The Beatles in concert in Japan during the 1966 release of “Revolver”.
Image: Kyodo
Repeat a mistake and it’s not one anymore: Gilles Martin has made a spectacular remix of the Beatles’ “Revolver” album possible, on which new soundtracks turn the well-known songs into mini radio plays.
WIt was already clear how far the former leather rockers would venture into “electronic wonderland” when the Beatles met for the first time on April 6, 1966 at the London EMI studio to work on the Lennon composition “Tomorrow Never Knows”. to attempt. After the first experiments on “Rubber Soul”, the recording studio should now be used as a fully-fledged musical instrument.
Lennon envisioned “a thousand Tibetan monks singing on a mountaintop” for his hallucinogenic song. Instead, the most experimental piece on the “Revolver” album relies on tape feeds with backwards running guitar lines, tambura, sitar, loops with seagull cries, Indian laughter, mellotron flutes and string sounds. The reduced melody and harmonies, the sluggish, hypnotic rhythm, a wafting chant, all made the song a mind-expanding pop panorama from which, according to Lennon’s vision, “a cosmic keynote of the universe” should arise.
