Oil Well Bootlegs - RSC CD: Pink Floyd – Black Wizard Oil Well

Pink Floyd – Black Wizard
Oil Well – RSC 070 CD

1 Echoes 24:38
2 Careful With That Axe, Eugene 13:26
3 Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun 14:47

Note:
All songs by Waters/ Wright/ Mason/ Gilmour unless noted.
Live in Montreaux, CH - September 18/19, 1971 - Vol. 1

Lineup:
Nick Mason (drums)
David Gilmour (guitar)
Roger Waters (bass)
Richard Wright (keyboards)

This album is a clone of: "Live In Montreux 1971" - The Swingin' Pig – TSP-CD-071-2 - CD1
Front cover is a close up color photo of Nick Mason playing drums. Back cover is plain and lists songs and dates with no track times.
Wonderful quality, although it is a bit slow. I only noticed a drop in the recording levels once in Echoes. The songs are not cut during the intermissions between, and you get to hear all of the banter between Waters and the crowd. No crowd noise during the songs. Speed is slow. Excellent addition to any collection.Read below for other infos about this bootleg!

Audio quality:

Quality content:

_______________________________________________________________

Pink Floyd’s performance at the Festival de Musique in Montreux, Switzerland on September 18
Pink Floyd’s performance at the Festival de Musique in Montreux, Switzerland on September 18, 1971 has two recordings available, the first to circulate is actually considered recorder 2 and is an excellent soundboard recording, it has been released many times before on titles Black Wizard (Oil Well RSC 070) and its companion piece White Witch (Oil Well RSC 071), Live In Montreux 1971 (The Swingin’ Pig TSP-CD-071-2), Plays Montreux (Highland HL 476/477) all of which tended to run too slow. The speed issues were fixed on one of Sigma’s earliest effort, Labyrinths Of Coral Caves (Sigma 18) and was considered the best version on silver pressed CD.

There is also a very good audience recording commonly referred to as recorder 1 from the famed Victor, and has been released as Echoes In Montreux (Sigma 53), both recordings have their own idiosyncrasies but compliment each other nicely, and please refer to the reviews from Plomerus and GSparaco for the details on these releases.
https://www.collectorsmusicreviews.com/pink-floyd/pink-floyd-montreux-1971-radio-suisse-romande-open-air-mics-recording-sigma-113/

Atom Heart Mother World Tour
The Atom Heart Mother World Tour was an international concert tour by Pink Floyd. It commenced during September 1970 and ended during October 1971. It marked the first time the band visited countries such as Japan and Australia. Intended to promote their new album Atom Heart Mother, the band hired local orchestras and choirs on some dates to perform the title piece while performing it in a four-piece arrangement on other occasions.

Early in 1970, Pink Floyd performed at gigs a piece from their film soundtrack for Michelangelo Antonioni's film Zabriskie Point referred to as "The Violent Sequence". This was the musical basis for "Us and Them", from their The Dark Side of the Moon album. Lacking only the lyrics, it is identical to the final song[1] and is the earliest part of the seminal album to have been performed live. The song "Embryo" was also a part of the live repertoire around this time, but was never to appear on a studio album until the compilation album Works.

On 17 January 1970, the band began performing a then untitled instrumental piece, which would eventually become the title track to their next album Atom Heart Mother. At this point, it had no orchestra or choir accompaniment. This is the first time they performed a song live in an unfinished form as a work in progress, something they continued to do until 1975. The song officially debuted at the Bath Festival, Somerset England on 27 June 1970 under the title "The Amazing Pudding" (later the name of a Pink Floyd fanzine) and for the first time with orchestra and choir accompaniment.

Announced as "The Atom Heart Mother" by legendary British broadcaster John Peel on his BBC Radio 1 show "Peel's Sunday Concert" on 16 July 1970, a name suggested by him to the band,[2] it was also announced as "The Atomic Heart Mother" two days later at the Hyde Park free concert.[3] Partly due to the difficulties of finding and hiring local orchestras and choirs, the band often played what is referred to as the "small band" version of the song when they performed it live.

New Montreaux 1971 release: Montreux 1971 Radio Suisse Romande Open Air Mics Recording (Sigma 113)
Pink Floyd’s performance at the Festival de Musique in Montreux, Switzerland on September 18, 1971 has two recordings available, the first to circulate is actually considered recorder 2 and is an excellent soundboard recording, it has been released many times before on titles Black Wizard (Oil Well RSC 070) and its companion piece White Witch (Oil Well RSC 071), Live In Montreux 1971 (The Swingin’ Pig TSP-CD-071-2), Plays Montreux (Highland HL 476/477) all of which tended to run too slow. The speed issues were fixed on one of Sigma’s earliest effort, Labyrinths Of Coral Caves (Sigma 18) and was considered the best version on silver pressed CD. There is also a very good audience recording commonly referred to as recorder 1 from the famed Victor, and has been released as Echoes In Montreux (Sigma 53), both recordings have their own idiosyncrasies but compliment each other nicely, and please refer to the reviews from Plomerus and GSparaco for the details on these releases.

For this new release Sigma utilizes a new tape source for recorder 2 the soundboard recording, this tape has known lineage being first gen reel to reel > 2nd gen cassettes and is being referred to as Radio Suisse Romande open air mics recording. What does all this mean? Well the recording was actually done using open air mics as that’s what the radio engineers were used to using as they had previously done only classical music, so in a nutshell they professionally recorded the band from the audience. Since we are dealing with the same recording, it does suffer from the same issues as previously brought to light by Plomerus in his excellent breakdown of the recording and performance.

What this new release has to offer is a nice, but not ground breaking, upgrade in sound. Lets get real, it was already an excellent recording, this version expands upon it, it is cleaner with virtually no distortion, little if any hiss and has a generally brighter sound with a bit more punch to it. At times it rivals the BBC recording that would be done just 12 days later. What it comes down to is one has to ask themselves, do I need another version of this concert? Speaking for myself I was on the fence but after doing some online research, much thanks to the Yeeshkul! site, the decision was easy to make. I prefer 1969-71 Floyd and after to repeated listening’s I need to go no farther, until the master surfaces this is the preferred version of the this recording.

The packaging is color inserts featuring pictures from the Montreux gigs (the band played two shows, this date and the following day), the one on the inner jewel case features a close to empty hall in preparations for the concerts, the Floyd equipment is set up on stage, the one on the rear features the band during Atom Heart Mother and is also quite nice, all this is packaged in a slimline jewel case.