I was a huge fan of Razormaid during their golden period of the late '80s, having bought many of the original monthly issues on vinyl, and picking up all three of the CD box sets in 1992. I bought the first In Hindsight collection when it was compiled in 1997.

Yesterday I listened to In Hindsight II for the first time. Holy cow, what a load of CRAP. The classic Razormaid sound was generally a re-edit with some additional EQ, and sometimes a reworking from the master tapes. It always retained the feel of the original song, with more emphasis on the beat, and DJ-friendly intros, outros, and breaks.

In Hindsight II was Joseph Watt discovering how to digitally adjust the tempo of a track without shifting the key, and going crazy. No one wants to dance to a s l o w e r Confusion. He abandoned his keen ear for editing in favor of a kitchen sink approach, grabbing 4 bars here and 4 bars there, jamming them together where they don't make sense, instead of carefully restructuring the track in a way that maintained a consistent feel. The original idea behind Razormaid was to streamline tracks that were forward-thinking, and this was him going in the complete opposite direction, making tracks more complicated.

He was always a greedy a-hole (I've had very unpleasant, personal dealings with the man), but he at least put out a quality product. In Hindsight II sounds like it was thrown together in a single afternoon as a blatant cash-grab from the fans, banking on New Order's name and Razormaid's past reputation.

(And don't get me started on his claims of copyright. His original deal with the labels was no more than 1000 copies of any track pressed, but 20-plus years later he's now selling CD-Rs through his website. He's never paid any royalties.)

[EDIT]

In Hindsight II is a very unsatisfying listening experience.

Edited by user 31 March 2013 04:57:52(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Hope you were breathing while letting that out?

Feel better now? Good.

Does anyone have a copy of the razor maid remix of "Mr. Disco"? If so could you contact me and send it to me? Thanks

The razormaid mixes of subculture blow away the official ones, and are much better,
and some of the other ones are good too, and better than the official ones.


Don't let people just give their opinions, actually go out and listen to them.

later
-1

Edited by user 16 May 2017 12:11:48(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

The Razormaid mix of Subculture (aka Record Mirror Mix) is the only one version I listen to & has been for several years.

you guys just have bad luck, ok, some of the early ones were rough (putting it nicely), but later ones eclipsed most of the official mixes.
- erasure
- cabaret voltaire
- kraftwerk

in fact some bands even used the rezormaids on their official releases
- red flag

again, your mileage varies... i personally like, and own a lot of razormaid releases, hot tracks, DMC and many other DJ service remixes.

later
-1

Exactly the same thing happened to me on a copy that must have been 8 or so years old. Even emailed them at the time asking if they could send a replacement. But no reply - not even sure if they're a going concern. Just left with a very lo-fi MP3 version I converted from a Sony ATRAC CD grab I made at a terrible bitrate back in the day.

Goes to show the importance of making lossless rips of CD-Rs - which have a much shorter lifespan than regular CDs. Also interested if anyone has decent quality MP3 or (ideally) lossless.

Mind you, as alluded to above, they really were just rubbish fan edits I rarely ever listened to anyway!

Edited by user 12 August 2020 12:55:34(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Yes, the quality of these CDs is very bad. I have tried to rip them in Wav files. The process never reaches the end of the CDs...

Sorry. I leave it around 97/100 messages, as I don’t really want to delete lots of messages.
Consequently, as soon as I get one or two messages and respond to one, it’s full again.

It never stays full for any length of time though and I clear it back down to 97 each time I get one. So, if anyone else wants these, either keep trying by PM or post here, and I’ll pick it up.

http://www.50poundnote.com/neworder/

These are the AAC versions. Also added a folder of upgraded artwork for their entire Factory output 1981-1990.

Edited by user 14 August 2020 06:03:47(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Thanks, 50!

Thanks for this -1.

I always thought though that the 'archive' took up more room in one's quota.

For instance, I've just gone and deleted a load of messages and archived a load too. It currently says:

"You have 37 private messages: 0 in Inbox and 7 in Outbox, 30 In Archive from a total of 100 allowed. Your mail box is filled to 37.00%"

So 0 Inbox + 7 outbox + 30 Archive = 37 messages. Therefore 37% full.

Therefore, moving messages to the archive isn't actually going to save me any room, I don't think. Or have I misunderstood?

As regards 'exporting', I tried to do this before but, for some reason, not all messages seemed to have been exported.


Anyway, I have loads of room now, so should avoid any blockages for a while. :-)

Edited by user 15 August 2020 08:33:37(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

There are already 3 Razormaid versions - Sarm West, Berlin, and one with added vocals by Deborah Iyall from Romeo Void. Jeez, Joseph, if you didn't get it right the first time, give it up. Razormaid was much better when they were doing re-edits of existing mixes, and not using the master tracks to mix something new from the ground up.

Incidentally, the Sarm West mix is the one used by Record Mirror.