LATEST ADDITIONS

Chinatown, starring Jack Nicholson as a world-weary private investigator, is an entertaining and brilliantly constructed period fiction about the very real history of Los Angeles. Paramount’s new 50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition offers up a generous complement of bonus content that teaches us plenty about the true events on which the story is based as well as behind-the-scenes drama.

British mixing engineer Ben Wiseman has a C.V. that more than mirrors the sagacity implied by his given surname. Among his many mix/remix and master/remastering production-related projects of the past two decades include albums from the likes of Soft Machine, Hawkwind, Barclay James Harvest, and Tangerine Dream. One of his latest projects includes the ever-intriguing 5.1 mix he did for inclusion in the recent 50th anniversary multidisc box set for Nektar’s November 1973 masterstroke concept album, Remember the Future. Here, music editor Mike Mettler and Wiseman discuss how he initially attuned himself to Nektar’s music, the process of finding and incorporating discarded tracks when it was appropriate to do so, and how he tried to honor the album’s lyrical content with his remixes. . .