Search - Nikhil Banerjee, Mahapurush Misra :: Manomanjari Berkeley 1968

Utterly dreadful recording quality!

Andrew W | Japan | 09/11/2007

(1 out of 5 stars)

"N.B. This review DOES NOT relate to the artist, but the quality of the recording, or lack thereof.



I own the entire Nikhil Banerjee set of Raga Records releases and am slowly listening my way through them. Finally I get to playing 202. I am SO disappointed! Despite the ages of the performances in this series, the quality has generally been very good, one might say that, due to the lack of atmospheric and ambient noises that ground the listener in that lost moment, "The quality is too good". But with Raga 202 the recording quality is DREADFUL, the levels are all over the place, the volumes of the segments too. It actually appears mixed from a number of microphones that picked up different sounds and frequencies. In addition to this there are also very annoying joints, where the sound actually drops out entirely between the sections of the Raag, so we loose the continuity. It is absolutely shocking that a record company would release something of this quality without first re-mastering it and cleaning it up. In fact, in this case, I would advise NOT releasing it at all. Rag Manomanjari exists on the Live at De Kosmos - Amsterdam 1972 - RAGA212, likewise does another performances at Berkeley: Live to Air - KPFA Berkeley 1967 - RAGA201. And it is to those recordings that I steer the reader of this review. Those like the rest of the series are worth purchasing, this is not. Not unless you love the late Pandit Banerjee so much that you want to own all the CDs he made. Thank-you."