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Jon Lord – Gemini Suite vinyl reissue: a closer look
Back in 1969, the lineup of DEEP PURPLE had seen a drastic change: Jon Lord, Ritchie Blackmore and Ian Paice split up with singer Rod Evans and bass player Nick Simper and hired the former EPISODE SIX musicians Ian Gillan and Roger Glover to complete the lineup.
One of the first shows to feature the new lineup was the live performance of Jon Lord’s „Concerto For Group and Orchestra“, an ambitious work to unite the different worlds of a rock band and a full orchestra which lay the foundation for Jon Lords career as composer / writer and solo artist. About a year later, the follow-up of the „Concerto“ faced the light of day during a live performance at the Royal Festival Hall, again featuring his DEEP PURPLE bandmates and conductor Malcolm Arnold.
While the „Concerto“ had its focus on band and orchestra as a whole, „Gemini Suite“ did focus on the different instruments, dedicating a track to guitar, piano, drums, vocals bass guitar and organ respectively. Also contrary to the „Concerto“, which took more than 40 years to be recorded in a studio, Jon Lord went to the studio in 1971 to record „Gemini Suite“ as a studio project. At that time, the rock career of DEEP PURPLE was in full flight and Ian Gillan and Ritchie Blackmore showed no interest in participating in the recording and were replaced by guitar player Albert Lee , multi talented Tony Ashton and singer Yvonne Elliman.
The 2019 vinyl release is based on the 2016 remaster by Rob Cass, using the original stereo mixes of the album. Luckily, the remaster doesn’t follow the popular trend of brick-walling every track and preserves the dynamics and overall feel of the original recording.
There’s still no explaination why the original artwork has been dropped and was replaced by completely new design, but the 2016 foreword by Roger Glover is also included on the inner sleeve.
Parts of this text were originally published on December 4th, 2016 as “Jon Lord – Gemini Suite“
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
In case anyone else is wondering what is meant by brick-walled (I had to look this term up), I found this description on Steve Hoffman’s web site (in a forum) that others there seemed to agree with:
“I call something brickwalled when there are no dynamics left in the music. Everything is so limited and compressed that all passages of the music are the same volume. Songs mastered this way are perceived to be LOUD LOUD LOUD! Also, when viewing a waveform in an audio editor, the waveform of something that is brickwalled doesn’t have peaks and valleys, and instead look like a two by four.”
September 14th, 2019 at 18:50Carl, sorry for the missing explaination and thanks for adding the details. Especially with remasters, it’s a common problem that dynamics of the albums get lost as levels are increased. The Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war is a good start.
September 14th, 2019 at 20:04Original mix (2003)from “How the West was won” album by Led Zeppelin is a good example.Brickwalled by Kevin Shirley.
September 18th, 2019 at 13:46Pretty cover art !
September 19th, 2019 at 12:27