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August 29, 2009
In the can
Above, the Double Sextet recording gang.
After two days and some 13 hours of recording session time, we’ve put down all of the tracks for Steve Reich’s Double Sextet, to be released on Nonesuch Records sometime in the hopefully-not-too-distant-future.
These were complicated sessions for 8bb as well as for the booth team, made up of Judy Sherman (superstar hard-ass producer), Steve Reich (superstar hard-ass composer) and Bill Maylone (engineer and all-around nice bloke). Ideally we would have recorded the 2nd Sextet part over the course of a day, had a couple of weeks break, during which time Judy could put together a fully-edited 2nd Sextet recording, then record the 1st Sextet part over the course of another day. Instead we had to jump from one sextet to the other (Judy: “Ok, time to transform yourselves into the 1st Sextet again!”), which meant in practice that we would lay down a mostly-correct 2nd Sextet then play along with our flawed recording.
This was hardest on the Kap and the Duv, our capable “back row” of piano and percussion, who both had to pay keen attention to as well as ignore their own pre-recorded selves. Oh, and they had to play some bloody hard shit.
After having tackled the first two movements yesterday, our job today was to do battle with the final movement. The session progressed smoothly until we reached the final section of the piece, the moment where Steve gave full voice to his latent Indie Rock side in a full-tilt, headlong, mixed-meter rocking ending. The Kap, wanting to find the right groove for this funky finale, had plans for us to record it without a click track. We had one attempt at recording both sextet parts without click (which ended up a few metronome notches slower than the tempo marking), then one attempt with click, and finally compared the two in the booth. There were creative disagreements about the finished product, but we deferred to Steve and Judy who strongly preferred the version with click.
Even with the click, this most complicated section of the piece gave us quite a lot of trouble, as the both sextets spend the final 100 bars hocketing (trading off between the two sextet parts) in a quite intricate and unforgiving way. Difficult, and on such occasions one has to give over all responsibility to the producer. We are but drooling infants and Judy is our mother, giving us the tough love and guidance to be able to survive; we see everything “through her eyes,” and rely on her to know whether we are doing the right thing. Given the extent of our experience with and trust in her, Judy was the perfect person for this role.
Still, I have uncertainties: Did we get good, in-tune takes for all of the chords at the beginning of the piece? Was the quartet really together for all of the attacks at the end of the first movement? Did the slow movement really sound so good that we plowed through it in just over an hour? Did I ever give in to my need-to-play-louder side, and play in a forceful, ugly way?
This is the final horror of recordings. Our aim is for a perfection that is impossible to achieve. We are never content, never satisfied; anything that might seem “musical” in performance can tend to sound unacceptably rough-and-ready on recording, so we aim for pristine but instead get soulless.
So we had to constantly remind ourselves, in our preparations and during the recording, to give as much energy as if we were in performance. As if every take was occurring not in a studio at WFMT but onstage in Carnegie Hall. This is especially hard in music like Steve’s, in which the focus can too easily be on perfecting the “machine”-like pulsation, leading to a very mechanical-sounding finished product (this is what the Kap was passionately trying to avoid in wanting to ditch the click track).
Luckily we had Judy, a producer that we trust implicitly. She comes in very handy with this problem: we focus on creating a “performance”-like energy rather than obsessing about the perfection of the finished product, and Judy takes on the role of our anal-retentive ears. The only problem? A “performance”-like energy maintained over two days of recording can be bloody, bloody exhausting. The only solution? Hopleaf.
I was going to post videos from today’s session, but I stupidly left my video camera recharger at the studio, so that will have to wait. In the meantime, you can find the videos I posted to Twitter here. (DJA, there’s an answer to your question in the videos about the “pods”. We were separated somewhat, but there was still a very small amount of bleed into each other’s microphones. We were only close-miked, and there were no “room” mikes.)
Below, the booth gang:
Below, our quartet setup (notice the look of hate between the Phot and the Mac):
The Alb at his most non-political:
Thanks again to the wonderful folks at WFMT!!
Our two days in the studio coincided with two horrific days of rainy, is-it-bloody-winter-already cold weather. But as we left the studio the sun was out, and the light was marvelous. The sort of light that somehow feels very, very CHICAGO. Below, looking north up Clark street – notice the wonderful Swedish flag-painted water tower:
Originally posted by Tim from thirteen ways, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Aug 29, 2009 at 05:11 AM