In this section we detail the work being undertaken on some current and forthcoming projects such as album re-issues and the transfer of old tapes to digital formats. We hope that this will give a good opportunity for a behind-the-scenes look at how these releases are put together.
The release rights to The Geese & The Ghost, Wise After The Event and 1984 (together with the rest of his back catalogue) have reverted to Ant's control now that the contractual period with Virgin Records has ended. The plan is that these albums will be made available through Voiceprint Records in a newly re-mastered form. Work continues on putting these re-issues together and progress reports and related information on this will appear here.
Each album will be presented as a 2 CD set, with an additional CD of extra tracks, demos and so on accompanying each of them.
Progress report - October 2006
Although it has been some time since our last update on the re-issues, work has continued on them. Most of the work on both The Geese & The Ghost and Wise After The Event is now complete and a comprehensive trawl through Ant's tape archive has provided enough material for additional CD of extra material to be compiled for each of them. Currently we are now working on 1984 and in particular the extra CD to accompany it.
The albums are due to be mastered towards the end of November and a release in the Spring of 2007 seems most likely, the plan being to have The Geese & The Ghost in particular available on the 30th anniversary of it's original release. However, exact release dates for the three albums are not yet set.
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Progress report - April 2006
One of the key parts of putting an album re-issue together is to locate the original master tapes for the album. This can often involve some detective work in firstly locating the relevant tapes and secondly checking them to confirm which tapes they actually are. Sometimes tapes get lost, labels fall off boxes or the wrong reels get put back in the wrong tape boxes. Sometimes a tape labelled as an original master turns out to be a safety copy and so on. Currently we are now in the process of checking all the available master tapes for Wise After The Event. The picture on the left shows just a selection of the various reels for the album with their distinctive Trident Studios labels. Fortunately all of them have been labelled correctly and the original master for the album together with the masters for the album in it's originally planned form and the unreleased EP are all present and correct. |
Progress report - February 2006
Currently we are concentrating our efforts on the preparatory work on The Geese & The Ghost. A selection of tracks for the extra CD have now been assembled and just require some fine tuning to be completed. The tracks on the extra CD have mostly been sourced from the original 4-track masters.
Progress report - December 2005
The exhaustive (and exhausting!) process of checking all the relevant tapes for the albums continues. All of the original 4-track master tapes from the original sessions for The Geese & The Ghost have now been transferred to a digital format and the contents are currently being evaluated. Similar material from Wise After The Event and 1984 has also been transferred and catalogued with a view to assembling a shortlist of possible extra tracks to include with the album re-issues.
Progress report - July 2005
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Currently we are concentrating on checking through all the available tapes for the albums that are held in Ant's archives. The good news is that so far a large number of tapes have now been located but it is taking some time to go through all of them in order to identify the format and content and then transfer them to a digital format. This picture shows the current batch of tapes that are being checked and transferred. These are a mixture of 2-track and 4-track and include most of the original tapes from the initial sessions for The Geese & The Ghost, Ant's demos for Wise After The Event and unreleased tracks from the 1984 era. |
Background articles
Recording Formats
The on-going work on transferring various analogue
tapes has given a good opportunity to
start the process off by establishing exactly what material for each album is
currently held. This is not a straight forward process as each of the
albums made use of different recording formats...
Wise After The Event
One discovery
has been the master tapes for Wise After The Event in it's original form
(complete with the link pieces that were later released on Back To The Pavilion)
and we are now considering the idea that the CD re-issue could follow this
alternate running order.
The work on compiling a second volume of Archive Collection is now completed. As work has progressed on putting the final selection of tracks together, we've been including more details of the different stages of production in the special production journal, which you can access below. In addition we're also including some background information which may be of interest.
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Journal
Journal entries: |
Read Ant's track-by-track commentary on the Collection
Background information
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A major project that has been underway for some time now is to transfer many of Ant's original analogue reel-to-reel tapes to a digital format. Since the release of Archive Collection, the contents of many reels of ¼" tape have been transferred to DAT and at the same time a catalogue of their contents has slowly been compiled. This has been very useful with a view to compiling future releases such as a second Archive Collection as well as locating potential extra material for album re-issues. So far the recordings transferred have been mono and stereo masters but we have recently started to investigate various multi-track masters with a view to transferring them into the digital domain.
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A small selection of Ant's tapes that are currently being transferred
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