As many of you already know, I like to do experiments regarding every aspect of music making. I cheerfully dedicate most of my time to those experiments. Sometimes they end delightfully, sometimes terribly.
THE SCHEME
So, for the recording of my current project Music of Ghouls I came up with the following scheme.
1. I pre-recorded most of the 12 songs in my own studio in Munich and I played almost all the percussion tracks on the Upright Bass. The bass is the ideal instrument to not only play real notes, but to make it screech and punch it anyway possible to get interesting sounds out of it.
FLUXUS
There’s a whole genre based on it. It’s called Flux Art or Fluxus. My favourite bassist being Joelle Leandre from Paris, whom I had the pleasure studying with in 1998. She was a collaborator with famous composer John Cage and has amazed listeners of New Music since then. Check her out, she’s amazing.
THE BAND
2. As I am currently in New York City I decided to ask my friend Steve Blanco, if his new not-fitting-into-any-category 3 piece band (drums, keyboards, guitar) would like to record the album with me. Instead of hiring freelance musicians and putting a band together myself I asked an existing band to play with me.
This has one big advantage, they’re well rehearsed, have good chemistry going on between them and they know what they are doing and what their sound is. The band is called El Chico Blanco, check them out.
CUT THE BASS
3. I decided that for the live tracks with the full band I don’t want to use any Bass on the recording. I want the band sound of El Chico Blanco and I’m afraid I would water it down if I added my own bass playing.
RECORDING
4. Instead of doing rehearsals and then the recording I limited the time of both to 2 days. Yes, two days to rehearse and record an entire album. We’re going to rehearse intensely in the mornings and record in the afternoon. This way everything we rehearsed stays fresh and the recording will still have that kind of raw and unpolished sound I aim for.
The big challenge here is the timeframe, of course. There’s no room for bullshit or distraction of any kind. We’re going in, set up, play our hearts out and that’s what you will get on the CD.
LIVE STREAM
5. The rehearsals will be streamed live online. We still have to figure out the internet connection and how to best set it up. If all fails and the live stream is not possible I go to plan B, which is to video tape the rehearsals to provide a video for you of the creative process of those two days. I’ll let you know the status of the internet issue so you can all tune in when it happens.
I hope we can get everything on tape that needs to be recorded. I am positive that we can pull it off, because the band is excellent and the musicians are strong musical beasts with a full hearted can-do mentality I’ve seldomly come across.
here are the dates:
August 18th & 19th 2010
Live Stream on the same days, times to be arranged.
