New Monday #98
Happy Monday -
I hope y’all had a good holiday. There’s one more big one coming up. Perhaps I’ll write something wise and heartfelt next week.
This week, let’s listen to stuff. Something old, something new, something disco, but not in that order.
Rosalia - Lux
Start here: https://youtu.be/m6z1sW_qtyg?si=CE3Ku9D8U8WewO0k
This album is on everyone’s best of 2025 list—it came out last month.
Rosalia is Spain’s Björk. She’s a powerhouse singer, a relentless experimenter and a workaholic. She gets an idea in her teeth and shakes it to death, exploring all the options. In the case of Lux, Rosalia is exploring opera, orchestra, pop, and her own voice. It's long and melodramatic, involving religion, the lives of saints, ex-boyfriends that deserve to die—quite in keeping with operatic plot lines. And much like opera, I don’t understand a word of it because it’s sung in 14 different languages and I speak only one and a half of them.
Most of the words I know outside of English refer to either food or WWII military equipment. Want some fromage avec that Stuka?
Sigh. It is a failure of mine. Something to work on in the new year.
In terms of the recording, Lux is 21st-century state-of-the-art. I can’t help but think there’s too much digitally emulated saturation, especially on her voice. There’s a brittleness, a graininess to the highs, and when she’s loud, you can hear the limiters stomp down. It’s mixed at a molecular level, everything pristine and very much in tune, clinical in its decisions, threatening to run off the rails but no worries: it’s wearing a safety harness. A virtuoso recording, but it plays it safe in comparison to the scale of Rosalia’s ideas.
But one thing I really like, and that is worth stealing/learning from, is the manipulation of reverb and ambience. Her voice migrates from space to space, depending on, I suppose, the emotional point of things. Sometimes the whole song heads somewhere else: It’s dry, it’s wet as heck, it’s dry with an unexpected reverberant tail that goes whipping out into the distance. Strings recorded in a hall turn into wet synth farts. This one is cool too: Dios Es Un Stalker.
The whole album is cool. Stunning in fact. Brilliant, actually. I just wish it was a bit more... dangerous.
Rasputin - Boney M.
OMG! Put on headphones or bury that head between the speakers. This thing is INSANE.
https://youtu.be/Nl_Eo2QzqU4?si=jro3NJ0a4uCahVkz
Good lord! Those drums at the top... then balalaikas.
Weird moment: a descending guitar line starts, the whole track speeds up and sounds out of tune for a moment. I have to figure out what is going on here, but my guess is they adjusted tempos, changed the pitch and decided, “Meh. Good Enough."
Fantastic funky rhythm guitar part, but it jumps sides depending on which mix you're listening to—on this it’s on the left. And of course, balalaikas. And a solo violin.
The drums are played by a fantastically talented guy named Keith Forsey. More on him in the new year, too. For now, you can really hear how the kick and snare are pushing slightly ahead of the beat, and the hihat is dragging.
Speaking of hihats, I’m hearing two: eighths on the right, and an upbeat accent on the left.
The vocals: the main male lead is actually the writer and producer Fran Farina, doubled.
Boney M. was a concoction by Frank Farian. He put the songs together in the studio and hired a group of performers, accomplished dancers, to lip sync or perform live, depending on the requirements. The female vocalists on the records also performed live, and they were both from Jamaica, Liz Mitchell and Marcia Barrett. Liz Mitchell is the female lead voice on Boney M. recordings. Live, Frank Farian’s parts were performed by dancer Bobby Farrell. Farian, by the way, repeated the Boney M. formula in the 80s with some modifications and drastically different ramifications—remember Milli Vanilli?
Boney M. was a disco phenomenon, made all the weirder by the fact that the songs tended to have a historical bend to them. Rasputin does indeed present a fairly accurate picture of the life of the Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin, who seduced the women of upper-crust Tsarist society and was murdered by forces that felt he was a threat to the monarchy. The story is: first he was poisoned, then shot in the chest. Then he came back to life, was shot a number of times again, and tossed into the Little Nevka river. A contemporary autopsy showed death by a single bullet to the forehead, no poison, no evidence of drowning. A great song but it isn’t Do The Hustle.
There’s something about this recording... contrast how smooth it is with the brittleness of the Rosalia album. Rasputin is very midrange forward—snares, hihats, guitars, balalaikas, and vocals all crammed into that midrange and pushed out, yet it’s not harsh at all. And the bass and kick are tight and controlled, yet down they go, especially the kick.
To some extent, this can be explained by recording to tape, but I think it’s also the electronics involved—the consoles, EQs and compressors. The recording details for Rasputin and everything by Boney M. are really sketchy. There wasn’t much I could find. But there were some outstanding German console makers in the 1960s and 70s, and how this record sounds—tight but big low end, and that smooth but forward midrange, sounds like the way everyone describes Siemens SiTRAL EQs from the 60s and 70s. SiTRAL was hyper-expensive, totally overbuilt equipment for German broadcast studios. More on SiTRAL later. Cool stuff.
Dear Prudence
My 15-year-old brain wasn’t prepared for the utter beauty of Dear Prudence. Listen...
This is an early Beatle eight-track, recorded at Trident Studios in 1968. More on the console there later.
The John Lennon stuff on later Beatles records has such an insouciance (casual lack of concern; indifference) about it. Tchad Blake described it very well at dinner at NAMM last year. I’m an idiot, I forget exactly what he said, so it is dumb to quote him, but it was along the lines of, “Someone would have an idea and they would just try it, and not get all hung up on it.” Dear Prudence is such a casual hang compared to most modern productions.
The guitar sounds are very “just plug it in.” Lennon’s lead vocal is out of tune, and doubled, out of tune.
It’s a pretty trashy drum sound—Paul playing, by the way. Ringo was pissed off and quit for a week.
On the left channel there’s a tambourine occasionally, like when someone feels like playing it.
George’s lead guitar parts sound like a rough take, getting louder and quieter, buzzy and clunky. But he totally nails the ending, doesn’t he?
Paul plays a sustained note on a flugelhorn—listen around 1:50. He’s not much of a flugelhornist, but it works. And he adds some flashy piano at the end, and that works, too.
That ending... it's like a sun rising, then it saunters off like a barefoot girl in the summer. It’s so lovely.
Here’s the Giles Martin 2018 remix. It’s different, not as much fun, but you can hear the flugelhorn better, as well as the drum overdubs.
There’s such an effortlessness to the whole affair. There’s no attempt to elicit the listener's emotions beyond simply playing the song. There’s no showboating. It’s so so simple, at times balancing on the knife-edge of Lennon’s voice and McCartney’s bassline.
Do you even remember the Rosalia song after hearing Dear Prudence?
The New Year is days away! Let’s make it different!
I wish all of you the best New Year ever, from all of us at Korneff Audio.