apperently the Beatles are planning on releasing an experimental jam from 1967 called "Carnival of Light"

should be interesting

Oooooohhhhh.....WANT.

yea i was reading about that this morning on CNN. It was supposed to be originally included on the anthology but george martin was against it.I really want to hear it!

A "lost" Beatles track recorded in 1967 and performed just once in public could finally be released, according to Paul McCartney. "Carnival of Light" -- a 14-minute experimental track recorded at the height of the Beatles' musical experimentations with psychedelia and inspired by avant-garde composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen -- has long been considered too adventurous for mainstream audiences.


In an interview for BBC radio, McCartney said his bandmates and their producer George Martin had vetoed its inclusion on the exhaustive 1990s "Anthology" collection, according to UK's The Observer newspaper.
McCartney confirmed he still owned the master tapes, adding that he suspected "the time has come for it to get its moment," The Observer reported. "I like it because it's the Beatles free, going off piste," McCartney said.

Almost everything recorded by the Beatles from their early days in Liverpool and Hamburg to their break-up in 1970 has been released to meet insatiable public appetite for anything to do with the legendary Liverpool quartet.
In the 40 years since its recording, "Carnival of Light" has acquired near mythical status among Beatles fans who argue that the existence of the track provides evidence of the group's experimental ambitions beyond their commercially successfully pop career.

The improvised work features distorted electric guitars, discordant sound effects, a church organ and gargling interspersed with McCartney and John Lennon shouting random phrases like "Barcelona" and "Are you all right?"
McCartney would need the consent of Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, and George Harrison's widow, Olivia Harrison, to release the track.

14 minutes only?
That's even hardly long enough for an EP..
how are they going to manage that?

that's plenty of time. nervous breakdown was only 5 minutes long and that's one of the best eps of all time.

anything titled Carnival of Light sounds so goddamned self-laudatory and egocentric and fucking overwrought....

fuck

it will be like listening to king crimson fart for a quarter hour. hell, that may be better than king crimson's normal bullshit.

I get the feeling this will let a lot of people down and I'm ok with that. There's way too much hero worship for The Beatles and bands in general.They're just people.

I dnt have the hero worship. I just think they were a good band. Especially in the 2nd half of their career. I'm gonna get this, though. I think it'll be interesting to hear.

the question is how long is it going to take to get released. I can't see Yoko Ono having a problem with an experimental track being released under the beatles name but i'm not so sure about harrison's widow and ringo.

I totally agree they were a great band, but I know plenty of people who would claim that everything they ever did was genius and treat them like gods. It's these people are going to be really disappointed when it's nothing like what they expect from The Beatles.

That said, I do want to hear it. I'm just going to try to got into it with an open mind and see what happens.

the GREAT ONES are never ever "just people."

stop trying to diminish the great ones to make the majority of mediocres feel better

Carnival Of Light
McCartney, Lennon Harrison, Starr voices organ, guitar, tambourine, effects, loops
Recorded: 5th January 1967, Abbey Road 2.
Producer: George Martin Engineer: Geoff Emerick.

Rejected for Anthology 2 - supposedly by Harrison but probably also by others involved - this 13:48 'freak-out' was taped by The Beatles during an evening session following a vocal overdub on Penny Lane. For various reasons, it will never be officially released, although it may, of course, eventually end up on a bootleg. Almost no one outside the Apple circle has heard it and interest among 'Beatleologists' is consequentially high. In fact, an enterprising fraudster could easily counterfeit a black-market version, since the real thing sounds nothing like The Beatles.
A free-form piece without beat or key, Carnival of Light was instigated and directed by McCartney eighteen months before Lennon's Revolution 9. For this reason, if nothing else, McCartney is proud of it and apparently still hankers for it to be in the public domain. Yet while it establishes his 'underground' credentials ahead of Lennon's, Carnival of Light cannot be compared to Revolution 9.

For more than a year before The Beatles recorded this track, McCartney had been playing at his home in Cavendish Avenue with tape loops on Tomorrow Never Know] and musique concrète, as well as experimenting with montage home movies. He knew the music of AMM, a free jazz trio founded in 1965 who often performed in darkness, incorporating randomly scanned broadcasts by 'playing' transistor radios and McCartney clearly had this sort of music in mind during the recording of Carnival of Light. The major discovery of his interaction with the mid-Sixties classical and jazz avant garde was 'random' - the realisation that chance elements, with which The Beatles had already casually toyed, could produce striking results when actually sought after. The difference was that AMM - following the contemporary ideal of transcending the ego [as in Tomorrow Never Knows] - specialised in a sensitive form of collective improvisation in which players not only listened intently to each other but interacted spontaneously with everything around them, including their audiences. In Carnival of Light, The Beatles merely bashed about at the same time, overdubbing without much thought, and relying on the Instant Art effects of tape-echo to produce something suitably 'far-out.' That said, it would be unfair to expect anything much more considered, given that, unlike Revolution 9 which took five days, Carnival of Light was knocked off quickly as an informal commission for a 'mixed-media' event held on 28 January and 4th February 1967 at the Roundhouse Theatre in Camden Town, North London.

- Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records of the Sixties, 1998

It's interesting how McCartney gets labeled as the pop guy and Lennon as the experimenter when that's largely more reflective of their '70s solo careers than what they were doing in the Beatles. They both walked both sides of the mirror in that context, and I bet Paul wants this to come out so he can prove it.

Anybody hear "Liverpool Sound Collage" which he put out in the '90s with Super Furry Animals? It's actually a quite decent experimental electronic album that samples some early Beatles demos with them arguing and everything. He made Capitol put it out but they refused to promote it at all.

I quite like that bluesey song he did with The Fireman recently (Paul McCartney + Youth from Killing Joke), he's still got an edge to him.

He's been showing more edge in recent years than he did for a long time. When he put out dreck like Pipes of Peace you would never know he'd recover, but he's definitely had his moments since then.

The Fireman stuff is pretty cool.

Carnival Of Light sound like a delicious slice of prime psychedelia, regardless of the group responsible. Personally I only like the beatles ''psychedelic'' output, which, depending on how detailed you want to get ranges from 2-5 albums.

Me too...wondering if I can look forward to seeing Sir Paul around...
ATO Records is set to release The Fireman - Electric Arguments.

This could be cool, but I'm not worried about it and I've always thought Paul had some tricks up his sleeve....

I mean you'd be surprised how many misconceptions there are about the beatles, that's why anyone who truly thinks they are whack are just misinformed.

Both paul and john were equals with experimenting/pop writing. Neither was less edgy or more poppy than the other, I'd just say Paul was more optimistic most of the time and john was more pessimistic in his lyrical style, and sensibilities.

Also they weren't the best of friends they were just a writing team, it was really John and Stuart (who passed in hamberg) who were the real good friends. Paul was happy when Stuart left the band.

That said.

I actually like the beatles in the first half of their career alittle better. But their ideas were much more unique in the second half and their songs became more experimental. You can't really compare the two careers and say one was b etter than the other, but I would definitely say they had more of the energy of a punk band in their early days, and they were really tight as a band. Imagine trying to play those songs on perfect rhythm when both you and the audience can't even hear what you're playing because of all the screams....

But yeah, the hamberg era beatles were the shit. They were a punk band. You can't argue how they lived lol.