One of my favourite recordings is an album called “From the Caves of the Iron Mountain” which features Tony Levin, Steve Gorn and Jerry Marotta. The unique thing about this recording is that it is recorded live and improvised down an old abandoned mine. The recording was made by a fellow called Tchad Blake who has made inroads in something called “binaural” recordings. Basically, this fellow wears a recording microphone on his head, roughly where his ears are, and takes recordings like this so that the resulting recording captures the ambience of the location and “feels” as if you are actually standing in the enivronment.
With that recording, Tchad Blake walks around the performers and interacts with the environment so it is a truly unique proposition. Listening to the recording on headphones is a constant joy and something I often return to when looking for inspiration. The album is so open and feels so expansive and full of ideas that I’d probably put it in my top five recordings. Yes, it really is that good.
One thing myself and old ex-recording chum Andrew Osborne share is a love of said album and when going through some old discs recently, I found a recording I’d made that sounds like something from it. Not a pastiche, but something unique, a homage, perhaps? It was recording in 2002/3 and if I recall correctly, Andrew had sent me a short recording of himself playing on a flute he’d bought from eBay. It had a lot of character, even though it wasn’t particularly musical, and I thought it leant itself to such a homage. So I put some acoustic bass and suitably ethnic percussion behind the flute and drowned the whole lot in reverb in a sad attempt to approximate the ambience of the abandoned Widow Jane mine.
Here is the recording:
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