Customer Reviews

Noise Candy

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4 star:		(1)
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If you're unfamiliar with Bill Nelson, this is a difficult start.

With six (count 'em: 6!) CDs in the box, one is offered a wealth of excess.

The music was recorded over a period of ten years, during what must have been Bill's biggest creative period. He release quite a number of albums through the 1990s. These tunes just didn't fit in to some of themes of those records. Uh... CDs.

But don't think this is a bunch of outtakes or tunes best left for the dustbin. All are first rate pieces of music.

The six CDs each have a different name & theme:

1). Old Man Future Blows the Blues

2). Stargazing with Ranger Bill

3). Sunflower Dairy Product

4). King Frankenstein

5). Console

6). Playtime

And each CD is at least an hour or more long, so we're talking one heady bit of output here.

The big number some may have heard on alternative or college radio is "Big Yellow Moon" on disc 2. Great stuff. But then there are many standout cuts, such as "Dreamland Avenue", "All This & A Girl Like You", "Existentialism", and more.

Music features Nelson's love affair with retro-1940s science fiction and technology. Less focus on pure guitar & more on flowing, lilting tunes. And his signature "found sound" vocals are evident on a few tracks (Bill will record voices from movies & TV, loop them, and use them in segments of his music).

Add to that, an extensive booklet of notes & lyrics, bound into a beautiful box to hold all six CDs, make this a must-have for any Nelson fan out there.

I'm telling you, it rarely strays far from my player...

Strangers to Bill Nelson, of which there are undoubtedly too many, will probably never read this. The casual fan or adventurous-but-uninitiated will be unlikely to take the financial leap to a 6-CD box set. To those who are thinking about it, a word of caution....this is NOT the usual box set. It does not contain the "hits" (if such a word can be applied to Bill's wonderful past work) and assortment of alternate versions and live tracks. Rather, this is 6 CDs worth of unreleased material that did not make it, for one reason or another, onto any of Nelson's many solo releases in the 90s. For this reason, I do not think it is accurate to call this Bill's "magnum opus", as so many of the faithfull (and the record company) have. As good as the music on these discs is, it is necessary to remember that these are the tracks that did not make the cut, time and again, as albums were assembled for release by Nelson. It would be a disservice to Nelson to say that this CD is the summation of his life's work. The tracks that made it to the various 90s releases are, in the aggregate, better than these songs and soundscapes.

That being said, Nelson is well known for his quality control, and there aren't any clunkers throughout these 6 CDs. The music, roughly arranged with like-to-like styles on each disc, is a nice reflection of the various areas of interest that the always-inquisitive Nelson has pursued musically. Nelson's cast-offs are better than most people's top shelf stuff, so listening to Noise Candy is very enjoyable. At the end of the day, though, it needs to be listened to for what it is......and odds and ends collection that cleared out a big chunk of the Nelsonian tape vault so that he can again focus on the future (always a noble goal). Know all this going in, and you will get a kick out of this collection.

Ten years in the making, two years overdue after its original announcement, Noise Candy obsessed me in theory for at least a year and half and gave me a headache during the year following its final belated release. Yes it's an album of songs that "did not make the cut," but that does not mean it's a b-side or outtake collection: Nelson's muse is a voracious and ever-changing dame, and so the albums he assembled out of the sessions that produced these tracks--namely After the Satellite Sings, Weird Critters, Magnificent Dream People, and Atom Shop--are all self-contained works, just like each of the six discs that make up Noise Candy, and yet all the material in question is of top quality, more or less straight across the board. What's more, Nelson reworked, remixed, overdubbed and reshaped all of these tracks during a long incubation period--1990-2000--in order to produce a 6-part work of astounding cohesion. The resulting sound is a bubbling, airy, layered, and candy-colored swirl, with healthy doses of After the Satellite Sing's Eastern glow and Atom Shop's bluesy techno throb. The thing gave me a headache because it arrived in my life at the very apex of a several-year obsession with Nelson's work, and so I could not play the thing without worrying that I was not listening closely enough, or that the tracks I was listening to weren't the ones I wanted to hear--there were just so many (over 120!)--and I kept hearing tracks I thought I knew and that sounded odd to me: when would I ever absorb this thing! And now, after staying away from it for a year or so, I've returned to it, here in the winter of 2004, and it is a familiar land to me, a wonderland of detail and melody and techno-bliss. My Secret Studio, the 4-CD box set he released in 1995, is still the Nelson masterwork for me, but Noise Candy is a close second.

I have been listening to the output of Bill Nelson for many long years and for a time he completely lost me. Then someone made me listen to 'After the Satellite Sings' and I was back with a passion.. - don't take that as a signal that I will like anything he produces - he can be pretty willful at times!

So I held off buying this because this mad album is a lot of money to put out. Well I read good reviews and gave in and bought it.

I put it on and I am knocked over. I just cannot believe there are enough hours in the day to be able to produce so much quality work!

I haven't had time to listen to all of it yet and it is going to take a while, but I am looking forward to the journey. So far it has been a joy of jazz/groove/funk/blues glory. It is difficult to categorise because this man does it first and others tend to follow- Think De-Phazz/Hendrix/Little Axe/Robert Fripp and others and you will be getting somewhere near the excitement of this huge volume (6 hours +)

This is one very big pool of great music- go on, dive in.

This set has been out of print for a long time, but good news everyone... Bill has agreed to release many of his back catalog including Noise Candy. No date is set but it has to be better than paying the secondary market prices set at a king's ransom.

There is even talk there will be a limited release of this set with the original packaging, which was stunning.

When you have the chance to grab this set do not hesitate, do not waver, it includes so much good music you will be amazed that this epic collection is not more well-known.

If you want more information on Bill and his music check out his website at "billnelson.com", there is a lot more of his music yet to be discovered by those who have not followed his adventures in sonic delights.