Letter from Home Part II, Nov '23

On mixing and (fake) mustaches

Dame Nellie Melba goes for a keeper take (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Here we all are, bumping along toward the nether end of the year, each one of us squeezed into our own personal Radio Flyers, our fingers bravely wrapped around the black metal handle. There are obstacles ahead, folks. There are ravines and berms there, just ahead, waiting to derail our course — but there are smooth, paved passages as well, ones lined with lush scenery and pleasant breezes. Hold tight, my friends!

I’ve been away from the studio for a few weeks now, though work continues apace. There is a lot of talk about structure and sequence; my certainty about this whole double LP concept has been shaken a few times — and my first thought/best thought track sequence looks to be at risk. But something better will emerge from all of it — I’m certain of that much. Tucker is mixing the songs now, which means he’s taking all of the stuff, the individual sounds and voices and instruments, and trying to make a organized sense of it all. At one point in time engineers called the mixing process “the balance.” It’s a critical part of the whole thing, but the shape of the process changes year over year, decade after decade.

The control room of Chess Studios, 1955 (Photo by Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images)

Of course, in the early days of recording, there was no getting a “balance,” you just recorded directly on to whatever medium you were using. With the advent of multi-track recording, there was suddenly this need to make sure the relative volumes of the instruments played nicely with each other — the vocalist sitting above the other instruments, the drums not obliterating everything in their path. Effects and signal processing comes in here: echo and compression become tools in the mixing (balance) engineer’s arsenal along with volume and gain. Then stereo comes around and suddenly there’s this option to weave sounds to one speaker or the other, a technology which certainly had its detractors in the early days, and suddenly the mixing process is a very different beast. Bands who started out recording on to a couple tracks now have four tracks to fill, then eight, then sixteen, then forty eight, then sixty four — and then things go digital and suddenly the only limit to your tracks is the size of your hard drive, which you measure in megabytes early on, then in gigabytes and terabytes…

Limitation is sometimes a good thing. We have to impose our own limitations these days.

Oh, the limitations, sweet limitations. (Photo by Paul George Schutzer/FPG/Archive Photos/Getty Images))

So here we are in our future days, and Tucker is busily filling a dropbox folder with files called “Never Satisfied V1_1.wav” and “The Reapers V3.wav” and I’m listening to them and scrutinizing them on headphones, then on my home speakers, then in my car, and I’m calling him and saying, “Could the guitar be a little louder on that opening bit?” and “What happened to those chimey things we put on the top of the song?” and the like. Tucker, having had to listen to my singing voice for hours on end, in excruciating detail, is now forced to hear my speaking voice, poking holes into his creations. It’s all a bit laborious.

In the meantime, I’m working on a novel. Correction: I’m am not currently working on the novel. Currently, I’m writing this letter to you. But my tip-tapping typing fingers are eager to get back to the world of Barnaby Chambers…

I’ve also been on a few long flights recently and I had a chance to watch the movie, Corsage, which is streaming on Hulu. It’s an Austrian film and it stars Vicky Krieps as Empress Elisabeth (or Sisi to her chums), of the nineteenth century Austria-Hungary Empire. The algorithm recently coughed it up in my general direction and it seemed to dovetail nicely with my current obsession with all things Habsburg. I thought it was pretty good; Krieps is incredible in it, but I think whatever she touches is made beautiful. There are some interesting anachronisms in the movie, a kind of signal to the viewer that this is not your typical historical biopic — a modern plastic mop and bucket sits in a hallway on the edge of the frame; a young violinist serenades the Empress and her lover with a Kris Kristofferson tune. I thought this was mostly charming. The soundtrack is also fittingly anachronistic: there’s a song that returns again and again, this song “She Was” by a French singer called just Camille. Here it is:

Pretty stuff! And strange! That refrain, “Go — Go — Go — Go away” I found really startling and moving. I did a deep dive on Camille’s other stuff; a lot of it is great, some of it is not for me. It put me in mind of how well songs can sometimes be elevated inside of films — the way the narrative of the film and the words of the song collide. When done well, it’s really powerful.

That was also the case with the last song in the movie, though I had to wait till I got home to figure out what the song was. Turns out it was “Italy” by Soap&Skin, another European singer who has flown under the radar here in the states. It’s a really sweet, simple song:

Fair warning: Netflix, once it has decided that the movie has ended, which it apparently determines by the film’s first blush of a credit line, will promptly play Season One, Episode Three of Reservation Dogs for you without so much as a by-your-leave, and you will be left scrambling, refreshing your browser and clicking around the screen so you can watch this incredible credit sequence of Vicky Krieps, in a flowery robe and a fake mustache, dancing wildly to an extended version of “Italy.” Was there ever a time I was so annoyed, so taken out of a thing by this obnoxious everything-must-be-binged attitude with which we are forced to consume art these days? I don’t think so. Anyway, I could listen to this song for days. And dance in a flowery robe in an abandoned Habsburg palace. I even have my own mustache.