The new issue of Electronic Sound magazine (with David Sylvian on the cover) mentions at the end of an article on the early years of Japan that BMG are issuing a deluxe version of Japan's Quiet Life in January 2020. As this is one of my all time favourite albums I'm rather excited about this, although Japan's reissues have been underwhelming, to put in mildly, in terms of bonus material. Anyone have any idea what is being planned for this 'deluxe issue'? Hopefully more than just the addition of b-sides and single edits and all 381 (approx.) mixes of Life In Tokyo. Japan are one of the few bands I'd welcome a peak period live set from, but demos, outtakes, alternative takes would be a dream come true.
Hopefully by deluxe they don't just mean a 2x45 rpm vinyl reissue as per recent Japan/Sylvian reissues and the pic posted by Richard Barbieri last week, but not holding my breath. Edit: My bad; the pic shows it's a 33 1/3 half-speed thingy.
I would like 2x45rpm by the same method we got Gentlemen Take Polaroids, please. I've never heard Quiet Life - I had Assemblage at the time, which I think included half the songs.
They're one of my favorite bands, so I'm reluctantly excited for this. And I'm happy it's being released on CD as well; too many vinyl-only reissues these days!
Currently enjoying the below variant via my Hansa Germany 251 261 cd, sounds great. (Quote) The band originally intended for the track listing to be 1) All Tomorrow's Parties, 2) Fall in Love with Me, 3) Alien, 4) Quiet Life, 5) The Other Side of Life, 6) Despair, 7) In Vogue, 8) Halloween, 9) A Foreign Place, and the notes in the CD cover booklet of the 2006 remastered edition suggest that the listener should try listening to the album in that order. (Unquote).
While we await news here is a link to a small feature on the original album. Quiet Life: Japan changes direction
Well..... It may be delayed, but at least I finally found another clean copy of the UK original to place my noise copy
The Music on Vinyl version is very nicely presented. but the sound of the main album isn’t anything spectacular. The 2004 CD sounds great, though, so hopefully this will be a significant upgrade. If it’s only a marginal improvement over that disc, and doesn’t include any rarities or similar, then I don’t know if I’ll bother with it.
I'm checking this thread regularly, as I'm on tenterhooks to see a release date for this. I find myself longing for this release, even though I've been quite content with my dusty old Hansa copy for the previous, well, nearly, 40 years! I think I deserve an upgrade on what has been an incredibly important album in my life. That half-speed master image is mouth-watering...
Well, if they can press this one without the nasty speed-bump style warps that seemed to plague Gentlemen and Tin Drum, then I'll have no reason to complain!
I can’t see why he would have since he was fine with the other Japan half-speeds, as well as those reissues of his early solo albums. It’ll be royalties for him, after all. I imagine that it was delayed for some reason in the first place, and now the virus has pushed it back indefinitely. Or I could be totally wrong...
I shall message or tweet the mastering engineer Miles Showell at Abbey Road to hopefully get an update.
Possibly, although this was originally scheduled for January, well before the pandemic had reached global proportions. But I am happy to be proven wrong.
Who knows? Delays like this aren't uncommon in the music world. Maybe there was some earlier hiccup with the mastering at Abbey Road, and then the emergence of Covid further prolonged the delay? It would be a little odd, though, if Sylvian vetoed it, since he apparently had no issues with GTP and TD, but also, there's this quote from Sylvian from "later in his career" from this link that someone else posted upstream: "I still feel very attached to [Quiet Life] – unusual for me. We reached a peak with this album – we knew what we were doing."