((newstereo)) production notes...

I Hope Your God Delivers - Track 7

I have been taking a hand held digital recorder with me to work and writing songs along the way. Today I had time on a job (between applications of setting drywall compound) to collate bits of “Olive, I’ve green eyes.” I am working in a retired art teacher’s house that is very near the bay. She is an elegant woman. Her house is old with a good feeling and oddly sparse except for the artwork of her students. I sat at her dining room table, writing, surrounded by one artist’s work that reminds me of both Andrew Wyeth and the children’s book “Curious George”. Outside was grey and cold and quiet.

I recorded “Olive” tonight and really liked the first take. I might leave it simple as it falls in at about the mid point of the current album. The previous 4 songs are busy with voices. Also the recording has the excitement of a newly written song. We’ll see.

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Learning as we go.

I made some adjustments to the titles and headings of these notes.

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Doctor Lightsinger - Song 2 - ((MisStereo))

This song is the second in a series of collaborations with Anatoly Davydov. Anatoly is a composer, musician, and nuclear scientist who lives in Visaginas, Lithuania. He works at the Ignalina power plant, which has recently shut down the first of its two operational reactors. The second will follow suit as a stipulation of Lithuania joining the E.U. The reactors have the unfortunate distinction of being the same design as Chernobyl’s. The Lithuanian government has put a great deal of money into safeguarding Ignalina but, apparently, the connection proved too much to bear.

Visaginas is full of highly skilled people from all over the former Soviet Union who were enlisted to run the plant. They began arriving in 1975 and slowly a town grew up (literally, up) amongst the tall pines, in the form of apartment complexes, to house the ever growing community. The streetlamps and official buildings boast an outdated vision of modernity. The extensively used playgrounds are comprised of spaceships and spheres. This visual projection has one inherent problem: the materials used to construct it all were of a very low quality. The real money had been spent on the power plant. 30 years ago the soviet founders set out to build a town of the future and now, as if by internal clock, the town is crumbling.

Anatoly and I sat in his small studio drinking Utenos beer. He is a genuine man in smile and style; and we carried on a conversation about music thru a Russian – English translation program. He told me he would like to attempt to write music for some of my songs. Two months after I arrived home, I received his first effort thru email. Anatoly had painstakingly divided each line (sometimes down to the syllable) of the song “Add 1 2 Each 5 4 2” and then re-assembled them into a new timing. Around this, he had built music which was big and bold but left room for a singer.

“Add 1 “is a song about the significance of numbers. I wrote it after wondering if the date September 11th or 9/11 had been chosen for its psychological connection to the emergency telephone number - 911. It made sense to me that someone who wanted to attack the psyche of a nation would play off this symbol of alarm which is drilled into its children when they are very young. I was glad Anatoly had chosen this song.

I invested in an upgrade for my multi-tracking software and re-recorded the vocal. The resulting mp3 is here.

Tolia’s second choice was “I will take up my muff and walk on”. The original is a cryptic dirge which took its pace from the “Tock” of a travel alarm clock. Anatoly’s version is far more upbeat and even danceable. This exemplifies a very cool thing about collaborating with someone who does not speak your language. I believe Tolia relies more on tune than lyrical content, so he is free to take that tune anywhere. In both instances I have been excited and challenged by what he has brought to the table.

The vocal I am working on is a composite of five tracks, all recorded in the same session. In college, my voice instructor told me, “It sounds as if your voice is coming from behind a curtain”.* For this song, I think, that would be a good thing.

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* She also said:

(A) “You have to stop singing rock music! “

(B) “I find it interesting that you play the harmonica. The harmonica is such a lonely instrument…”

I Hope Your God Delivers - Track 6


Building an album as you go is a lot like adding on to your house.

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I Hope Your God Delivers - Track 6

Remake of song 29—“I still Love Lietuva”.

29 + 29 = 58

I did not plan to release a remake this month. Instead I began with a new idea. I timed myself while recording four different tracks of nonsense singing. There is a name for this type of singing but we might call it Vocal-ease as it freed the singer of the restriction of words and made the flow easier. The four tracks timed out to around 1:11. As an after thought I searched thru memory for a song with words that might fit this kind of timing and ended up with “I still Love Lietuva”. This is when Orson Welles appeared in my kitchen. He brushed me aside and performed the song like a pro. His voice was a little tired but he‘s dead so I smiled and told him how much I had enjoyed his performance. When I overlaid the five tracks I decided to dump Orson and simply go with the wordless tracks. This became “Hoo in Hyan” which I liked but felt was lacking-- so in a different session I went with another round of wordless recording. This brought the total number of tracks to 8 and after working with levels I arrived at a final version of “Hoo in Hyan” which I thought would be the February release. This is when Orson’s attorneys stepped in and demanded I re-insert his vocal track. Not only that I had to reduce the levels of the formerly finished song to accommodate him. You can’t keep some dead men down.

Here is the “Hoo in Hyan” mp3 without Orson’s crumb crisp coating.

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Here you can find the music.

First of all, I would like to thank Blogger.com for hosting these notes and Todd Dominey for the creation of this template. I would also like to thank my wife Panchia for more and more.

In the fall of 2002, I created a website and began uploading the original music I record in my home in rural Delaware. I have since released 57 a cappella recordings.

The better part of the 1990s I spent working with an independent theatre company of which I was a founding member. The Knights of Indulgence Theatre United States was a dedicated group of people who produced one-off original productions from start to finish. As a show was ending, we would already be hard at work on the next. When I left that company, I found I had not lost the drive to create on this kind of continuum. I turned to songwriting. This was something I had done extensively before and intermittingly during my involvement with K.I.T.U.S.

It did not take long for the songs to start coming. The break had been good for me and I liked these new songs. I married on September 12th 2001 and spent the rest of that year living in Vilnius, Lithuania with my wife while she finished college. I had time to write and the inspiration of unfamiliar surroundings, and of events back home. I followed these events on the BBC. The songs from this time are somewhere between the country of my birth and the one I married into.

In January of 2002 I was back in Delaware. I bought a computer, recording software, and my first microphone--a Sony ECM-MS907. My goal was to simply document these songs as performing them was out of the question. Musically, I had no idea how they should be presented. It was during this time that I recorded the first 31 songs and to my surprise I liked their simplicity. They reminded me of the field recordings collected by John and Alan Lomax and others in the early part of the twentieth century. It struck me that they were not, in fact, all that different. (Living in a hundred-year-old schoolhouse may have contributed to this realization.) I had one foot in recorded history’s past and one in its digital present. This juxtaposition was both charming and intriguing. I decided these songs were done.

Example: One country world tour.mp3

I did not like having finished material just sitting around. I needed to get rid of it, to release it as finished, so I could be done with it. The words of my good friend and fellow K.I.T.U.S. member Beth Lorio kept coming to mind: “It is not your job to worry about what people will think. It is your job to put it out there.” I realized that one could get no more out there than the World Wide Web.

Learning how to build a website is quite another story. Suffice it to say that newstereo.net had rocky beginnings but was indeed launched on October 31st 2002 with 13 songs available for free download.

The software I use for recording is also an audio editor with many powerful effects and processes. I must admit that as I released those early recordings I was tempted and did indeed embellish many of them. I was relieved when the last of the original 31 had been published.

Now in new territory I stayed with an a cappella base recording but felt free to apply effects and manipulate the overall sound of the audio. Over time I added two microphones, a condenser and dynamic. More recently I have been working with multi-track software. It was this latest addition that really led me to re-examine a time in the early 1990s, just prior to the formation of the theatre company, when I felt I was really onto something.

This “something” was music I was making with harmonicas. Crude multi-tracking seems like the best way to describe it. The process was labor intensive but not very technical. It involved two hand-held cassette recorders and a lot of tape swapping. The resulting recordings were multiple harmonica tracks. Some of these tracks had been played back thru one machines speaker and re-recorded thru the tiny microphone of the other. The more tracks I added, the more there was a distortion of the overall sound. The final track being the most clear and present. I worked with harmonicas in different keys. This was music of moments. The improvised compositions moved from fractured and disjointed to delightfully melodic in a heartbeat. It reminded me of circus music so I dubbed it “Collopie” in a tip of the hat to the big top.*

What I am working on presently is a Collopie of vocals. The sound quality and instrument is different but the melodic surprises remain. I have achieved interesting results overlaying unmonitored independent vocal tracks. The effect is similar to echo as different versions of the same song weave around one another. Variations in tune and tempo add an element of chance. Alan Lomax--meet John Cage.

This web log will chronicle the making of future ((newstereo)) recordings.



*Playing off of the Circus Calliope which in turn borrowed its name from the Greek muse of epic poetry.