Newsletter May 2000

After the excitement of the birthday party, we have to nurse the hangover and get on with the rest of the year. The headache isn’t helped by mixing an up-tempo club/techno version of BETTY’s Jungle Jane, a seven minute free MP3 extravaganza featuring several new sets of lyrics from the fabulous Alyson Palmer and her earrings, delivered about two inches in front of your nose. This mix complements James Rosenthal’s (which we put up in free MP3 last month). It’s much faster and it’s very different. Mike Thorne adds the story of his production to the collection, glad to be back in danceland.

The studio was busy this month, with Sarah Jane Morris contributing vocals and song-writing to Thorne’s forthcoming CD, which will be dance-oriented and feature extended songs as long as nine minutes. Three New York dates were nixed at the last minute, thanks to someone’s scheduling confusion (not ours, pal), but she still came over and made loud, tuneful noises. Her new album is now released in the US, the reason for the original dates which were to have been at CBGB’s, Barracuda and the Tonic Club. We hope she’ll be able to return, possibly in June. We’ve added a few recent reviews.

Alyson Palmer is the BETTY whose idea grew into the Carnival, er, concept. Typically, she wrote a thorough initial treatment, and we now publish this little story. It’s even scary on your screen.

For those of you who missed BETTY's NPR interview, we have it available for streaming in RealAudio and Liquid Audio. The interview aired on Saturday, March 4, 2000 on Weekend Edition with Scott Simon.

The Stereo Society made several experimental virtual reality panoramas in 1995/6, for Warner Music International. Rather than just stick to pretty, scenic surroundings, we created some spaces which certainly don’t exist in the real world, embedded in a tour of the studio as it then was. Click on the monitor screens in the control room to find Alice in Wonderland or to visit the lyric room.

The QTVR files are playable with Apple’s QuickTime application on Mac and PC. The file is quite large, slightly over 7 Mb, but seemed worth posting as an inspired curiosity. There are several panoramas, and you must find the hot spot to travel from one to the other and to navigate through the different studio areas.

Photography and panorama assembly by JR Rost. Additional assembly by Jason Tal.

The Mixman competition finalists are all selected, and the final judging will be announced in next month’s Newsletter. Looks like Stereo Society vinyl is coming. We will be preparing several further tracks in the Mixman format, for release later this year. And they won’t just be the obvious dance numbers.