Recording
The album opens with an extended and improvised recording titled "Cambridge 1969", recorded on 2 March at Cambridge University, before a live audience. The piece consists of Ono's vocalisations accompanied by electric guitar feedback from Lennon. Saxophonist John Tchicai and percussionist John Stevens join Ono and Lennon towards the end of the piece.
The remainder of the album was recorded on a cassette tape in their suite at Queen Charlotte's Hospital in London during November 1968, where Ono would suffer the first of three miscarriages by the couple. "No Bed For Beatle John" consists of John and Yoko singing the text of press clippings about themselves, in a cappella chant style. "Baby's Heartbeat" is a recording (made with a Nagra microphone) of the ill-fated child's actual palpitations. "Two Minutes Silence" follows; sometimes compared to composer John Cage's 4'33" in that, like Cage's avant garde composition, it is completely silent, the track was intended as a memoriam for the baby, "and for all violence and death." The album closes with "Radio Play"; thirteen minutes of a radio dial flipped back and forth with brief moments of John Lennon making a telephone call in the background. (Incidentally, The Beatles song "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" is discernible amongst the radio static during this recording.)
Read more about this topic: Unfinished Music No.2: Life With The Lions
Famous quotes containing the word recording:
“I didn’t have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough, let’s say, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing!”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“He shall not die, by G—, cried my uncle Toby.
MThe ACCUSING SPIRIT which flew up to heaven’s chancery with the oath, blush’d as he gave it in;—and the RECORDING ANGEL as he wrote it down, dropp’d a tear upon the word, and blotted it out for ever.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Write while the heat is in you.... The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)