Peter Gabriel - "Undercurrents" (1981) (unreleased audio track)

Peter Gabriel
"Undercurrents"
Milano, San Carpoforo, 1983

This is a weird one... An audience recording of a studio outtake :-)
Be forewarned that quality is what it is, and don't expect a studio sound!

THE STORY
Quite well known among PG's students of his most obscure items, "Undercurrents" is a 14 minutes instrumental piece that was written originally as the ambient soundtrack for an exhibition by painter Graham Dean, whom he was introduced to by David Rhodes (if I remember correctly, you can find more details on how this came about in Spencer Bright's biography).
The track was subsequently passed on to the Italian theatre group Assemblea Teatro, which used it on two occasions: the theatrical piece "Le città invisibili", based on Italo Calvino's work, and "Rock Shots", an exhibition by well known Italian photographer Guido Harari.
"Rock Shots" had its premiere in Torino, then moved on to Milano (where I went to see it, in the old deconsecrated church of San Carpoforo, together with a couple of friends) and finally to Barcelona.

THE RECORDING
Since we knew about the PG soundtrack we decided to tape it and brought along a Superscope CD-320 professional portable deck and a mono Audio Technica shotgun microphone (sorry but don't know which model). It turned out to be a good choice, as you will find out by listening to the recording...
I'm still wondering what on earth posses them, but the exhibition organizer had the 'splendid' idea of putting up a tv monitor in the church hall, with a video of live bands (I'm pretty sure I remember Led Zeppelin and Talking Heads, but there were certainly more) the sound of which was delivered by a big audio system and was actually far louder than Gabriel's music.
This was in fact limited to a very small metallic 'cage', where 2 small speakers played "Undercurrents" alternated with some PG hits ("Solsbury Hill", "DIY", "Games Without Frontiers", "Shock The Monkey" and more).
The end result is quite clearly audible in the recording, with Led Zep and crowd noises providing a totally unwelcome background to most of the track! But I guess that if we had used a different, 'normal' stereo microphone, the result would have been total and utter crap. Thanks to the extremely directional shotgun, instead, what you get is still a piece of crap, but one you can still make out the Gabriel instrumental...

THE "MUSIC"
Though it might appeal to those who enjoy the most obscure electronic genre, the 'music' itself is NOT for the casual PG listener: quite dark and atmospheric, even Birdy-like at times, it almost completely lacks any kind of melodic and even rhythmic structures, with passages that phase in and out without much apparent 'sense'.

THE MASTERING
After digitizing the old cassette at 24bits/96khz, I tried lots of different filters and denoisers, but without any real success. 'Subtracting' the Led Zep bits from the rest of the recording cancelled far too much of the actual music. In the end, I decided to leave it well alone and asked Renzo (of RDWM fame) to help me out if he could: the result is indeed an improvement on the original, and bar a couple of fades at the beginning and the end that I placed myself, this is what's on offer here...

Enough blathering.
Here it is for your enjoyment (or not?)


the.intruder, 2013