Recorded in May 2010 in Belsize
Park, London. Cover artwork based on Shreyans
Bhansali's lady in the water. You can enjoy Shreyans' amazing photography by clicking this link.
The album is a journey through a day and its
events, as seen through the eyes of the girl standing in the rain. The
songs are points on that journey - dots that you connect in your
mind with whatever narrative, trajectory or squiggly line feels right to
you.
As this is a concept album with a narrative arc, the sound clips can't
really do it justice but they give you a rough idea of the sound.
Musically,
it's extremely homogeneous by my standards and I
had to resist a number of tantalising temptations, ditching several VERY
experimental tracks at the last minute. In terms of style, there is no
attempt to reach any qualitative merit whatsoever (which is just as well since previous
experience indicates that the latter acts as a prohibitive deterrent).
It's simply soundtrack music for an imaginary movie.
Recording
the album
This is
an album designed
to lose yourself in, and listen to it over and over again, so it was
quite
important to me, quite apart from the music being sufficiently interesting, to keep your attention, that
from a sound engineering perspective, its dynamic range would be as high
as humanly
possible. By way of a two-word synopsis: it is.
If you've seen
the notes on the "4" album, then you're already aware of my (selective)
quest for dynamic range in audio engineering. This album is special in
that regard since it's the first album where I set out to create an
album with extreme dynamic range before I starting the recording sessions. The album is officially a DR14 album,
and even more strikingly, this is my first album without any dynamic
compression whatsoever. This means that every note on every instrument
resonates exactly as it would naturally. What amazed me on the first
listen is that the acoustic guitar melody part in Covering Cold Feet With Warm Sheets sounds so crisp that hearing it strike the few notes it does is an
entirely different experience from the way it would sound in a
dynamically compressed mix.
So it was great fun to lean into every note knowing that the smallest
subtleties in playing would come across.
The piano part was
also a special experience. A good chunk of the piano parts I write, in
terms of level of difficulty, is pitched well towards the upper limit of
feasibility
(for me), so I'm quite grateful when in a compressed mix, I can peel
away a lesser layer of difficulty by not having to pay quite so much
attention to the relative volume of each key stroke. On this album, however, the
differences in volume of different key strokes are utterly exposed,
which has the effect of (a) sorely reminding me of how rubbish my piano
playing is, and (b) sounding quite pristine in those rare moments when I get the keys to balance
exactly right.
