I’ve had quite a creatively transformational time over the last couple of months.  I actually feel stupidly excited about it.  It’s to do with a sonic landscape I’ve fantacized about creating as the perfect backdrop and counterpoint to the sometimes saccharine and mostly hummable melodies I sing.  It started quite some time ago, driving in the car and hearing an early Brian Eno record for the first time.  I immediately fell in love with the keyboard oriented sound.  Don’t get me wrong, I like guitars, but mostly a lightly strummed accoustic, hopefully nylon string even.  But I’ve gotta be honest and say I’ve never been that crazy about them being a feature in my music.  Big electric ones, that is.  But sometimes it works great, so I don’t want to be too cut and dry here.  What I really mean is, keyboard music rocks my boat.  Go Kraftwerk.

Anyway, Malcolm had been mixing this cool artist Richard Buckner, and I had heard the roughs in the car with him and immediately loved it.  He uses nice vintage keyboard sounds and has beautiful melodic music and a gorgeous voice.  His first mixes for him contained the usual sparkly tricks of a bit of reverb here, a few effects there, but it wasn’t totally what Richard was after.  Suddenly he had a lightbulb moment that Richards roughs had no effects whatsoever, because Richard had a fairly primitive home recording set up and only knew how to record things dry, but with the great sounds, he didn’t need them.  So Malcolm mixed the rest of his songs without effects, and just made the sounds more spacious and perfectly balanced.  It was cool. After his lightbulb moment of recording with minimal to no effects, Malcolm had reconnected with his original way of recording when he had hardly any gear, by limiting all the toys, and just sticking to a very basic palette.  I’d been begging him to just let me record my stuff simply with cool keyboard sounds without sticking other stuff on it.  It clicked!  I started to play my songs in live takes on a vintage Korg with a minimalist sound which is also as rich and huge as you’d expect of an analog instrument, and he and I would put a spattering of a few little bits of pieces on it, and that’d be it.  Bit of piano here and there, sparse accoustic guitars, another layer of keyboard, and a few bv’s.  Done. Check out the results of a couple of weekends doing this on Malcolm’s downtime.  I’ll load a couple up in the player.  I can feel a new album coming on.