David Bowie - Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001) [Box set #5]

What a mess Bowie's catalogue is always in. Why couldn't they just have included Shadowman 1970 on WOAC? And they could have easily stuck the excellent Pictures of Lily (which I think is the best recording from the sessions) at the end of the Toybox. It has a little style to it and a bit of sparkle which is imo lacking in general over the Toy sessions. It makes me weep that DB's releases are always incomplete, on gimmicky limited editions or restricted formats and generally inconvenient to collect. For what reason is Shadowman 1970 streaming only? Why make things difficult? The machinations of Parlophone/Warners/Whoever are Labyrinthine.
I'll give them one thing: that they have put out quite a lot of unreleased material - but it appears like the guy in charge of Bowie's back catalogue has had his brains scrambled.
I bought the Toy cd box and I agree with others that the lack of sleeve notes is mystifying. (Well, it would be if it was a different artist - it's not really a surprise with Bowie releases to have some weird nonsense going on.)

 

Toy:Box, the box set so lousy it doesn't even deserve its own thread?

Bit late now, but couldn't someone be arsed to start one?

Like, is Toy:Box included in the Brilliant Adventure box? No, it isn't.

 

Toy is mastered so loudly that I can barely stand to listen to it, it’s fatiguing. A big disappointment for me. DR 8.

 

It's really too bad that they didn't do a Toy : Book , disc 2&3 and a book telling the story . Thinking like "Width of a Circle" is . Would've made too much sense IMO .

 

True.
Go for it

 

Yeah, that would have been nice.

But on the other hand, I’m very pleased with the presentation of the CD set. It feels substantial and special. And I’m falling more in love with the material every time I hear it.

 

I don't have it, and have no plans to get it. But it would be nice to have a stand-alone thread, so that I don't have to sift through this whole thread to read about it if I ever sucker myself into buying it.

Are we all done with BA, then? I just played Outside, disappointed not to notice the glitch at 2:40. Is there something wrong with me?

 

Wrong with you? I don't know you well enough to answer that. LOL LOL j/k j/k !!!

It appears that some have a glitched pressing and others do not. Probably a small batch that got glitched I would guess. If you can't hear it then, I would suggest getting a lotto ticket as your luck streak seems to be hot.

 

I have the vinyl. Is it just on the CD, or the vinyl too?

 

I don’t think so. The main album is fine.
It sounds more like it’s the individual instruments that has compression baked in.
I mean, the ever so praised Japanese Abbey Road by The Beatles has a DR value between 8-11! Nobody has ever complained about songs being too loud on that one!
Now, the Visconti mixes on disc 2, there is compression and limiting involved on the tracks itself.

 

To my understanding, it is on all formats (download, CD, and vinyl).

 

Has anyone posted a sample here?

 

I have started a thread for Toy:

David Bowie - Toy

 

Please fill out your equipment profile.

I can send you a sample *cough*

 

Low Orange vinyl Indie exclusive:

SPACE 1999 Distribution David Bowie Low (Indie Exclusive)

Release: 15/01/2022

 

And another site that has it

 

I can hear it on my vinyl and also on the spotify stream. So I assume the glitch is on every version.

 

Well I can't hear it, so either (a) it's not there on my copy, or (b) it's there, I can't hear it, bravo to those who can, SMH for caring about it.

 

Imagine if you had a booger hanging from one of your nostrils, or even worse, from your ear. You can't see it but everyone else can. Not good.

 

I’ve obviously missed something here. What glitch are we talking about?

 

If you can't hear it, then you don't want to know, cos once you do hear it you can never undo these things and it will bug you thereafter.

 

There's a 3-part piece on Toy up on Mix Online with Mark Plati and Pete Keppler. (It's quite short, no idea why they broke it up into 3 parts? But anyway...)

You can find all of the parts here: Mark Plati - Mixonline

Part 3 gets into the final mixing of Toy and the 2011 leak. Excerpts:

Plati: After Sear Sound, a lot of songs got to final mixes, some didn’t quite get there, and then David changed course, because we’d already started recording new songs that were basically the beginning of his next album, Heathen.

Keppler: Toy got shelved and then David changed labels. Mark got back involved with Toy again much later, [almost a decade] after the album leaked online in 2011.

Plati: I don’t know if I’m touchy about the leak—maybe a little. The best I can figure out is, we would make CDs at the end of the day of what we were working on, and somebody got a hold of one. That wasn’t the right way for it to come out, so it was disappointing that somebody felt they needed to do that.

Keppler: It sounded terrible! They weren’t finished mixes, and then there was the streaming quality; you’re at the mercy of data compression and a lot of other not-so-musically friendly technologies. To this day, I have no idea where that leak came from. Somebody pressed 500 copies on vinyl, too, which just cracks me up.

The "some didn't quite get there" reminds me of Plati's recent comment in Uncut that "Can't Help Thinking About Me" had never gotten a final mix back in 2000/2001 and required one for Toy:Box.

The rest of the piece talks about the work involved in prepping the tracks for the Toy:Box when 20 year old technology was involved.

Anyway, this interview, combined with the other recent piece where Plati says Virgin never even heard Toy properly, further reinforces my belief that there was never a finalized, ready-to-go tracklist back in 2000/2001. If Virgin had given Bowie the go-ahead, there would no doubt have been final mixes, an official tracklist, promo copies etc., but that never happened. Instead, Bowie began working on Heathen, and Toy was abandoned.

 

^ Correct. This canard that Virgin 'rejected' it is not the full story...

 

#FAKE_GLITCH