On recording/mixing avant garde music
Yesterday I was running reference mixes for some clients - Danny Sher, Peter Schlamb, and Darin Gray. Peter Schlamb is a next-level jazz vibrophone player (he sometimes plays electric vibes, which is like a Fender Rhodes but it's a vibrophone. He distorts the hell out of it and it sounds like the whacked-out likimbes from Konono No. 1 shredding atonally).
I was working on a track for Schlamb - Electric vibes, odd time signatures, outlandish chords, guest saxophonist from Amsterdam - and realized it was the most normal thing I'd worked on all day. Previously did some rough mixes for NYC drummer Danny Sher from his 4 person free jazz freakout session recorded around Christmas with Schlamb on vibes and two(!) upright basses (Nick Jost and Ben Wheeler). That morning, I had formatted and sent off some files I had recorded for prepared bassist Darin Gray. A huge component of that track was a Gray playing a trumpet mouthpiece attached to a plastic tube going into his upright bass through an F hole.
Somebody asked me recently how you go about mixing something like this. There are often no anchors of standard mix assembly. No groove to reinforce or lead vocal to spotlight. But even when it isn't conventionally "music," the goal is the same - to make it musical. To make it art. Yeah, there are some hilarious sentences like "I think the bowed cymbal jammed in the guitar strings needs to be turned up in the left speaker." To that, I reply:
The first time I did a super out-there session was for Darin Gray and Seattle prepared guitarist Bill Horist, back when Bird Cloud was still a home studio in the upstairs of a probably haunted house. Before mixing, Darin laid it out for me. He said (approximately): "I don't care about accurately representing what we did in the room. When I play something, I don't exactly know what is coming out. This isn't about preserving something that was fully formed when it happened. This is about creating something, and it's still being created."
Long story short, if I could record avant-garde sound art that 90 percent of humans wouldn't consider music for the rest of my life, I would die a happy man.
