Finishing up

Naturally, it turned out to be a longer process than I’d anticipated but I did manage to complete the mixing of the new recordings by the end of June; or, at least, finished *one* of the sets of mixes of the recordings.

As will eventually become clear upon release this album is a multi-headed beast and each one of those heads has to present a subtly different sonic appearance. Any change in one potentially meant a necessary, subtle, adjustment in another.

So most of July has been taken up with intensive listening and then the process of micro-management. At this end of the operation a lot of the effort has to be devoted to coming at things afresh, as though knowing nothing at all about the pieces. It certainly hasn’t been a question of listening ot the same things in all-day-long sessions.

Rather, I’ve had to make my mind blank (in terms of what I think are really good and, conversely, potentially iffy, passages). Each time I had a listen-through, of course, I’d take notes but deliberately didn’t refer to them before the next run-through. Therefore the matters which needed to be addressed (of mixing, of ordering, of pacing) would only be those which showed up a number of times in the collected notes.

(As an aside, I do use up a lot of paper in the course of making a record; it’s a much more reliable, if time-intensive, form of record than notes made on a computer. And it’s always possible to backtrack on the paper trail. I *don’t* save any of this stuff when the project’s done though….)

Finally, now, I’m happy with things in all the forms in which they occur. The record’s done. Just the small matter of the cover, now, remains – and sorting out all the Biz stuff of release schedules and so on. So it’s not exactly about to be on your shelves in the next couple of weeks….

Sorry if I’ve seemed a tad mysterious about the nature of this release. All will, I hope, become clear in a later post, once I have a release date to hand.

Meanwhile, on the other wing of things, there’ll also soon be a live VdGG release, taken from our touring of last year. So I’ve also lately been spending some time going through incoming mixes from HB of all *that* madness.

Good clean fun….and more to come. Next week, a one-off solo show and a first visit for me to Romania.