The interesting thing about this album is that it was recorded in numerous houses/rooms with different microphones, pre-amps and recorders on practically each song. Somehow mastering engineer Jeff Lipton was able to create a coherent and complete sounding album; between consuming two over-sized cups of coca-cola and taking random jogs around the building, more about this later.
The recording was made between December of 2003 and October of 2005. By this fact alone, we were setting ourselves up for an inconsistent sounding recording. My studio set-up seemed to change every week with the acquisition of new microphones, pre-amps and other random electronics thrown into the signal path, including a distortion pedal I built.
The first recording we made was the title track 'Leng Jin'. It was recorded on pro-tools with three mics in a concrete basement. Two Royer R-121 in front of the drum kit about 4' away, with 4' between them and level with the toms and one Shure SM-57(Steve Albini's nemesis) on the guitar amp. The Royer's of course picked up the guitar and created a nice ambient sound between the guitar and drums. The original improvisation was about about 30 minutes long, but it took us 20 to get into the meat of Leng Jin. It's a little creepy listening to the un-edited version and hearing how we came into the developed ideas together at the the same moment and then just rode it to the end. We could never write anything that good....sigh. So we compressed the crap out of the royers and mixed it down with lots of reverb.
The second recorded track on the recording was Variation No. 1 and was recorded using a now obsolete mini-disc recorder by Yamaha called the MD-8. needless to say the sound suffered a bit from mini-disc compression, but overall it came out ok. The drums and guitar were recorded in the porch of a beach house I was renting in the winter of 2003. The guitar signal was split between a peavy tube amp and a Sears Silvertone amp, the guts of which guitarist John Lima stuck into an old wooden crate. It made for a very interesting squashed sound that also breathed at the the same time.
Kaseja and Hyperborea were both recorded on my Sharp 2-track mini-disc recorder with two lapelle mics, much to Jeff Lipton's dismay. Love that thing though, because you can adjust the recording levels without using an automatic leveler, unlike the Sony version. We just added some reverb and some slight eq and that was it.
The last two tracks we recorded were 'Aqueous Suspension' and 'Deathstar Gamma Burst' (a title which still makes John cringe, saying it's too "highschool/sci-fi"– guilty as charged.) Those were pretty straight forward pro-tool recordings using the built-in pre-amps, with guest musicians Sarah Ladd and Christine Harrington on Clarinet and Cello respectively.
The real fun started when we made our way up to Newtonville MA to meet Jeff for the mastering session at Peerless Mastering. He ran most of the tracks through analog tape and used a billion dollar George Massenburg compressor to even things out. Some of the highlights were of course: his laps around the building, which thankfully we didn't pay for, his pacing around the room and drinking oversized cup after oversized cup of high octane soda, and my favorite comment about tweaking one of his eq's: "I have never had to turn this knob this far in my life!" This was on one of the Sharp mini-disc tracks, which needed an extreme 20K injection. It made him giddy to turn that knob. I think we heard a creaking and saw some rust fall out.
Fond memories.
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