30 May 2012

A 17 hour travel day from Aarhus, Denmark to Lecce, Italy on the 28th of May for a recording session with the Ex & Brass Unbound at Roy Paci’s studio, Pasada Negro, started the most intensive month of work in my life. Luckily the recording didn’t begin until the morning of the 29th, and my suitcase, which didn’t arrive with me and had some of my equipment inside of it, also showed up that afternoon. The plan was to record 8 pieces with the group, most of them brand new and not even rehearsed by the full ensemble, all musicians in the same room playing together (usually this is the case with most of my recordings, but with a group that includes 3 electric guitars [Arnold de Boer, Terrie Hessels, Andy Moor], drums [Kat Bornefeld] sax, trombone [Wolter Wierbos], and trumpet [Roy], plus vocals, I was surprised that each take would be done in total, rather than adding horn parts later, etc.). With such a complicated set up, I also figured it might take most of the 1st day to just get the microphones and logistics organized, especially because none of us (aside from Roy) had ever worked in this studio before. With only two days to get all the songs cheapvaltrexbuy.com/neurontin.html finished I was wondering how it would be possible to complete all the material, but I failed to anticipate the quality of Roy’s studio and the abilities of the recording engineer, Riccardo Parravicini- by the end of May 29th the group had not only set up all the equipment and soundchecked, we’d completed 4 finished takes of music.

The next day went equally well, the band finalizing the four other pieces by late afternoon (the entire set included Beloni, Bicycle Illusion, Burundi, Kat Hit Hands, Konono, Our Leaky Homes, Words, and a mostly improvised piece structured loosely after a hocketed horn piece from Africa [Kat played a beautiful, melodic drum groove for about 6 minutes, then each of the horn players added fragmented phrases one at a time, not listening to the tracks until all were put together for a polyrhythmic cascade of melodies). The entire session was done in time to have an incredible feast by the sea (about 16 courses of all kinds of seafood, the first time I ever tasted raw mussels and clams- an unbelievable meal). The only downside to these initial days with the Ex & Brass Unbound was that Mats Gustafsson wasn’t there to participate too.