Goldbug Zwei session 2 (overdubs) 1k studio | Philadelphia

Barry Meehan and Eric Slick came to the studio today to add a layer of live overdubs to the original improvisations from session one. I prepared their work areas before they arrived; Barry has a Fender amp mic’d up w a sennheiser 609 and is using an old RCA crystal microphone; various acoustic and electric guitars, and a casio keyboard—lot’s of found sounds, feedback melodies, textures, and lo-fi vocalizations.  Eric has both a Shure green bullet mic and a Turkish contact mic running thru a kaos pad into a marshall mini-stack mic’d with a sennheiser re20. His toys and sounds include cymbals, turkish sazbus, thumb piano, echo regenerations, and Floydian madness. The contact mic proves to be very interesting on everything. For this session, I engineer mostly , but also have a roving sm58 that i move to various sources, or use on my own vocals. We generate a vast amount of new material improvising along to the original tracks—some fascinating accidents of sound occuring more often than not. Later Barry and I create the ‘hieroglyphic choir’ on a section of the music generating 6 tracks of double tracked vocals before recruiting Dejha Ti for two tracks of operatic female vocals. Two tracks of reductions are made for Theo Travis to play on and sent over to London via dropbox.  Thus far terms like ‘Kubrickian, primordial, heiroglyphic’ are used to describe the feeling of the album. Theo responded that he loved what we sent over: “I sense a sort of 21st century Interstellar Overdrive but with a jazz depth, some serious playing and a sort of nujazz electronica. Very cool stuff.”  As we are waiting for Theo’s parts to arrive (he’s currently quite busy with Steven Wilson touring), we’ve been constructing an intro to the album using the source material, and bits of a 30 minute improvisation I did on a recently acquired 1950’s Hammond chord organ. Exciting stuff. more soon.