Eclectic Blah – my project for freely improvised dance music. It had folded about seven years ago. There’s a lot of recordings of sessions and concerts, but even though I had thought about it for years, I never got through to actually putting together an album of this material.
left to right: Straschill (keys), Gruber (dr), Klos (b), Cyrus (git)
Now when you play freely improvised stuff, there’s always those tracks where while the whole piece doesn’t actually appeal as a whole, some short segment might just do so. Normally the entire piece just gets discarded – but when you’re working on an album with short pieces (which might just be bricolage work), you suddenly remember those great short segments from a long, boring track.
Sansserif - looking back, perhaps one of my favourite Eclectic Blah concerts. It was January of 2004, and it was the second (and unfortunately, last) of our concerts at Salon Erna, a location which has unfortunately closed its doors since. Salon Erna was completely un-clublike: a very high ceiling, wooden floor, tall windows – this would make for some very characteristic acoustics.
The lineup for this concert was – next to Blahveterans XO Gruber and myself – Christian Klos on bass (who had generously offered to sit in with us, after he had left the group the year before), guitarist extraordinaire Luke Cyrus; and Luke brought along his trusted bass warrior, one Jack Traherne. I counsciously decided on a kind of sound engineering which sounded like a mix of an ECM jazz record and a Police album, one the one hand, Eighties-like, but also with that ECMish, almost surreal room.
The track in question was 11:30 minutes long. Starting out with an organ riff, which I had thought could open an electro-jazz track, the rest of the group decided otherwise, and turned it into a reggae number. Unfortunately, we never got it working right, even after bringing it into double time, and then more or less decided to end it – but in the fading Wavestation synth chords from me, Ralf brought in another groove altogether.
Gruber hits it hard
This turned into a coda, which is basically only drums, synth pads and some ambient guitar noises, and which originally extended to 3:44 all by itself – still, too long.
I started out with getting some basic mix right, putting great emphasis on the trapset and making use of the fact that on this track, there was no bass guitar competing for space in the low frequency domain. Both guitar and keyboards required only minimum editing (fortunately, I had recorded the Wavestation onto its own channel pair, so an added passive theme played on the Sirius could just be left out). Precisely cutting the track more or less in half, leaving the basic structure put forward by Gruber intact, the edit clocked in at exactly 90 seconds – which is my upper limit for any tracks for this album.
Things to do? Perhaps there will be another synth added, to replace the one I had removed.
Credits:
drums – Ralf “XO” Gruber
guitar – Luke Cyrus Götze
photography – Maria Hazod
everything else – me