Help Please

[surfchild]

Firstly apologies if this is the wrong place to put this but I'm new here.

I have a little project I have been working on that I need some help with. I have a tape of an Underworld radio test transmission from 1997 that I don't think has seen the light of day yet (well not that I can find anyway).

I need some help from someone in cleaning it up. I can either provide a couple of wav files, the audacity project files or if anyone in the UK is any good with cleaning up tapes, I can post the original tape as long as I get it back.

a very poor copy of it is on my soundcloud page if you search for surfchild you should find it.

thanks

[Jamiel]

I could give it a try in Soundforge, but am not sure it is something I could turn over quickly.

I have done some tidying of broadcasts before, removing pops, glitches, etc. Enhancing poor sound though isn't something that much can be done with, if that is the problem.

Send me PM if you would like me to have a try.

Jamie

[negative1]

nice, just checking it out.

it doesn't sound too bad as it.

the only XFM sessions that made it out were the 1998 ones
for the preview of 'beaucoup fish'.

ok, this sounds like the same one.. did this come out in 1997 then?

the second part might be new from what i've heard.

later
-1

[nelfun5]

Sounds (https://soundcloud.com/surfchild/) lovely! Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to hear it cleaned!

[nelfun5]

nice, just checking it out.
the only XFM sessions that made it out were the 1998 ones
for the preview of 'beacoup fish'.


any existing recording?
edit: it's on the RTSR!

[surfchild]

This is one of the test transmissions from August (I think) 97. There was either 4 or 6 hours of it by memory but for some reason I only got 90 minutes. It does indeed feature stuff from Beaucoup Fish with lots of spoilers. Don't know if it's some of the same stuff that's on RTSR as I only got access yesterday, will have to download and check. Other test transmissions were by the cure and pulp

[negative1]

This is one of the test transmissions from August (I think) 97. There was either 4 or 6 hours of it by memory but for some reason I only got 90 minutes. It does indeed feature stuff from Beaucoup Fish with lots of spoilers. Don't know if it's some of the same stuff that's on RTSR as I only got access yesterday, will have to download and check. Other test transmissions were by the cure and pulp

Part 1 has been there for awhile.
Part 2 is new.

welcome aboard.

and thanks for sharing.

later
-1

[TheBang]

Given the finished state of the BF tracks that appear on this broadcast, I was skeptical that this was 1997 (almost 1.5 years before the album release), but it appears to be true!

https://web.archive.org/web/20101121005057/http://chainofflowers.com/aug97.htm

According to this, in advance of XFM London going live on 104.9 FM on September 1, 1997, they had Underworld, The Cure, and Pulp (and Prodigy?) doing test broadcasts on the frequency. No indication as to how long the broadcasts were, or which date exactly Underworld was.

I was surprised to hear "Are You Rockstar?" at about 18:40 in Part 2. We didn't hear it again until the Bungalow with Stairs broadcast in 2008. I had no idea Rick had been reaching so far back into the archives for some of those tracks on the radio shows.

[holden]

Very nice find and share, especially as it is a harbinger not only to BF, but also the dirtyradio broadcasts and other internet mixes that UW treated us to throughout the 00's. The version I had from way back from the rtsr Ftp site seemed to be just the UW snippets, ending with Wichita Lineman.

It is hard to tell from the low bitrate aliasing, but Cups sounds rather different from the LP version to me, more techno, less jazzy...if I recall from a radio interview around the release of BF (the one with the acoustic Born Slippy and speculation about collab with U2 as mofo plays), the interviewer says a year ago (97?) Cups sounded like this.... And a snippet is played, very cold electro. Karl mentions the vocoder being up too high, a happy accident leading to the final version.
So, at least Cups still sounds unfinished in this mix.

Good spotting, theBang, on Are you Rockstar, a decade plus early. I'm not surprised, though, given how long tracks like ALAF and Beautiful Burnout/ biro took to evolve and make it to albums. That said, what other snippets from old radio shows might become incorporated in the next LP? Or, as you said and Karl has recently alluded to, maybe it will be a fresh start from scratch?

[crank]

Man it really would be nice to have something better. this sounds so compressed and muted.

[nelfun5]

The 1998 XFM session (available on the tracker) would not mind some cleaning too. The Cups early version from negativeOne's "underworld odds and ends mix" (also on the RTSR, taken from the same source) sounds definitely better.

[Dunwho]

If there is a cassette tape with the recording on it then, theoretically, the low bitrate issue should not be present on that version as Tape recording does not work in that way.

So I would guess that the degredation has come from the process of digitising the tape recording. I would suggest getting a physical copy of the tape and digitising that again at better quality.

Thanks for the share, this is a fantastic little nugget :)

[Lx_Nen]

The thing that would help this the most is a high end tape deck and some fiddling with the azimuth control to match the device it was recorded on.