We like to think of our memories as history filmed in our minds, kept in reels we can play back whenever we so desire. that's far from the truth, as not only is our memory too fragmented for such things, but what we remember is not the truth as it existed. Our memories are a version of the truth we have been telling ourselves for years, massaging to better fit the narrative that gives us peace. The gist will be the same, but we wind up constructing many of the details out of fiction, rarely realizing what we have done.
I was recently re-writing the stories of memories I had committed to paper years ago, and doing so was a lesson in the ways memory fails us. As I read those stories and shifted the language to better represent where I am right now, I tried to revisit those moments. What I found was the visions I had were exact matches for the words I had written previously, so much that I knew what I was remembering was the memory I had written down, not the moment as it actually was. Trying to find the truth under the narrative was far more difficult, because it is shreds and shards buried under the sands of time.
What's comforting about music is that we have the songs and albums always with us, so the memories stay fresh as often as we listen to them. We don't have to imagine what a favorite old record sounds like, we can pull it off the shelf and relive the experience another time. We have to daydream what it was like the moment that music made its connection to us, but the rest of the story is there, exactly as it was.
But what if it wasn't?
As the last part of reissuing his catalog, Dan Swano has finally made "Moontower" available again, complete with a remastering that brings the album into the present day. As these things go, it's a gentle remastering that doesn't fundamentally alter the experience of listening to the record, but any change to the memories we have is disconcerting. If I listen to this album and hear it slightly differently, it reminds me that I can't trust anything I think I remember, because I can't ignore the ways in which those memories fade and change like old ink left in the sun.
The other aspect to this is that "Moontower" did not need to be updated. The record not only sounded brilliant in its original form, but was a record meant to sound older than it was from the moment it came out. To pull time forward is to do it a disservice, because our interpretation of what "death metal in 1972" would sound like is nearly three decades further removed from the experiences that created it. We've all been subjected to remasterings and remixes of classic records from the likes of Led Zeppelin and The Beatles so many times that it's difficult to know when we are remembering the original versions, as opposed to all the glossier and louder interpretations that tried to scream so we could hear them through the fog of our memories.
This new version of "Moontower" is still brilliant, but it almost feels to me as if it is one of those old photos that has been 'upscaled' into faux-HD. This version has a clarity that wasn't present in the original, which perhaps adds too much detail for the ear and mind to process. That isn't to say it sounds any worse than the original, because it doesn't, but there are subtle shifts in the frequencies that play with my perception. This is nothing like the 'uncanny valley' effect the updating of Green Day's "Warning" produced last autumn, but it is enough to raise questions about how well I know a record I thought I have loved for many years. Listening to the new version, I don't quite trust my hearing, because my expectations miss the mark just enough to hit the edges. Likewise, I was struggling to trust my memory, because as I attempted to fill in the gaps in the details, I realized the best I could do was give my present-day interpretation of what I was missing.
That's what Dan Swano is doing with this remastering of "Moontower". He is giving us a new interpretation that is the same music, but as he remembers wanting it to be. That isn't exactly the same as what he actually intended in the moment, and neither he or I can know precisely the disparity.
What I do know is that having "Moontower" back in print is a gift for all of us, regardless of which form it takes.
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