Let me tell you what loving a song is about…
Once upon a time, back in 1985, I recorded a lot of things off the radio. Much of it was from 94.3 CKMF FM in Montreal. They had a countdown, top 10 at 10 kind of thing I recorded, and for a couple of weeks, there was this incredibly cool song that floated around on it.
I have cassette recordings of it, but it took me many, many years to track down the source.
So there was this band, called Style, from Sweden. They released a single that made a bit of a splash back then called Telefon. Here’s what the dance mix of it sounded like:
I guess somebody at Sire records in the US pulled some strings, and got them to do an English language version of it. That’s what I got to hear, record, and ponder over for decades. Then I started looking for it.
Now, there are a couple bad rips of it floating around, but a couple years ago, there was nothing, so I did some research, and some shopping. I sourced a couple copies of the original 12″, one from Brazil, and one from Holland. My reasoning was that I could eventually do a vinyl transfer on both of them, and if there were any glaring imperfections, I could crop together the best bits of each, and make something listenable out of it.
That’s exactly what I just did tonight. It took me most of the last 2.5 hours to do this. I ended up taking the majority of the audio from one copy, and replacing two sections of it with heavy pops from the second copy (painstakingly, with single-sample level cuts). Then I ran a bunch of basic utility cleanup on it, some gentle paragraphic EQing, and slight multi-band compression on the final result to make it sound “good” to my ears.
Here’s the result:
Soundcloud, for average people: https://soundcloud.com/umdesch4/style-telephone-english-version-12-umdesch4-remaster
Chirbit, for Apple people: http://chirb.it/C8AILH
Amazing 32-bit, 48 kHz lossless FLAC, for audiophiles: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0rPp4_Z9UenY1dBNU9RVU9XdkE/view?usp=sharing
Enjoy!
umdesch4
umdesch4 