Brian Wilson's Modular Approach on SMiLE
I am a bit obsessed with SMiLE information lately, so there's yet more I want to get off my chest... from info I gathered mostly from wikipedia pages.
I wanted to mention the modular approach that Brian Wilson employed in putting musical fragments together in this album (which remained unfinished... in 1967). To cover this, I'll use my own modular method of snipping bits I think are interesting and pasting them below. Here I go...
Modular approach
The Smile sessions were intentionally limited to recording short interchangeable fragments also referred to as "modules".
The cut-up structure and heavily edited production style of Smile was unique for its time in mainstream popular music, and to assemble an entire album from short musical fragments was a relatively bold undertaking.
Brian explained, "I had a lot of unfinished ideas, fragments of music I called 'feels'. Each feel represented a mood or an emotion I'd felt, and I planned to fit them together like a mosaic."
Carl Wilson likened the assembly process to film editing, a view shared by Smile archivist Alan Boyd who stated: "I think he was right about that. The kind of editing that the project required seemed more like the process of putting a film together than a pop record."
Music journalist Paul Williams suggested that Brian Wilson may well have been one of the earliest pioneers of sampling.
Marshall Heiser says "Possibly the best term offered yet to describe the project is: 'sonic menagerie'".
"Heroes and Villains" was the ultimate keystone for the musical structure of the album, and the considerable time and effort that Wilson devoted to it is indicative of its importance, both as a single and as part of the Smile narrative. Like "Good Vibrations", it was edited together from many discrete sections. "Good Vibrations" was completed and released in October 1966 while Smile sessions were underway.
Nearly thirty sessions for the various versions of "Heroes and Villains" spanned from May 1966 to July 1967. There are dozens of takes spanning each section of the song, multiple versions of both the variant sections, and many attempts to splice together final mixes.
Additionally, most individual tracks on Smile were composed as potential sections of "Heroes and Villains".
In total, for Smile, fifty hours of tape was amassed from a ten-month-long course of album recording sessions.
Given the technical limitations of record production in 1967 and the sheer bulk of material that was being recorded, Wilson recorded far more music than could possibly have fit on one LP, yet the album was only ever envisaged as being a single disc.
Eventually, the number of possible variations for song edits became too overwhelming for Wilson.
Danny Hutton compared the challenge to hearing "a commercial ten times, and all of a sudden you start humming it, and you don't even know if you like it or not, because you've heard it so many times you can't even judge ... He lost that ability of the 'freshness' to know which part should go where."
Smile Sessions co-producer Mark Linett argued that Wilson could not have finished the album simply because his ambitions were unfeasible with pre-digital technology: "In 1966, [assembling pieces] meant physically cutting pieces of tape and sticking them back together-which is how all editing was done in those days-but it was a very time-consuming and labor-intensive process, and most importantly made it very hard to experiment with the infinite number of possible ways you could assemble this puzzle."
His colleague Alan Boyd shared the same view, stating that the tape editing "would have been probably an unbearably arduous, difficult and tedious task".
Wilson said: "Time can be spent in the studio to the point where you get so next to it, you don't know where you are with it, you decide to just chuck it for a while."
Also, Van Dyke Parks was depended upon by Wilson whenever issues came up in the studio, and when he left the project in early '67, the end result was that Wilson lost track of how the album's fragmented music should be assembled.
"There is no 'correct' track sequence, there is no completed album, because Smile isn't a linear progression of tracks. As a collection of modular melodic ideas it is by nature organic and resists being bookended."
Some of the original Smile tracks continued to trickle out in later releases, often as filler songs to offset Brian's unwillingness to contribute.
The band was still expecting to complete and release the album as late as 1973 before it became clear that only Brian could comprehend the innumerable fragments that had been recorded.
In the meantime, he gradually ceded production and songwriting duties to the rest of the group and self-medicated with the excessive consumption of food, alcohol, and drugs.
Mark Richardson of Pitchfork Media commented on Smile... "It looms out there in imagination, an album that lends itself to storytelling and legend, like the aural equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster. … So you might start hunting down bootlegs, poring over the fragments, and finding competing edits and track sequences, which only feeds your desire to know what the 'real' Smile could have been."
I wanted to mention the modular approach that Brian Wilson employed in putting musical fragments together in this album (which remained unfinished... in 1967). To cover this, I'll use my own modular method of snipping bits I think are interesting and pasting them below. Here I go...
Modular approach
The Smile sessions were intentionally limited to recording short interchangeable fragments also referred to as "modules".
The cut-up structure and heavily edited production style of Smile was unique for its time in mainstream popular music, and to assemble an entire album from short musical fragments was a relatively bold undertaking.
Brian explained, "I had a lot of unfinished ideas, fragments of music I called 'feels'. Each feel represented a mood or an emotion I'd felt, and I planned to fit them together like a mosaic."
Carl Wilson likened the assembly process to film editing, a view shared by Smile archivist Alan Boyd who stated: "I think he was right about that. The kind of editing that the project required seemed more like the process of putting a film together than a pop record."
Music journalist Paul Williams suggested that Brian Wilson may well have been one of the earliest pioneers of sampling.
Marshall Heiser says "Possibly the best term offered yet to describe the project is: 'sonic menagerie'".
"Heroes and Villains" was the ultimate keystone for the musical structure of the album, and the considerable time and effort that Wilson devoted to it is indicative of its importance, both as a single and as part of the Smile narrative. Like "Good Vibrations", it was edited together from many discrete sections. "Good Vibrations" was completed and released in October 1966 while Smile sessions were underway.
Nearly thirty sessions for the various versions of "Heroes and Villains" spanned from May 1966 to July 1967. There are dozens of takes spanning each section of the song, multiple versions of both the variant sections, and many attempts to splice together final mixes.
Additionally, most individual tracks on Smile were composed as potential sections of "Heroes and Villains".
In total, for Smile, fifty hours of tape was amassed from a ten-month-long course of album recording sessions.
Given the technical limitations of record production in 1967 and the sheer bulk of material that was being recorded, Wilson recorded far more music than could possibly have fit on one LP, yet the album was only ever envisaged as being a single disc.
Eventually, the number of possible variations for song edits became too overwhelming for Wilson.
Danny Hutton compared the challenge to hearing "a commercial ten times, and all of a sudden you start humming it, and you don't even know if you like it or not, because you've heard it so many times you can't even judge ... He lost that ability of the 'freshness' to know which part should go where."
Smile Sessions co-producer Mark Linett argued that Wilson could not have finished the album simply because his ambitions were unfeasible with pre-digital technology: "In 1966, [assembling pieces] meant physically cutting pieces of tape and sticking them back together-which is how all editing was done in those days-but it was a very time-consuming and labor-intensive process, and most importantly made it very hard to experiment with the infinite number of possible ways you could assemble this puzzle."
His colleague Alan Boyd shared the same view, stating that the tape editing "would have been probably an unbearably arduous, difficult and tedious task".
Wilson said: "Time can be spent in the studio to the point where you get so next to it, you don't know where you are with it, you decide to just chuck it for a while."
Also, Van Dyke Parks was depended upon by Wilson whenever issues came up in the studio, and when he left the project in early '67, the end result was that Wilson lost track of how the album's fragmented music should be assembled.
"There is no 'correct' track sequence, there is no completed album, because Smile isn't a linear progression of tracks. As a collection of modular melodic ideas it is by nature organic and resists being bookended."
Some of the original Smile tracks continued to trickle out in later releases, often as filler songs to offset Brian's unwillingness to contribute.
The band was still expecting to complete and release the album as late as 1973 before it became clear that only Brian could comprehend the innumerable fragments that had been recorded.
In the meantime, he gradually ceded production and songwriting duties to the rest of the group and self-medicated with the excessive consumption of food, alcohol, and drugs.
Mark Richardson of Pitchfork Media commented on Smile... "It looms out there in imagination, an album that lends itself to storytelling and legend, like the aural equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster. … So you might start hunting down bootlegs, poring over the fragments, and finding competing edits and track sequences, which only feeds your desire to know what the 'real' Smile could have been."