Leslie Shatz and the scattering of my undead brainsssshhhh...

Leslie in studio..maybe recording pool table' sounds??!

In a moment of boredom at my parent’s house back in Italy I turned on the TV and started zapping through the tragedy of the Sky channels. Suddenly everything stopped and I snapped out of the room and found myself underneath a shower of broken glasses cutting through my brains. This is kind of what I felt the first time I watched the shower scene from Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park. Without taking away any credits from Van Sant’s amazing visuals, what makes this scene so special to me is the sound design and the resulting perfect synesthetic marriage between the image and the sound.  Searching through the imdb database I soon found out that the man behind this sonic magic is a regular Van Sant’s collaborator called Leslie Shatz. One of his first jobs was as dialogue editor for ‘Apocalypse Now’ and the year after for ‘Star Wars: the empire strikes back’. Since then it seems like he worked in loads of productions that I really enjoyed. As sound designer for The assassination of Jesse James, Gomorrah, The Road, Elephant, Dracula, and only as sound re-recordist for others, which are definitely not in my top 10 best films ever (Rambo 4, Van Helsing, Hidalgo). Finally I’m watching Paranoid Park from beginning to end for the first time. Because last time I started watching more than half way through, many things now start to make sense, but hey! If you didn’t watch it yet try to do it from the shower scene and then rewind to the beginning the second time around. So here’s a video of the scene. Enjoy. Ps Crank up the volume pleeease!!! Signing off..

There's something menacing crawling out of my speakers every time I play Raw Power. As Search and Destroy kicks in, the pressure on air particles becomes unbearable.. As Nick Kent puts it - 'still the meaniest-eyed, coldest-blooded tour de force ever summoned up in a recording studio.'
The version I'm listening to is the legacy edition - which was remastered by Iggy Pop himself: at -4db it is the loudest heavy-rock record ever to be released. This is the second time Iggy tried his hands on the recording's tapes: the first time was in 1972, but he had to subside to record labels pressure and let David Bowie remix if he ever wanted his baby to be available in shops for public consumption. Not that the label was expecting to make any money out of it..but at least they wanted the last word on content listenability and packaging design. The Iggy Version can be described in his own words: 'Look!That's not in the red, why isn't that meter in the red? That should be over there in the red with the rest of those meters!'
Many critics hated the new release, citing digital distortion throughout the record. I'm not usually in favor of heavy mastering and I think all this discussions about loudness war are going nowhere: a track needs to breathe and a sound wave representation shouldn't look like a long homogeneous tube - unless that's what you're really looking for, or like Merzbow and other Noise Artists, who sometimes during mastering look for digital distortion on purpose.-
I got to say that I'm really enjoying this version in spite of all the above critics, but I'm looking for the Vinyl of the original mix for comparison. I also found out that there's a new legacy - doesn't legacy usually means what someone is remembered for? ..Forever? - 2010 edition of the David Bowie mix. I'll leave you with Iggy's point of view on this messy mixing epic: 'I don't think you can beat David's mix,it's very creative. But this is just a simple, straight band mix of a powerful band'.

If you want to know more about Raw Power, the best way is just blasting it off your speakers! ..whichever version of the record you've got!The LOUDest the BETTER. If you don't have it..
A someone stOOle it from you..
A something pretty big escaped to your aural senses

B you've never heard that something called ROCK landed on our little planet sometime ago.. bringing some good things and.. lots of bad things. well.... 

                      RAW POWER GOOD!!!