On the Sunday of Life… (2015 remaster)

The debut PT album from 1992, newly remastered by SW using analogue tape sources for the first time, and with greater dynamics. On the Sunday of Life was recorded by Steven Wilson solo and originally released as a double LP. Lo-Fi by later PT standards, this is an album of future possibilities including everything from psychedelic pop to ambient interludes. The seeds of the future PT sound are also in evidence in tracks such as It Will Rain for a Million Years and the classic Radioactive Toy.

From the sleeve notes:

When I purchased my first digital tape machine in 1989, I copied the Porcupine Tree analogue mixes onto DAT and used these digital copies as the source for all releases from then on. None of this really mattered when I was just duplicating the music onto cassettes, but when it was later released on CD and vinyl I carried on using the 16 bit DAT copies in the belief that they faithfully represented the original analogue tapes. I also felt I needed to do something about the tape noise / hiss on many of the tracks, so the music was subjected to various denoising processes, EQ and filtering to minimise it. Consequently previous editions of the album were never exactly satisfactory to me, but I always assumed that this was down to the sonic limitations of the recordings. That was until I listened to the original analogue tapes for this edition, and was surprised to find that the tone of the music was much richer and the stereo image wider, and I now realise how poor the analogue to digital convertor must have been on that first generation DAT recorder.

Anyway, the upshot of this is that while I’m certainly not going to claim that this album is some kind of sonic masterpiece, this is at least the best On the Sunday of Life… has ever sounded, with a wider stereo image, greater dynamic range, and much more vibrant and natural sonics.