Tomorrow never knows: how the Beatles invented the future with Studio Magic, Tape Loops & LSD

by Finn Patraic

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“”Tomorrow never dies“We could not be done today, and not only because the Beatles have already succeeded in 1966. Perhaps marking the biggest stage in the artistic evolution of the group, this song is in all directions a product of its time. Like the conscience of religion and music of religion technology of religion, possible approaches, were approaches. That the musicians would never have imagined having tried before – and, when they are united, produced a result that many listeners of a few years earlier would have hardly recognized as music.

In the new You can't smoke that video aboveHost Raymond Schillinger explains everything that has entered the recording of “Tomorrow Neats Knows”, whom he calls “undoubtedly the most crucial song in the Beatles career”. It seems that John suffered considerable experiences during the group's five -month break after Rubber soulSince he introduced himself to Emi Studios thereafter with a song which “challenged almost all the Congress of pop music at the time: the words did not rhyme, the progression of the agreements did not really progress, and instead of romantic love, the subject extended his psychic conscience by the death of the ego.” A youngster Geoff EmerickWho had just been promoted to the role of the Beatles recording engineer, took up the challenge of facilitating an equally non -standard studio process.

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The entirely new sound texture that has led to the use of several band loops, literal audio tape sections connected at the start and end to allow a theoretically infinite repetition of their content. It was a fairly new musical technology at the time, and the Beatles used it with enthusiasm, creating loops of all kinds of accelerated sounds – an orchestra playing, a MellotronAn inverted Indian Sitar, Paul resembling a seagull – and orchestrating them “live” during recording. (Ringo's battery track, despite what looks like superhuman regularity in this context, was not, in fact, a loop.) Other technologically new elements included double -track voices by John crossing a leslie turning speaker and a guitar solo back on the fact that the enthusiasts of the Beatles are always arguing.

What John had called “vacuum” was removed after one of the expressions of the Ringo self -patch (“a difficult night” being another) in order to avoid attracting too much attention as “drug song”. But listeners supported in the LSD scene would have recognized the lyric inspiration from The Tibetan Book of the Deadthe old work which also informed Psychedelic experienceTimothy Leary's guide and Richard Alpert (later Baba Ram Dass) with which John directed his own first trip. But even for the least lit Beatle fan, “Tomorrow Never Knows” was “like going from a black and white world in color”, as Schillinger says. The Beatles may have followed the Rolling Stones path and have chosen to record in an American studio rather than their home at home on Abbey Road, the unconventional use of his advanced equipment less than here in the twenty-tenties, when the expansion of consciousness itself has become digital.

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Based in Seoul, Colin MArshall Written and broadcastTS on cities, language and culture. His projects include the substack newsletter Books on cities And the book The stateless city: a walk through Los Angeles from the 21st century. Follow it on the social network formerly known as Twitter in @ColinmArshall.

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