Speaker 1: Ephemeral is production of my heart three D audio for
Speaker 1: full exposure. Listen with that phones. The musical world is
Speaker 1: a rich tapestry, and yet the sonic homogeneity of our
Speaker 1: epoch can be deadening for all the artists working in
Speaker 1: the fringes who are making brilliant music without a mainstream platform.
Speaker 1: How do we amplify those voices. That's where Matt Worth
Speaker 1: comes in. My name is Matt Worth, and I am
Speaker 1: the proprietor of Revenge r VN International. When Matt founded
Speaker 1: the Revenge label in two thousand three, he came in
Speaker 1: with a lot of hands on experience before running a
Speaker 1: record label. I was running a record label. I've kind
Speaker 1: of always been running record labels. I was a part
Speaker 1: of the punk rock scene in Little Rock, Arkansas, where
Speaker 1: I grew up. In high school, an established record label
Speaker 1: was handed down to me and a kind of ceremonial
Speaker 1: or maybe non ceremonial way. The previous tenant was leaving
Speaker 1: on tour and needed someone to kind of look over
Speaker 1: mail order. I walked into a situation with a label
Speaker 1: with international distribution and a big catalog and learned my
Speaker 1: way around from there and never looked back. I moved
Speaker 1: to New York City, discovered dance music, electronic music. I
Speaker 1: still love punk rock, but I was participating in that
Speaker 1: world quite a bit more than the scene that I
Speaker 1: grew up in. Revenge was kind of like a punk
Speaker 1: rock label in a dance music community. Akin to punk rock,
Speaker 1: Revenge was founded on the basis of a moral code,
Speaker 1: one that emphasizes the ethic of doing it yourself. It's
Speaker 1: just fair d I Y is the fair shake almost literally.
Speaker 1: Not that we still rely on handshake deals, but we
Speaker 1: still maintain a fifty fifty net profit deal with all
Speaker 1: of our artists. We still encourage artists participation and autonomy
Speaker 1: and self starting, keeping their principles in the driver's seat.
Speaker 1: Revenge is mutated a lot over the last eighteen years.
Speaker 1: We went from kind of applying the same punk rock
Speaker 1: practices spray painting the DJ mix covers, hand collating everything,
Speaker 1: to finding distribution shape shifting from dance music into more
Speaker 1: as a teric avant garde experimental music. We've never really
Speaker 1: followed one specific genre. Instead just kind of followed an
Speaker 1: instinct that's essentially informed the evolution of the label more
Speaker 1: than anything, adaptability to new music and a very open
Speaker 1: attitude and heart toward new sound. Well, Revenge does a
Speaker 1: tremendous job breaking and promoting new artists, their efforts also
Speaker 1: extend into reinvigorating existing mater room. Just like Revenge is
Speaker 1: agnostic to genre, it's more of an intuitive feeling which
Speaker 1: kind of new music we get involved with. The same
Speaker 1: concept applies to archival music, except maybe the spin is
Speaker 1: that we choose to focus on artists that didn't really
Speaker 1: have a fair shake the first time around, or whose
Speaker 1: music was appreciated but maybe under explored at the time.
Speaker 1: We tend to favor musicians that we're doing it themselves
Speaker 1: then too, so you'll see throughout the archival division a
Speaker 1: lot of home produced music. There's that spirit of autonomy,
Speaker 1: the idea that these musicians were doing it for themselves
Speaker 1: with some hope that it would transmit beyond their home
Speaker 1: studios or beyond the fifty cassettes they were duplicating and
Speaker 1: sending out. Our first archival record was Synthesist by Harold Groskoff,
Speaker 1: Originally released early eighties. Grosskoff was a staple in German
Speaker 1: crowd rock bands and then went off to make this
Speaker 1: extremely synthetic record compelled by his live drumming. There was
Speaker 1: not a huge market for reissues at the time. There
Speaker 1: were certainly a few labels that had started as reissued
Speaker 1: labels and had huge catalogs from the beginning, but in
Speaker 1: our sector, there just wasn't a lot of people going
Speaker 1: deep on reissues. Honestly, it felt like Harold's record was
Speaker 1: contemporary to our catalog and it just made sense to
Speaker 1: contextualize it with what we were doing. Synthesis was like
Speaker 1: a straight one to one reissue, and we had fun
Speaker 1: mutating the experience around the album. We used different artwork.
Speaker 1: We included a disc of reinterpretations of Harald's music, obviously
Speaker 1: created all new context with liner notes too, add a
Speaker 1: little bit more tech, sure, a little bit more colored.
Speaker 1: The next one was Sensations Fix, the project of an
Speaker 1: Italian musician named Franco Falsini who was making music in
Speaker 1: the early seventies through the mid seventies of Sensations Fix.
Speaker 1: For that one, we went through his archives and compiled
Speaker 1: two LP set that covered the full Sensations Fixed gamnet
Speaker 1: and lasted. Apart of the chronology, it wasn't like seventy
Speaker 1: one through side A to side D. It was how
Speaker 1: we responded to the sequence. From there, we visited the
Speaker 1: archives of k Limber, an amazing bedroom producer composer from Seattle,
Speaker 1: and then we reissued Craig Leon's No Moos and visiting
Speaker 1: a pair of records that he made in the early eighties.
Speaker 1: Craig was a fixture in the downtown New York scene,
Speaker 1: famously the producer of the first Ramons record, Blondie the Fall,
Speaker 1: and then went off to make this highly experimental electronic record.
Speaker 1: From there we went through Oriel Kalmas archives, French saxophone
Speaker 1: player two, melded his wind instruments with synthesizers, Bred Woman,
Speaker 1: the character the myth making of Anna Homler, which was
Speaker 1: also a collaboration with Stephen Mosher, went back to kay
Speaker 1: Lymber's archives to release Savants Ensemble with other Seattle musicians
Speaker 1: doing like a Brian you know, David Byrne sample vibe
Speaker 1: and the grules of this. I need to like Syrinx,
Speaker 1: which was a Canadian trio pioneering mogue, synthesizers, Pauline and
Speaker 1: a strong again an archival effort to go through all
Speaker 1: of her independently released work. Mark Renner, the musician from Baltimore,
Speaker 1: in the eighties, making Drudy column esque shimmering UK influenced
Speaker 1: guitar driven music. Michelle Mercure the collection for her self
Speaker 1: released music from the eighties, and that was the most
Speaker 1: recent before Peter Iver's, which was our Catalog number nine,
Speaker 1: and then took another six years to actually release. Developing
Speaker 1: the album that would be titled Becoming Peter Ivor's began
Speaker 1: a unique journey from math through the archives of another
Speaker 1: person's ephemera. The best way to get to know Peter
Speaker 1: is through his music. I really wish I could just
Speaker 1: like carry around the little Peter toy box that I
Speaker 1: could open and crank and it would play Miraculous Weekend
Speaker 1: or eighteen and Dreaming. Peter grew up in Massachusetts. Bypassing
Speaker 1: his fildhood, he ended up at Harvard in the late sixties,
Speaker 1: joined by so many other wild, imaginative characters Fight Harvard, Fight, Fight, Fight,
Speaker 1: demonstrate to them our skill from Doug Kenny, who founded
Speaker 1: National Lampoon. By their friends and neighbors Stargard Channing, John Lithgow.
Speaker 1: There's explosive creativity happening all around Peter. He gravitated towards music.
Speaker 1: He would make trips out to Chicago to study blues
Speaker 1: heart players and come back with that knowledge sharpening his
Speaker 1: harmonica playing skills. He would help create music for his
Speaker 1: friend Tim Mayor's theater productions at Harvard, and then ended
Speaker 1: up making his own record still in college or just
Speaker 1: out of college, called Knight of the Blue Communion COMMUNIONCOUM,
Speaker 1: which is kind of the Zappa esque Free for All
Speaker 1: that somehow ended up on Epic Records because Peter barged
Speaker 1: in on a meeting that he wasn't really invited to.
Speaker 1: This is all happening to Peter before He's tonight, another
Speaker 1: myth from Massachusetts. Fresh slices of Osiris littered the city,
Speaker 1: The cock of the walk, the talk of the town,
Speaker 1: waits for his hawkheaded son to come down and assemble him.
Speaker 1: Will the result resemble him? The record flopped, but Peter
Speaker 1: was determined and headed out to California. He eventually was
Speaker 1: signed to Warner Brothers by Van Dyke Parks, who at
Speaker 1: the time was in r but had more notably produced
Speaker 1: The Beach Boys music and his own fantastical orchestrated music.
Speaker 1: Peter had another shot at stardom or pop success. The
Speaker 1: Academy and Fellow with this new deal and submitted a
Speaker 1: highly avant pop record called Terminal Of for his debut
Speaker 1: on Warder Brothers. It's a masterpiece by my estimation, but
Speaker 1: again it didn't quite connect space sound. But even with
Speaker 1: a string of less than successes, Peter's individualism remained intact
Speaker 1: and doors continued to open before him. I think there
Speaker 1: was a belief in Peter around the label. He really
Speaker 1: brought such a magnetic energy to any environment. It created
Speaker 1: a support system for his antics. Around the time Eternal
Speaker 1: Love he opened for Fleetwood Mac. Famously, he wore a
Speaker 1: diaper on stage and through hot dogs at the audience.
Speaker 1: A lot of people look at that as this self
Speaker 1: sabotaging tactic, but Peter was genuinely interested in transforming the
Speaker 1: audience expectations and felt that that was the best way
Speaker 1: that he could go out and win over a Fleetwood
Speaker 1: Mac crowd. It didn't work so well, obviously, it makes
Speaker 1: a great story, but he remained connected in the music world.
Speaker 1: Got to make another record with Gary Wright, who famously
Speaker 1: wrote and produced dream Weaver for his second Warner Brothers album,
Speaker 1: m M, that again did not perform. Around that time,
Speaker 1: he was introduced to David Lynch a friend named Steve Martin,
Speaker 1: not to be confused with that Steve Martin, nonetheless a
Speaker 1: very instrumental figure in Peter's life who ran a midnight
Speaker 1: cinema in l A that kind of broke David Lynch's
Speaker 1: career by showing eraser Head for several years. I thought
Speaker 1: I heard a stranger. We've got chicken tonight. The soundtrack
Speaker 1: of David Lynch's seminal film is made up of mostly
Speaker 1: amplified ambience, Fats Waller's swinging pipe organ, and one signature
Speaker 1: sing along. As our main character lays awake in bed,
Speaker 1: we peer inside the radiator to reveal a checkered stage
Speaker 1: upon which a smiling blonde with swollen cheeks dance is
Speaker 1: the two step and sings to Cameron Peter wrote in Heaven,
Speaker 1: which became a centerpiece of that film. That's Peter's voice,
Speaker 1: By the way, a lot of people primarily know Peter
Speaker 1: through that song. You know the most famous song I wrote,
Speaker 1: It's called Him and Diana. Are you sure? The song
Speaker 1: in a razor Hood is called which certainly is a
Speaker 1: testament to his songwriting. In the weird effect of Peter's sensibilities,
Speaker 1: but is just one part of a huge catalog of music.
Speaker 1: Everything is everything is everything. He was a studious home
Speaker 1: recorder in the house that he and Lucy Fisher, his
Speaker 1: girlfriend of many years, lived. He almost had a monkish
Speaker 1: ascetic practice of recording music every single day, and he
Speaker 1: left this incredible trail of music in various stages, which
Speaker 1: ultimately became vocal to our collection. He was also a
Speaker 1: black belt in karate. He was a yoga master. He
Speaker 1: was on the scene. He was a social butterfly and
Speaker 1: clubs and all these different contexts, and I think that's
Speaker 1: how he ended up hosting a new wave theater WelCom.
Speaker 1: The New Wave Theater was a customer accent increased to
Speaker 1: pass a skeleton around the table before every banquet to
Speaker 1: remind every one of their mortality, which was a seminal
Speaker 1: cable access show in Los Angeles in the early eighties.
Speaker 1: New Wave Theater fearlessly documented a scene which arose from
Speaker 1: the discontent and uncertainty of the youth of the country
Speaker 1: that broke a lot of punk rock bands Janitor, Suburban Lawns,
Speaker 1: Dead Kennedy's Black Flag. He kind of walked into that
Speaker 1: situation treating it as a gig. What are you projecting,
Speaker 1: by the way your presentention of the music. Most of
Speaker 1: our songs are rags, you know. I mean, we're just
Speaker 1: we're talking about outmoded sensibilities, outmoded sensibilities like read him,
Speaker 1: like surf culture. Famously, as host, he presented all these
Speaker 1: monologues before bands would play that have become so synonymous
Speaker 1: with him. Hey, every Gigel has an unconscious idea of
Speaker 1: what good art is. The New Way Theory drill Bits
Speaker 1: Survey says real art always has some stack of the
Speaker 1: unknown woman into its spine. Yes, there's nothing like the
Speaker 1: unknown to make people stop to fulfill art's purposes. Change
Speaker 1: maker art and music as art is truth in a play.
Speaker 1: Only Geegle set limits on their future, not understanding that
Speaker 1: the unknown as a friend. A New Way Theater Bible
Speaker 1: bulletin says it's better to spend more time on where
Speaker 1: you're going than where you've been. Does that mean we're
Speaker 1: timeless and we can just bounce off the bumpers of
Speaker 1: burger them like somebody abandoned shopping cards. And the sixties
Speaker 1: it was never trust anyone over thirty and the new
Speaker 1: music eighties has never trust anyone who's alive. In the fifties,
Speaker 1: it was banned the bomb. In the eighties, it's which bomb,
Speaker 1: we've forgotten, the atomic lessons of yesterday and a hopeless
Speaker 1: frenzy of shredded plastic and vital vitriol. But is still
Speaker 1: time to him the Hackles, provided we the pioneers, share
Speaker 1: the same blend o vision, the people will not perish,
Speaker 1: enjoy the show. But these were monologues that he actually
Speaker 1: didn't writes today. In Regan Country, it's only at funerals
Speaker 1: and times of loss that we allow ourselves to see
Speaker 1: the tranjiance of life. For no one wants to be
Speaker 1: reminded of the passage of time, especially when they're having
Speaker 1: a good one. Peter Tree Neway Theater as a day
Speaker 1: job when he really wanted to be working on his music.
Speaker 1: That's sadly where Peter's story ends. He was murdered in
Speaker 1: in his downtown l a loft. It remains an unsolved case.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's the third thing that Peter is most known for,
Speaker 1: and obviously the most tragic thing that he's known for.
Speaker 1: Though they never met, Matt found a personal connection to
Speaker 1: Peter through his music. You and New Yez just Carny Lights, Dream,
Speaker 1: I wanted you Way Well and a dream. My infatuation
Speaker 1: with Peter started about ten years ago, finding all of
Speaker 1: his albums, which they're probably so they weren't a ton
Speaker 1: of becoming familiar with New Way theater. This fact has
Speaker 1: not been lost on the young, who today, at the
Speaker 1: very least, are making enough poetic noise to waken the
Speaker 1: dead and chill the living. And a couple of years
Speaker 1: after I discovered his music, and oral history of Peter's
Speaker 1: life was written, which eventually led me to his archives.
Speaker 1: Lucy Fisher, as mentioned, was Peter's longtime girlfriend. She became
Speaker 1: a quite powerful executive at Warner Brothers and has gone
Speaker 1: on to produce a number of films. A story like
Speaker 1: mine has never been told. Very humbly, I approached Lucy
Speaker 1: to see what was being done with Peter's music archives,
Speaker 1: knowing that she was so close, and finding out that
Speaker 1: she was actually administering Peter's estate, she granted permission to
Speaker 1: visit Harvard and go through Peter's archives, which had been
Speaker 1: sent there for safekeeping after his murder. It was the
Speaker 1: first of many, many times, because the first experience was
Speaker 1: just so overwhelming. To Harvard's credit, they had at least
Speaker 1: put everything in boxes. Once opening those containers, though, there
Speaker 1: was just no organization whatsoever. It was like Peter's brain overflowing.
Speaker 1: There was sheet music, magazine clippings, tapes, BHS, cassettes, stoodles, notebooks,
Speaker 1: just a really random assortment of ephemera. The first couple
Speaker 1: of days was more of a psychological gestation phase. What
Speaker 1: am I walking into? What am I contending with here?
Speaker 1: But if you've ever been through a personal archive, like
Speaker 1: sorting the belongings of a late family member, you know
Speaker 1: there's more to contend with than the materials at hand,
Speaker 1: going through the belongings of someone else, reckoning with that
Speaker 1: spirit that looms over you. I know, I don't love
Speaker 1: people going through my ship. So it's a very personal
Speaker 1: experience and a reverent one. You kind of have to
Speaker 1: respectfully acknowledge the mess. When it comes to cataloging one's
Speaker 1: own stuff, everybody has a different approach. He was thorough,
Speaker 1: he was not exact. So once we actually got to
Speaker 1: the audio portion of the archives at Harvard, it was
Speaker 1: a total game of whackamrole. The tapes were largely unmarked
Speaker 1: or they work marked critically and there were over seven
Speaker 1: hundred cassettes and reels. Instead of being scientific about it
Speaker 1: and looking for like exact brands that may have matched
Speaker 1: the years that we were trying to capture audio from,
Speaker 1: we just transferred everything. We transferred every single reel and
Speaker 1: essentially created the database for Peter's archives at Harvard along
Speaker 1: the way, which was fun and also ruling over seven tapes,
Speaker 1: there's just going to be a large amount of unused,
Speaker 1: sometimes unlistenable music or just audio detritus. Speaking from my
Speaker 1: own experience, what keeps your head down during that exercise
Speaker 1: and tedium is holding out for the eureka moments? How
Speaker 1: far would you go before you sold yourself? Martin? We
Speaker 1: set up these impromptu tape transferred studios. I was in
Speaker 1: one very barren, vacant room. There was no heating, there
Speaker 1: were no curtains over the windows, lonely environment, super conducive
Speaker 1: to having an intimate experience with the project at hand.
Speaker 1: Going through mostly unmarked consumer grade cassettes and pulling out
Speaker 1: of super nondescripts C sixty cassette that had ain't that
Speaker 1: a kick written on the label, putting it in and
Speaker 1: then hearing in a totally different way. Six or seven
Speaker 1: versions of Peter songs that I knew and adored one
Speaker 1: day love the camp new orchestration is added level of
Speaker 1: production and sheen. It was truly astounded and probably like
Speaker 1: an experience that only I could have at that time
Speaker 1: as someone on that mission, as someone so invested in
Speaker 1: infatuated with Peter's work. But yeah, for me, it turned
Speaker 1: my brain inside out. And now, of course we have
Speaker 1: to cut to a commercial, and Heaven everything is fine,
Speaker 1: and Heaven, everything is fine in heaven. You got your
Speaker 1: good thanks, and I've got mine gone gone, gone gone,
Speaker 1: And Heaven do you have it on take? When can
Speaker 1: we get a Copye? How do you go from that
Speaker 1: massive archived transfer to paring it down and turning it
Speaker 1: into a record. You don't do it by yourself, that's
Speaker 1: for sure. I enlisted my friend Matthew Sanders to help
Speaker 1: me go through everything. We weren't working in the same
Speaker 1: room because we would just be too much, and we
Speaker 1: were allowing ourselves the leisure of time. We set up
Speaker 1: a pretty elaborate Google spreadsheets that linked to all of
Speaker 1: the transfers on a Dropbox server. Big shoutouts to those
Speaker 1: huge corporate platforms. We would make notes on these linked
Speaker 1: reels in different fields, clearly being able to mark music
Speaker 1: that could possibly make the cut, that was definitely going
Speaker 1: to make the cut, and that was definitely not going
Speaker 1: to make the cut. Walking in a through collaborative feedback,
Speaker 1: we arrived at a much more lean track selection, no
Speaker 1: knock to Peter's capabilities, but surprisingly, after going through seven reels,
Speaker 1: it was not insanely imposing. What we landed on was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is the best of the best, seeing you face
Speaker 1: the taste of there's no time just stop myself haunted
Speaker 1: by your careful stacreously looking through just to see if
Speaker 1: that wasn't paying. But we still need to slim this down.
Speaker 1: In that process, we started sequencing, working with really long
Speaker 1: sequences of songs just to see what was working and
Speaker 1: what wasn't. There was another process of elimination, and then
Speaker 1: we ended up where we needed to end up, but
Speaker 1: still didn't have everything we needed to complete the story,
Speaker 1: so we had to go to Warner Brothers to license
Speaker 1: a few tracks. I'm a little hot dog, really yeah,
Speaker 1: your love is hot, but that's the thrill of happy
Speaker 1: on the ground the Harvard Boxes. In addition to audio
Speaker 1: recordings contained a hodgepodge of other ephemera. All right, here
Speaker 1: we go again. Now we came across a lot of
Speaker 1: amazing photography of Peter that had never been seen before,
Speaker 1: which ended up on the cover and ends up on
Speaker 1: the liner notes. Come on, come on, give me a smile.
Speaker 1: None super intimate, but quite a few professionally shots revelatory
Speaker 1: photos of Peter during that time. Problem here, I can't
Speaker 1: make up my mind. Which one do you? This was
Speaker 1: the time when major labels were splashing money around photo shoots.
Speaker 1: Anyone would do? They're all good. Lots of contact sheets
Speaker 1: and then an enormous amount of his notebooks with lyrics,
Speaker 1: with to do list, phone numbers, a lot of anecdotal questions,
Speaker 1: what do you look for in a relationship? Written mostly
Speaker 1: in pencil, posed to himself, posed to other people, because
Speaker 1: any expectation makes it? On spontaneous notes to Lucy that
Speaker 1: you could tell he'd fixed to the front door of
Speaker 1: their house. And then there were tons of formal proposals, Hi,
Speaker 1: I'm Peter Iver's you here to do a presentation of
Speaker 1: my musical Nirvana Beach. Those jolly themes are set deep
Speaker 1: depression and death that's right, Rision you like an angel
Speaker 1: shine miraculous Weekend. There were multiple copies of various scripts
Speaker 1: for the screenplays that he was working on, plays that
Speaker 1: he had written xerox from tight to originals, and tons
Speaker 1: of sheet music that spoke to his musicality. When his
Speaker 1: friends would come over and jam, presumably he was handing
Speaker 1: out with sheet music for everyone to follow. Get the
Speaker 1: style rack in this Weekend You This Weekend back at
Speaker 1: the Vortex. The song ends with the audience blewing the
Speaker 1: band on two three D four you. While Peter Ivor's
Speaker 1: is most associated with contemporaneous new wave artists, his approach
Speaker 1: his songwriting has been compared to that of Irving Berlin
Speaker 1: and the great American songbooks. And they say you learn
Speaker 1: how without me? So okay, I told you to forget
Speaker 1: about me by there's not another girl amused me. I
Speaker 1: told you to go. Peter sense of songcraft was not
Speaker 1: necessarily like old fashioned, but it did kind of have
Speaker 1: a sensibility tucked away in some history of songbooks. One
Speaker 1: thing I do know she where isisy to keep as
Speaker 1: simple but unstep the actual sonics, especially from the collection
Speaker 1: that we put together, they kind of have a feel
Speaker 1: of the day, but then you stripped back the ornamental
Speaker 1: rock and roll instrumentation and get down to a very
Speaker 1: intimate sensibility. The night it didn't come, I had so
Speaker 1: many questions. I didn't know where, and I don't know where.
Speaker 1: I checked the clock to talking my memory, and then
Speaker 1: I checked my Peter with a Fender Rhodes drum machine
Speaker 1: and harmonica doubling his vocal takes to me is just
Speaker 1: as profound as Peter with an orchestra behind him on
Speaker 1: the night, on the night, on the night, on the night,
Speaker 1: on the night it didn't come, on the night, on
Speaker 1: the night, on the night, on the night, on the
Speaker 1: night didn't come. One of the things that I just
Speaker 1: wish I could hear now is where would he have
Speaker 1: ended up? What kind of music would he have written?
Speaker 1: And how would he have placed that songwriting approach to
Speaker 1: new movements in music or to new genres. It's a
Speaker 1: tremendous responsibility to curate what's essentially the summation of a
Speaker 1: life's work. How do you capture that magic and something
Speaker 1: that is consumable by the public. I've waited so long. Girls,
Speaker 1: set yourself and take your chances. One of the things
Speaker 1: I was constantly reckoning with was my super fandom and
Speaker 1: the fact that most people have no idea who Peter is.
Speaker 1: So how do you present a case for Peter? How
Speaker 1: do you make his music approachable? A good song amazing
Speaker 1: to go? You can't expect a girl like I Want
Speaker 1: You when she doesn't know you want her to. You
Speaker 1: gravitate toward the hits first, but even then, the most
Speaker 1: successible music is not that accessible. Then you gravitate towards
Speaker 1: the intimate moments, the human moments that everyone could possibly
Speaker 1: relate to. Why don't you let yourself go so she
Speaker 1: can let herself come to? Fortunately we had that in spades.
Speaker 1: There were just all these incredible demos of stripped back
Speaker 1: Peter Ivor's songs that took away the brass, that took
Speaker 1: away the production and kind of left spare and these
Speaker 1: amazing songs started my song sweet Melody come On and
Speaker 1: singing in Peter's printed material. The Revenge team came across
Speaker 1: the document with a particularly telling quote, demos are often
Speaker 1: better than records, more energy, more soul, more guts. That
Speaker 1: was another Eureka moment for us. We're clearly focusing on
Speaker 1: a lot of his demo material, and he said it
Speaker 1: here in this broader context. It was just kind of
Speaker 1: like the invitation from Peter to keep going along the
Speaker 1: path that we're going beautiful Conference Conference. The context that
Speaker 1: that appears from is actually a proposal that he was
Speaker 1: writing too Warner Brothers, which was called the Peter Iver's Plan.
Speaker 1: We fade to black and we come up once more
Speaker 1: on avan of Beach Party. He was interested in starting
Speaker 1: an arm of Warner Brothers that dealt in music videos
Speaker 1: before there were music videos, And this time the images
Speaker 1: from the song become the set. You see a blue
Speaker 1: diamond moon cresting the horizon and a timeless island floating
Speaker 1: in the distance. A version of MTV. This is the
Speaker 1: way we want to do it, a video feature using
Speaker 1: film and video, highly designed, energized, and hot. Part of
Speaker 1: that proposal was looking at the everyday life of musicians.
Speaker 1: Does that mean lick the microphone? Yeah, lick the microphone
Speaker 1: and being able to document the process of how different
Speaker 1: musicians creates. These accomplishments are written in a memorial somewhere
Speaker 1: in someone's mind. I don't think about video. It lives
Speaker 1: here without you. After six years of work, becoming Peter
Speaker 1: Ivor's was released in twenty nineteen. Once we'd landed on
Speaker 1: that selection and sequence, we hesitantly. I think I remember
Speaker 1: just like putting this off for so long, sending the
Speaker 1: final tracks to Lucy Fisher and to Steve Martin's our
Speaker 1: gatekeepers for the project, being two of the closest people
Speaker 1: to Peter. We just wanted nothing more than to make
Speaker 1: them happy. Eventually getting that selection and sequence over and
Speaker 1: from both of them, receiving one of the most positive
Speaker 1: responses possible and the green light to go ahead with
Speaker 1: those selections. Then it became a us us of There
Speaker 1: were so many other obstacles after that. We had to
Speaker 1: license a few tracks from Warner Brothers. As I mentioned,
Speaker 1: we ended up remixing a few of the tracks because
Speaker 1: we had multitrack versions transferred and just needed a little
Speaker 1: bit more life out of the music. We had to
Speaker 1: re transfer some of the cassettes because the fidelity was
Speaker 1: not necessarily the best on our audition transfer, and then
Speaker 1: we had to master the entire thing while simultaneously writing
Speaker 1: the liner notes, compiling the artwork, and starting the early
Speaker 1: conversations with press and our distributor and stuff. That's really music,
Speaker 1: a real fabulous billion. It's been really heartwarming. Making Lucy
Speaker 1: and Steve happy was the biggest battle one. From there,
Speaker 1: seeing other people that had been a part of Peter's
Speaker 1: life embrace the collection and participate in interviews What's the
Speaker 1: meaning of life? And show up at the release parties.
Speaker 1: That was the peripheral reward, and then the further reward
Speaker 1: is just seeing all sorts of new people come to
Speaker 1: Peter's music, which is happening in very different ways, from
Speaker 1: amazing press to one of Peter's songs is going to
Speaker 1: close this Friday's episode of High Maintenance. Oh yeah, you're
Speaker 1: You're my favorite customer. So we also learned that Peter
Speaker 1: is huge in Japan. We shipped so many records and
Speaker 1: CDs over there and received such a positive response from
Speaker 1: Japanese man. So there's a new appreciation around Peter. In
Speaker 1: the narrative that built up posthumously around Peter Ivor's, the
Speaker 1: artist himself was often overshadowed by the tragedy of his murder.
Speaker 1: One of the efforts underpinning this project was to avoid
Speaker 1: falling into that trap. Having known the Cold Case story
Speaker 1: for so long, and especially for the people that surrounded
Speaker 1: and new Peter. It happened. It's tragic, and it's tragic
Speaker 1: that it's not been solved, But it's the past, beyond
Speaker 1: sensational tabloid true crime narratives, which you know that there
Speaker 1: was so much more to Peter's life. There was such
Speaker 1: a curiosity in his creativity. There was clearly such admiration
Speaker 1: amongst his peers, amongst collaborators, honoring this incredible history of
Speaker 1: Peter's creativity. That's what compelled us the entire time. Having
Speaker 1: the opportunity to reactivate his music and to see how
Speaker 1: it works. Now, that wasn't even so much an experiments,
Speaker 1: just providing a little platform for it. We knew it
Speaker 1: would find its audience. It's not a super immediate process,
Speaker 1: but neither was the process when Peter was alive in
Speaker 1: making music. It was a kind of gradual accumulation of fans.
Speaker 1: It's become so much a part of me. I can't
Speaker 1: help but continue evangelizing and advocating that story. I'm in
Speaker 1: the Peter business. I'm in Peter's life for the rest
Speaker 1: of my life. Can't just stay with me to can't
Speaker 1: you whole lack of la You've always got some place
Speaker 1: to go with stars are putting on a show, but
Speaker 1: I don't watch it to I want to can't stay
Speaker 1: with need no be to Why can't you hold me
Speaker 1: like a like? I wan't a chance to turn you one,
Speaker 1: but when I turn around your gun, I don't want
Speaker 1: to do I want to be Peter? Why can't you
Speaker 1: stay with me? Tonight? We're gonna have to talk, touch
Speaker 1: or too much, but stay with me tonight. Ephemeral is
Speaker 1: written and assembled by Alexis and produced by Any Reese,
Speaker 1: Matt Frederick, and Tristan McNeil, with additional mixing from Josh
Speaker 1: Thing and special thanks this episode to Matt Worth and
Speaker 1: Sammy Joe Concilia. Learn more about becoming Peter Ivor's and
Speaker 1: all of Revenge is other releases at I get r
Speaker 1: VN dot com. Next week, Matt will be back, along
Speaker 1: with three more artists from Revenge's archival catalog, Michelle Mercure,
Speaker 1: Pauline and a Strong and Anna Hommler, a k A
Speaker 1: bread Woman, go O Got back Room. Until then, you
Speaker 1: can find us online at Ephemeral dot Show You and
Speaker 1: Tiny Last and Tea and a Dreaming m m