The Continuing Need for Not
On Interventional Listening and Why You Shouldn’t Unscramble an Egg
I had spent an entire morning doing a “home remaster” of Levitation’s Need For Not, that much-anticipated—and then promptly mishandled—debut from Terry Bickers and his band of merry conspirators. I loved the lead-up: the singles, the EPs, the Coterie compilation that felt like someone sweeping scattered visions into a temporary shrine. Even the early live recording of “Smile,” before the studio smoothing and the critical cold-front rolled in, left a mark. And then the album arrives, the British music press executes its ritual “meh,” and the band is pilloried so hard they effectively take a dirtnap.
For me, Need for Not has always sounded paradoxical: too loud and too quiet, too boxy and too muddy—as if its own ambition fogged up the room around it. But this morning, tinkering with it for the nth time, something clicked. The album isn’t a monolith; it’s a three-act arc disguised as a rock LP.
The first third is pure forward thrust, unapologetically pedal-to-the-metal: Francolini’s artillery drums, Bickers and Hayes carving serrated lines across the stereo field, the whole thing insisting on velocity. The middle third eases its grip ever so slightly, introducing oxygen and contour, almost as if the band wonders what might happen if they let the ground drop away beneath them. And the final third is all dynamics—ebb and surge, quiet flickers giving way to towering incursions. A real mastering puzzle box: each section demands a different touch, and none of them reliably predict the next.
By the end of the morning, I could only laugh at the hypothetical remastering engineer who might someday be tasked with refurbishing this album the way Star Blazers refitted the sunken battleship Yamato into the galaxy-hopping Argo. What do you polish first? What do you excavate? How do you keep the engines from melting through the hull?
It’s chaos. It’s gorgeous. And, if you’re reckless or curious enough to intervene, it reveals its inner scaffolding—three ascending plateaus, each built for a different sort of oxygen.
If Need for Not is a three-act arc pretending to be a rock album, then interventional listening is what you do when you realize you’re not dealing with a pristine, recoverable blueprint—you’re dealing with a scrambled egg someone made in 1992 and handed to you still steaming. You can’t un-scramble it; you can’t pull the yolk back out; you can’t go back in time and whisper to the engineer, “Hey, maybe let the drums breathe here, and for the love of God don’t chain the last three dynamic songs together like a self-imposed stress test.”
Interventional listening begins the moment you stop pretending fidelity means fealty. Once the egg is scrambled, your role changes. You’re no longer a passive diner; you’re a short-order cook who has inherited someone else’s half-finished breakfast. What do you do?
You season.
You adjust.
You scoop aside the overcooked bits.
You nudge back the parts where the salt pooled.
You hit the whole thing with Tabasco. Or ketchup. Or both.
You make the thing edible—or perhaps even beautiful—for this moment, this system, your ears right now.
That’s the heart of interventional listening: not restoration, not correction, but harmonizing with the artifact you’ve been given.
Levitation’s album practically begs for this kind of attention. Its loud sections don’t clip so much as crowd the exits; its quiet passages bury their own transients like fragile notes passed under a dorm-room door. The middle is a dog-pile of frequencies that all want to be first through the funnel. Looking at the waveform is like looking at a cardiogram of someone who refuses to relax until the last possible second.
So you intervene—not out of arrogance, but out of curiosity.
A static mud-zone dip works fine for the first six tracks, because they behave like a single organism: consistent, muscular, insistently forward. But the last three are shapeshifters. They build. They coil. They explode. They retreat. They are the part of the egg where the whites and yolk never fully integrated, and the only humane response is dynamic EQ—gentle attenuation that rises as the song does, a quiet collaboration rather than a correction.
Interventional listening doesn’t pretend to be canonical. It’s not a remix; it’s not a restoration; it’s not “the way the band intended.” It’s something more modest and more intimate:
A listener saying to the music, “Let me meet you halfway.”
And once you’ve crossed that line, you can no longer pretend you’re simply “hearing” the album. You’re participating in it. You’re shaping the space where it lives. You’re acknowledging the truth modern listening has been trying to hide: fidelity isn’t obedience; it’s attention.
Interventional listening is not an act of preservation so much as an act of care.
Care without authority.
Care without permission.
Care because the scrambled egg is already in front of you, cooling by the minute, and someone has to decide whether to let it congeal or to give it another stir.
Two other landmark albums of that era—Spiritualized’s Lazer Guided Melodies and Verve’s A Storm in Heaven—complete a kind of triumvirate of early-’90s kosmic shimmer. Three bands, three debuts, three different relationships to clarity, density, and drift. And each one, in its own way, sets a trap for anyone foolish enough to pick up a parametric EQ.
Verve—before appending the definite article as if donning a slightly fancier jacket to meet with the copyright attorney—did me the courtesy of issuing a multi-disc deluxe reissue that basically walks up and hands you the “canonical” version. Here, they say. Here is the egg plated for you. All the seasoning decisions rendered, all the outtakes in neat rows, all the fidelity-repair labor completed by professionals who know where the bodies are buried. It’s the equivalent of being invited into the kitchen only to find the meal already arranged under glass: “Please admire.”
Jason Pierce, by contrast, remains in high orbit, radioing down messages only when the mood strikes. When Lazer Guided Melodies was reissued two years ago, it arrived not as a sonic renovation but as a time capsule—the original master, kept intact, no modern EQ sheen or dynamic repairs, no re-evaluations of the low-end fog that always seemed more theological than technical. It was like receiving a postcard from 1992 that read: “Wish you were here. Atmosphere still thick.”
These three albums form a triangle of approaches to listening, to authority, to permission itself.
Verve gives you the curated museum exhibit.
Spiritualized gives you the reliquary.
Levitation hands you the scrambled egg and walks away.
If Verve’s deluxe edition says, “This is the version you were meant to hear,” and Spiritualized’s time-capsule says, “This is the version that ain’t broken,” then Need for Not mutters, “Well, here it is… good luck.” Levitation challenges me for interventional listening not because the album is broken, but because I find it excessive. It overspills its own container. It is too much signal for the medium in which it was encoded—and too alive to sit politely within its original mastering limitations.
Spiritualized and Verve, ironically, feel complete in their flaws. Their drift has coherence. Their distortions are design. Their muddled corners feel intentional, the side effects of atmosphere being prioritized over legibility. You don’t fix Lazer Guided Melodies. You surrender to it. You don’t repair A Storm in Heaven. It’s already done for you.
But Need for Not…
Need for Not invites me to meddle.
It calls me closer.
It hurls gravel into the mix and dares me to sift.
It dares: “Make of this what you can, and what you must.”
Which is why the triumvirate works so well as a diagnostic trio:
- Verve represents authoritative curation.
- Spiritualized represents aesthetic stasis—a refusal to rewrite history.
- Levitation represents the artifact that requires the listener to finish the work.
And for those of us who lived through that era—college radio kids, guitar pedal romantics, people who learned about reverb before we learned about rent—it makes perfect sense that we gravitate toward the one that asks us to get our hands dirty.
Interventional listening isn’t an obligation.
It’s an invitation.
Levitation didn’t give me an album so much as a kit, a set of emotional and sonic parts that don’t fully resolve until I interact with them. Some artifacts arrive complete. Others arrive alive.
The scrambled egg can’t be un-scrambled.
But it can be seasoned, tended, tasted, adjusted.
It can be made to speak.
And in that space—between the record as released and the record as experienced—we become something like collaborators, or caretakers, or simply the last link in the chain of people who refuse to let an imperfect thing disappear just because it didn’t arrive in perfect form.
What emerges, when you step back from the waveforms and the EQ curves and the catacombs of vanished reissues, is a strangely comforting truth: the listener has always been the final mastering engineer. We just used to pretend otherwise.
Studios establish the conditions. Labels shape the containers. Artists supply the pulse and breath. But the final transformation—the one that determines how a record actually lives—is the one that happens in our hands, in our rooms, through our speakers, our EQ settings, our outboard DACs, our whims and fancies and Sunday-morning curiosities.
Some albums resist that intimacy. They arrive fully cooked, fully sealed—curated exhibits or immaculate reliquaries. A Storm in Heaven carries its own mist machine; Lazer Guided Melodies brings its own cathedral air. You don’t intervene. You submit.
And then there are the scrambled eggs.
Albums like Need for Not, where you can see the weld seams, where the density runs ahead of the medium, where the ambition outruns the engineering, where the artifact and the intention never quite fuse. Records that hand you something unfinished—not in the sense of sloppy, but in the sense of ongoing. Records that require a second listener to complete the gesture, to coax out the shape that was always there but never fully realized by the technologies of the time.
Opal’s disappearance taught us what happens when custodianship becomes accidental, unplanned, involuntary—when the official channels evaporate and the artifacts survive only because someone kept their copy. Levitation’s story reminds us what happens when custodianship becomes tactile, playful, elective—when the official version exists but begs for a little help standing upright.
Both point toward the same horizon:
records survive because listeners refuse to let them vanish.
Whether the work is rescuing a withdrawn album from the undertow of rights disputes, or gently pulling 400 Hz out of a mix that’s been waterlogged for thirty years, the impulse is the same. Care. Attention. Refusal to let time, fashion, or entropy settle the matter.
This isn’t about canon anymore.
It isn’t about fidelity or authenticity or chasing the artist’s intention like a quarry that fled into the trees decades ago.
It’s about relationship.
It’s about the way music persists—not as a fixed object, but as a negotiated truce between what was made and what we make of it.
Which is why that morning spent nudging Need for Not into legibility doesn’t feel like vandalism or hubris. It feels like tending to something alive. Something unruly. Something that asks to be met halfway.
Opal disappeared, and we became custodians.
Levitation refused to congeal, and we became collaborators.
Spiritualized and Verve stayed frozen in their respective ambers, and we became their archaeologists.
Different roles, same truth:
the record doesn’t end where the album ends.
It ends where the listener finishes it.
And so we bring it home—not with authority, but with affection.
Not with certainty, but with attention.
Not with the illusion that we are restoring anything to a “true” state,
but with the simple fact that we are keeping the signal alive.
The egg is scrambled.
The ghosts are wandering.
The masters are lost, withdrawn, contradictory, or stubborn.
But the music—our music—remains audible because we keep listening,
and because, when needed, we aren’t afraid to pick up the fork and stir.