CD / double vinyl / download
Composed, mixed and produced by Robert Henke November 2008 - September 2009.This morning I found a note on the fridge door: 'Selling longboard and a cabin near the beach! LOL!'; someone added: 'Idiot' to it. Currently there is a lot of tension here, rumors spreading about a severe safety issue. If you'd ask me, it is definitely not a good idea to roll back now since we are so close. I just wish it would stop raining.
The storm is finally over, the sky wild and exhausted. We went up to the observatory and the gods were with us. They gave us the most beautiful rainbow i've ever seen. I closed my eyes and cried.
Sound sources include field recordings of airport announcements, hammering on metal plates at the former Kabelwerk Oberspree, Berlin, several sounds captured inside the large radio antenna dome at Teufelsberg, Berlin, dripping water at the Botanical Garden Florence, air condition systems and turbines in Las Vegas, Frankfurt and Tokyo, walking on rocks in Joshua Tree National Park, wind from the Grand Canyon, a friends answering machine, a printer, conversations via mobile phones, typing on an old Macintosh keyboard and recordings from tunnel works in Switzerland. Synthetic sounds created with the software instruments Operator, Tension, Analog and the build in effects inside Ableton Live. Additional sound design and sequencing using MAXMSP / MaxForLive. Additional reverb: various impulse repsonses via Altiverb. Composed, edited and mixed in Live with a pair of Genelec 8040s. Mastering by Rashad Becker at Audioanwendungen September 2009. Field recordings captured with a Sony PCM D-50.
A1 - 1 Watching Clouds [listen] 5:19
A2 - 2 Infinite Snow [listen] 6:10
A3 - 3 Null Pointer [listen] 4:43
B1 - 4 Far Red [listen] 6:05
B2 - 5 Avalanche [listen] 6:30
B3 - 6 Void [listen] 3:29
C1 - 7 Internal Clock [listen] 8:15
C2 - 8 Shutdown [listen] 6:33
D1 - 9 Reconnect [listen] 5:52
D2 - 10 Observatory [listen] 8:36
Total running time: 61:06
The music on this album has not been compressed, limited or maximized at any production stage. Why not?
Once upon a time, music had dynamics. There were loud parts, and there were more quiet parts. Then came radio. In radio there is a technical limit for the transmittable maximum volume. As a consequence the average level of music with a high dynamic range is lower than the average level of music with a low dynamic range. The loudest possible music in radio is music where every element is constantly hitting the limit, music with no dynamics at all. Radio, and more recently mp3 players and laptop speakers influenced the way popular music is composed, produced and mastered: Every single event has to be at maximum level all the time. This works best with music that is sonically simple, and music in which only a few elements are interacting. A symphony does not sound convincing through a mobile phone speaker, and a maximized symphony does not sound convincing at all.About the mastering: Mastering was done entierly in the analog domain, using a selection of vintage and high end EQs running at 'hot levels'. This implies there is a certain degree of saturation going on in very loud parts due to electrical characteristics of the tubes, transistors and audio transformers involved, but that's it as far as nonlinear behaviour is concerned.
More (general) thoughts on mastering can be found here.Design by snc based on photos captured by Robert Henke.