UPDATE 1: Clive Young of the Mix website published an interview with T Bone Burnett on 5/20/22 on the Ionic Originals disc technology, as well as Burnett’s plans for his NeoFidelity business. The full interview can be found at the link below, but the IO Shadow Kingdom cut(?) full album(?) will indeed be a one-off collectible acetate, with more details on how it will be sold coming next week. Other highlights from the interview include:
- Writer Clive Young — “As might be expected, the Ionic Original process is not cheap, and while it is scalable to a mass-market level of production, that will require considerable investment. For now, to gain both attention and funding for the company, NeoFidelity plans to create one-off recordings of notable artists, have them cut to disc by [Take Out Vinyl] and then sell them in a method yet to be determined… Of course, that business model will, for now, make NeoFidelity discs as rare as actual acetates — items to owned by well-heeled collectors.”
- “We are creating scarcity in the beginning,” Burnett readily admits. “… all of the Bob Dylan fans won’t be able to hear it, but there are thousands of other Bob Dylan recordings they can hear for free. We’re just adding to the canon….”
Original article below…
Return to Bob Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom
On April 26 2022 record producer, musician, and songwriter T Bone Burnett announced via press release the creation of a new technology that represented “the first breakthrough in analogue sound reproduction in more than 70 years.” Of more interest to Bob Dylan fans was that the first application of the technology would be used for the release of “special studio recording sessions with Bob Dylan, during which the universally acclaimed artist revisited a personally chosen set of his iconic songs for the first time in decades.”
Those “special recordings” are almost certainly from the Shadow Kingdom sessions of May/June 2021, probably using some or all of the 13 songs released in the film Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan, and possibly including additional tracks — such as “Masters of War,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and “All Along the Watchtower” — that may have been recorded during the Shadow Kingdom sessions but not used in the film.
A little over a month ago, session guitarist Tim Pierce released a 12-minute video on his YouTube channel, “My dream became real. Tracking Live with Bob Dylan,” detailing his involvement with the Shadow Kingdom sessions, and how he came to eventually record over 30 songs with Bob Dylan.
In May of 2021 producer Don Was contacted Pierce with an invitation that he wanted “you, me and Greg Leisz to do some songs with Bob Dylan. Bob wants to do some of his songs in a very stripped-down way.”
According to the Dylan fanzine, ISIS, the sessions took place at the Village Studios in West Los Angeles — a venue with an eclectic history, originally a Masonic temple, one-time center for Transcendental Meditation, eventually converted into a recording studio in 1968. Artists interested in recording using vintage equipment, including Fleetwood Mac, The Rolling Stones, B. B. King, and Bob Dylan have all come to the Village at various times.
Pierce relates that the sessions were “very early ‘60s-style, live, off-the-floor,” that is, the group together in a room, recording in the round over the course of late May into June. The Shadow Band included:
Bob Dylan — vocals, harmonica
Tim Pierce — acoustic guitar
Greg Leisz — mandolin
Don Was — upright bass
Jeff Taylor — accordion
T Bone Burnett — electric guitar
According to Pierce, every performance was done together as a band playing to three or four microphones in the room, with the group adjusting chairs and playing styles as necessary to get the sound they wanted for each song.
“Greg Leisz would be sitting next to me playing mandolin,” Pierce says. “If he needed to be louder he would simply move his chair forward, Don Was was playing upright bass and if he was too loud he would just move back… We moved in space to adjust our dynamics for each particular song.”
Other musicians joined the core group, including T Bone Burnett on electric guitar. After around 19 days Pierce gave up his chair to guitarist Ira Ingber, a longtime Dylan associate who worked on Empire Burlesque and Knocked Out Loaded. “After I exited, that ensemble recorded many other songs, with other people coming and going,” says Pierce.
Building the Shadow Kingdom
Featuring Bob Dylan and a group of masked musicians on a set replicating a funky juke joint complete with equally retro-looking patrons, Shadow Kingdom premiered on the livestream platform Veeps.com July 18 2021. While Dylan probably had his own reasons for the title, Shadow Kingdom could just as easily been named Strawberry Fields, as nothing in it is real except the music. The musicians on stage— all actual professional musicians — are miming to a recording, as is Dylan. The audience — including one who appears to be the ghost of Robert Johnson — are actors and, in at least one scene, mannequins. The club, credited as the Bon Bon Club of Marseille, doesn’t exist except in the Theatre of the Mind.
Yet the 50-minute film is a tour de force, getting rave reviews by both critics and Dylan fans and followers. But after being extended for viewing five days past its original cut-off date, Shadow Kingdom disappeared back into the shadows. No DVD of the film. No CD of the music. No comments from the Dylan camp about its future. Bob Dylan moved on, restarting the Never-Ending Tour that had been curtailed by the pandemic and announcing a new book to be published in the Fall which has a cover that looks like it may have been inspired by a Shadow Kingdom publicity photo. Or maybe the Shadow Kingdom publicity photo was a gender-reversed hommage inspired by Bruce Perry’s original photo of Little Richard, Alis Lesley (the female Elvis) and Eddie Cochran at Sydney Airport on September 28 1957.
And that was all we knew. Until T Bone Burnett’s announcement of last week.
Joseph Henry “T Bone” Burnett III — Entrepreneur and Inventor
“Reps for Burnett and Dylan said there would be no additional information immediately coming about the Dylan project beyond what was contained in today’s announcement.” ~ Variety
Invented in the late 1920s, vinyl record production is a complicated process little changed since Columbia Records introduced the first vinyl record in 1948. To create a vinyl record you first need to transcribe an audio recording onto a lacquer-coated aluminum disc (there are other processes using other materials, but we’ll stick to the one T Bone specifically describes). This contains the final sound of the recording, a “master lacquer” in recording parlance. To get to the consumer product — a vinyl record — requires the creation of several generations of “father,” “mother,” and “stamper” plates, each further away from the master. Defects introduced during the production process of these clones result in diminished quality of the original audio.
Vinyl also has some inherent problems affecting sound quality. It’s easy to scratch and warp. It’s prone to attracting dust, hair and dirt. No matter how carefully you care for your vinyl record, each play degrades sound reproduction.
Now what if you could eliminate the steps between master lacquer and vinyl and make the master itself durable enough for the stamping process or to be played repeatedly? What if you could reduce vinyl wear-and-tear and produce a record that sheds dust and foreign particles?
That’s the thesis of the patent for “Methods and coatings for advanced audio recording and playback” — filed by T Bone Burnett together with several scientist/engineers. Using its patented technology, “Ionic Original” recordings will “produce superior sound reproduction, increase foreign particle resistance and shedding, increase longevity and durability, and increase abrasion resistance of [both] master phonorecords and end-use consumer phonorecords.”
The “how” gets a bit in-the-weeds, but essentially the technology uses a a thin coating of quartz, sapphire, or diamond-like carbon that conforms to the record’s grooves. That “conformal coating” in the patent description seems to be the key to the “break-through in analogue sound reproduction” that the Ionic press release heralds.
“The conformal coating can produce a high degree of sound fidelity when played on a phonorecord device or audio playback device, such as a turntable, phonograph, and the like,” the description states. “Additionally the coated analog audio recording can be played a plurality of times without diminishing sound quality. Surprisingly, phonorecords comprising the conformal coating can have improved playback quality upon multiple playbacks on an audio playback device.”
Interestingly, the description also notes that the conformal coating can be adapted to incorporate digital data “embodying audio, video, images, text, advertisements, voice comments from an artist, bonus material, e.g., B-side tracks, and the like,” although there’s no description of what playback device would be required for a hybrid analog/digital vinyl recording.
And there we have it to date. The first Ionic Original recordings will contain “special studio recording sessions” from Bob Dylan revisiting “a personally chosen set of his iconic songs.” What format these songs will arrive in is still anyone’s guess. But given the press release quoting T Bone as saying, “It is one of one… lacquer painted onto an aluminum disc” and the somewhat ominous claim that he intends to “reset the valuation of recorded music” combined with Jesse Dylan’s and Jeff Rosen’s involvement with the NFT start-up, Snowcrash, it’s entirely possible that we’re looking at such things as a one-of-one master edition of the Shadow Kingdom sessions, or perhaps extremely limited editions…
“Snowcrash works with intellectual property holders, brands, artists, generative art scientists, AR-XR-VR artists, interactive world builders, games world architects to create collections of master editions, limited editions, streaming rights, and digital goods over a broad category of digital assets in visual art, music, movies, sports, games, architecture, and collectibles.” ~ Snowcrash, “Who We Are”
… but hopefully we’ll also see high-quality vinyl consumer editions for the hoi polloi. Or maybe what we’ll see are some variations of all these including digital material of B-sides and out-takes. Or perhaps more. Or maybe less.
We’ll have to wait and see. Right now, only The Shadow knows…
