Spent several days last week engineering Chris Cutler's contributions for a project produced by Jocelyn Robert called Project Covers. More info about that as it happens. The rest of the time, when I'm not amusing myself working on some drawings or new songs, been working on the construction of the new guestrooms for band members who come here to record, as well as for pals who just come to visit.

Also used the site's downtime as a good excuse to start upgrading some of those pre-high-speed internet connection audio samples of my albums. All those "30 second excerpts" at low bitrates...Now you get at least two entire songs at high bitrates. (From most of them...still working on this!) I plan to replace all the samples from all the albums with better ones, another something to do on the dark, drippy days and long cold nights of winter.

Sébastien Moig of Jazzosphere came here to interview me for a book they will be producing on "Musique & Univers imaginaires" (Music and Imaginary Universes) expected to be released in summer 2007. It was a very enjoyable interview! (Note to my non-French reading readers: it will be all in French!) We talked about - among other things - my music and art and photography, and I'll be contributing a weird painting too.

Now that DVD audio is around, and I'm always improving my recording gear as well as my craft, I am considering recording my new album at 96 kHz, and making it available as DVD audio at 96 kHz/24 bits for anyone who would like a high resolution copy. I'd burn the DVD myself, so the packaging would be low-rent and home made. Of course it will be available on standard CD as well, and with ever-improving ways to resample for CD (as well as my always-evolving experience and ever-improving studio gear) I am confident that the result on standard CD will still be as fine as all my recent work.

My "deluxe" copy of Recording The Beatles arrived a couple weeks ago, enjoying that quite a lot!

Finishing up the mix of the new What's Wrong With Us album, recorded here last month.

In more immediate news, Swiss group What's Wrong With Us arrives here later this week to record their next album. A week of recording and then I'll mix it later. I guess I didn't really need to say that last bit, about mixing it "later", after all, one couldn't really mix an album before it was recorded, could one? Might have to try that sometime...set up a complicated mix and then plug a song into it.
Actually now that I've just written that, it occurs to me I did do exactly that, at least once, that I can recall...when I was in London mixing Peter Blegvad's album "Just Woke Up" with Chris Cutler and Peter. We'd finished the mix of some song, and next up on the tape was the title track. This was in the pre-computer days when everybody still mixed on a mixing desk, and before I'd had a chance to clear the desk (set all the controls back to a neutral setting) and because nobody had remembered to stop the tape rolling, the next song suddenly started playing, using all the settings and effects and levels and echo and compression and whatnot from the previous mix. Because the instruments on each song were not necessarily recorded on the same tracks as other songs, and the instrumentation itself quite different, the settings were not what you might usually do on purpose. It was a big unexpected dense mess, but pretty cool! Chris was especially thrilled and said: "DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING, IT'S PERFECT!!!!! Peter was less thrilled, being a more cautious type about mixing, and I was about 70 percent towards Chris' feeling, so indeed we left it like that; a song using some other song's mix!

Not feeling any immediate desire to start recording a new solo album yet. I'm happy to let some song ideas stew for a while longer and probably won't begin recording any of them until next year.

When I wasn't busy faxing DNA samples to Paypal, I have been mixing the new Condor Moments album (see March 2006 entry below.) I think it's GREAT! I'll be working on that until around 21 May. Hopefully it will be released by someone or available from the band's website or something.

There was also an especially thrilling moment when the only existing master tape of the album - a 120 minute dat - jammed up and broke while I was copying it. Upon examination it appeared to me as if that bit of the tape had been somehow scrunched up or perhaps eaten by another machine sometime in the past...we'll never know... So I cut out the broken and crinkled bit which amounted to about 30 seconds worth of music, spliced the remaining sections to new rollers, put them into new dat cases, and copied the resulting two dats with no trouble. I used the existing CD version; doctored by me of course, to plug the hole. In the end it's only noticeable if you know where it is. At any rate, this is a great improvement over the existing CD versions.

Just finished mastering the "Feedback Tour" CD for the LMC. You can read about that on their website when the CD is out, it's hard to describe!

Next week Susanne Lewis arrives and we'll record a few more songs for the new Hail album.

A few weeks ago Chris Cutler was here and we finished up a program for a German radio station (sorry I don't know which station, I'll find out.) They'd asked him if they could play his "Twice Around the Earth" album on the show, and Chris suggested instead that he and I construct a whole new piece similar to Twice Around the Earth, since there was still so much material "leftover" from it; so we did, and it was good. After that, we did a bit of editing on Chris and Fred Frith's recent performance in Tel Aviv. Might be released on CD.

This spring and summer, we (EM Thomas and I) will be building some new rooms for the studio: a new control room, a new big room for recording in, and a nice new "guest room" for the "clients". If all goes well, everything will be set up and ready to go sometime in late summer. Who knows, maybe sooner...I'm no architect...This rather large building project, which will naturally require significant quantities of my time, will delay commencement of recording of my next solo album. I had imagined starting to record the songs this summer, but I'll probably wait until NEXT summer...as in summer of 2007. I actually feel really good about that; I'd like to let these song ideas stew for a while, and then start recording in a whole new space. Seems like the right thing to do.
Meanwhile things will go on as usual in the "old" studio, which is also quite pleasant.

The new batch of CDs from AdHoc Records includes my first solo album "What Day is it?" (voici la version français) with a new cover and booklet finally, as well as NIMBY's "Songs for Adults". ( voici la version français)

Not much else to report, still working on the Pamela's Parade mix, and in a couple days I'll get started on mixing the new Hamster Theatre studio album.

Two days after I returned home, the group Pamela's Parade arrived from Geneva for a 5-day recording session. I'm in the process of mixing that now, and as soon as that's finished (around Dec 10th I expect) I'll get started on mixing the new Hamster Theatre studio album...which is going to be one of two discs in their upcoming Cuneiform release, probably available sometime early in 2006. The other disc will be the live in Seattle recording I mixed earlier this year.

Me playing two banjos simultaneously during an excellent jam session at Kurt's place, Nov 2005.

About my next solo album:
The way I have done my previous six solo albums is to record and mix a song as soon as I have one worked out. In trying to do something a bit differently this time, I have decided to spend a year or two coming up with the songs, and when I have enough for an album spend a month or so recording them all in one relatively condensed period. I imagine doing it this way might make the resulting recorded songs have more of a kind of sonic consistency; a bit more like a "band" doing a concentrated recording session. Who knows! But I like the idea and it feels like the right thing to do so that's all I need to know.

More about how I record my own stuff:
I always record and mix a song all in one go; that is, I never record a bunch of songs and then save them all for a future "mixing session". I like to do it all at once: come up with a song and record it as soon as I have the basic form worked out...as the instruments and voices are added the mix evolves naturally, and when I've added the last instrument or voice to the song in question, the mix is also done and I can forget about that one and start coming up with the next song....It works for me! I'll keep this approach on the next album, the only difference being that I won't start recording until I have enough songs for the album, which to me - being a middle-aged person who grew up with record albums - means when they add up to around 40 minutes. Since I am in a chatty mood I am going to continue and say that 40 minutes of "good" stuff is a lot of music to come up with when you are the guitarist, bassist, drummer, singer, banjoist, organist, violinist, etc, as well as the songwriter, arranger, producer, recording engineer, etc...you know, not only do you have to come up with the parts but you also have to set up the mic stands and get the levels, things I also love doing but they do add up when you do it all yerself. Anyway, I do LOVE doing all of the above and hope to continue until I don't!

OK that's all for this chatty yet verbosely enlightening update, next one will come just before my trip back to the USA...coming up in just a bit over a week from now.

Notes about this 2005 edition: I originally released this, my first solo album, in 1994 in a small edition I'd pressed myself. The roughly 300 copies distributed until now contained a hand-made photocopied booklet and a color photocopied cover insert; each one cut, folded and stapled by me, individually trimmed to fit each jewel case. A laborious, time-consuming, and ultimately discouraging way of doing it. In fact at times I didn't even bother with the booklet! It was that, along with my trepidation about the much of the singing (it was my first time being "the singer" ...I hear myself working so hard trying to overcome my clunky Midwestern accent!) and my non-existent abilities as a mail-order salesman which combined to dampen my interest in seeking any further distribution for this album. In September 2005, David Kerman invited me to let him distribute it via his ReRUSA label. I gratefully agreed, but a new cover and booklet were definitely needed. Almost nothing remained of the original art but the cover painting (now seen in its entirety!), the photo of the burned trees, and the photo I took from an airplane window which I'd wanted to use for the album but hadn't until now.

So that's it! I'll of course post the news here as soon as it's available.

Next up, before Zaar returns at the end of August, I'll be (inviting? conjuring? seeking? looking for? reeling in? trying to come up with???) some songs for my next solo album, which will have the banjo as its centerpiece, so to speak, and the songs will be fairly epic lengths for me; I imagine something like 3 minutes or more. I do have some good ideas for one piece already: an epic banjo song about the life of H.P. Lovecraft.