As I mentioned in connection with my vinyl copy of this album, there was no real justification for getting a remastered version on CD. If you listen carefully on headphones there are some details you can pick out in the quiet bits that maybe weren't evident on the record. But the Orchestra used the studio as a sketch pad. Their approach to recording was attractively shambolic and anti-perfectionist — so there's little to be gained from scraping over old recordings for nuances that aren't there. It's supposed to be rough.
The remastering was done by Tony Cousins and Arthur Jeffes, son of the Orchestra's original leader, Simon Jeffes. I've been listening to my download of the first album
by Arthur's ensemble, Penguin Cafe. It's so uncannily similar to his dad's music that you can almost map each track onto a antecedent by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. Penguin Cafe's Finland, for example, is made of the same DNA as the PCO's Nothing Really Blue. Or is it Oscar Tango? When you actually try it, this mapping is actually very hard and doesn't quite work — but it feels like it could. And that's what makes it radically different from the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, which always retained the feeling of the unpredictable born out of chaos; the exact opposite of the studied calculation of the Penguin Cafe.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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