This week, The L.A. Record ran an interview with Terry Six (Terry & Louie, The Exploding Hearts) and Ardavon Fatehi who is the director for an impending feature-length documentary about The Exploding Hearts.  Reading the interview was like taking a time machine back to 2003.  It sure sounded like Adam Baby was in the room.  I should also note that the article was written by Clorox Girl, Justin Maurer. 

I hope you take the time to read the whole article.  I think it will make you laugh.  It will help you remember what punk rock was like before everyone had a camera in their pocket.  There's also a little bit of information in the article about one of my own projects.  I'll be telling you more about that soon.  Meanwhile, enjoy the picture below.

I produced and engineered this album from one-time Timbuk 3 frontman, Pat MacDonald at my sixteen track Portland basement recording gutter, Studio 13.  We began tracking in October or November of 2005 and wrapped up mixes early in 2006.  Both Pat and I were going through some rough times.  We were both ending long term relationships.  Take a listen.  You can hear the pain coming off the Troubadour's performance.  You can hear the darkness in my mixes and production.  Almost all of what you hear is Pat MacDonald laying down a live performance in his one man band format.  The drum sound is Pat's home-made stomp box construction - a wood box with a D-112 kick drum mic inside.  The mic was run through guitar effect pedals and sent to an amplifier.  I took it DI and I mic'd the cabinet.  We would occasionally double track a vocal or add some percussion or hand claps.  An Ibanez AD202 was my main delay used for this album. It was released in 2007.  This album came from some really dark days.  But I'm so happy I got to spend that time with Pat MacDonald.  We made some great music.

iTunes:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/troubadour-of-stomp/291780642
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/3BbQK4c3bpmJq2IAExtiTF

Back in 2007, The Clorox Girls released an album called J'Aime Les Filles which I produced, engineered and mixed at my short lived studio, The Color Lab in Portland, OR.  The Color Lab was in the old Paramount Films building and included a film vault that was used as an echo chamber.  I wish I had that studio for a longer time. 

It sure is nice to find out that twelve years later, instrumental tracks are still finding their place on the internet.  Here's an instructional video that demonstrates how to make your own crotch bulge.  Perfect use for a song called Stuck in a Hole.  But I still think they should have used Banana Split from the same album. 

This one hasn't quite hit the streets yet, The Reverberations newest album, Changes, is out officially on February 7, 2019.  But you can hear the first single from these Portland psychedelic rockers by watching the video for So Strange.  And the video is really, really good!  It has a cool story featuring the band and rhythm guitarist John Jenne's son in the lead role with the added bonus of sweet and cheesy special effects.   Plus, if you're a fan of British Invasion bands, you're sure to recognize a few homages to promos and movies from that era.  I spot a number of nods to The Beatles.  But I also think I'm seeing a rip from The Kinks' Dead End Street promo.

The Reverberations chief songwriter and lead guitarist, Dave Berkham recently informed me that we have known each other for ten years!  I went to see his band, The Midnight Callers, at the short-lived Chaos Cafe on SE Powell Blvd in Portland, OR, a full decade ago just last week.  Dave and I have become good friends over the years. It was an honor to get to record and mix Changes. Dave and I have been plotting this album for a long time.  We worked on a single with The Callers years ago, but it was a quick collaboration.  With The Reverberations' album, we got to dig in. Changes was all of us, The Reverberations and me, working together at 100% to make a record that already existed in our minds.  Since we were making a psychedelic record, that left a lot of room for experimentation.

Let me tell you about the process.  First off, I no longer live in Portland, OR, or have a studio there.  Dave called me up sometime in the summer of 2017 at my home; a small, remote, 500 square foot solar powered cabin in the Mojave Desert.  He asked about what options we would have for recording together.  There were two options;  I could come up to Portland and we could work in one of the studios up there or we could get a vacation rental out here in the desert and we would use my mobile recording rig.  The Reverberations opted for five days of tracking at a house we rented in Joshua Tree.

Dave sent practice recordings of the songs we were planning to record.  The songs were excellent to begin with.  And even more interesting, there were transitions between the songs.  Some sounded intentional, some sounded unintentional because guitars were feeding back.  I mentioned to Dave that I really liked what was happening.  The Reverberations performed these songs in the proposed album order for the short tour they had planned on their way to Joshua Tree from Portland. 










Arriving on a Sunday afternoon, we tracked Monday through Friday.  The band also slept in the house.  Guitar amps were set up in the kitchen and laundry room.  I took the Nord keyboard direct.  The bass amp was behind a couch we set up for playback listening (behind John, Ian and Bob in the photo above).  And we set up the drums where the master bed had been.  This room had a raised wood floor and wood paneling!  Ian's drums, the same vintage of Slingerland that John Bonham used on Led Zeppelin I, sounded... well, just like Bonham in that room!  We followed up with a day and a half of tracking in The Reverberations' rehearsal spot in Portland, using a smaller version of my mobile rig.

I mixed Changes at my solar powered cabin sporadically between February and April of 2018.  I would send mp3 mixes to the band. We honed the mixes until the album was finished.  I used a lot of analog compression including a UREI 1176, Chandler LTD-2s and a Distressor. All of the delays that you hear are analog as well; a Space Echo, the trusty Ibanez AD202 and others.  The flanging and phasing in the mix was done by hand.  I didn't use any plug-ins or pedals.  It was accomplished by splitting a signal into two different paths and manipulating the timing and pitch of one or both of the paths. There's a fair amount of backwards tracking on the album, like the cymbal at the top of So Strange.

The Reverberations' Changes hits the street February 7, 2019.  It will be available on vinyl by Beluga Records and on all digital platforms.

All photos are from The Reverberations Joshua Tree recording session.  Top photo L to R: Cam, Dave, John, Ian, Bob. Middle photo L to R: Bob, Dave and Ian.  The drum room is to the right of the photo. Bottom photo is the mobile recording rig.

I see my job, when working as the producer, as the person who helps the musicians realize their artistic potential.  In the case of the latest Rags & Bones EP, this started with a conversation between Rags, Joe Garcia and myself. 

Rags called Joe and I over to his remote Joshua Tree compound to discuss the next three songs he wanted to record.  He explained to Joe and I that he wanted to complete this project before he was obligated to move from the compound; Rags and his wife, Catherine, were putting the compound up for sale.  The conversation revolved around how important a role his residence had played in the development of his songs.  He recorded all the demos in a small office type studio on the grounds.  The little office had wood floors and a warm sound.  There was a small window looking out onto the open desert.  Rags dog, Steinbeck, was always either sleeping on the floor, or the couch when Rags let him get up there.  Although the three songs slated for the EP all dealt with memories of Rag's father and Rag's own Southern California upbringing, the Joshua Tree compound and it's little studio was just as present in the music, even if that wasn't reflected in the lyrics of the songs.  Perhaps it was the solitude at Rag's compound that encouraged the reflective period in Rags life that produced these songs?

Rags told Joe and I about the three songs slated for the album.  He mentioned the sentimentality he was feeling about potentially moving from the compound.  Rags initial plan was to do all of the tracking at my Solar Powered Cabin.  But after hearing both the stories behind California Bound, Drive and Foothill Boulevard as well as Rag's feelings about putting the compound up for sale, Joe and I both had the same reaction.  We both said to Rags, "You should do the tracking right here, in your studio."  I told Rags that the room had a sound. And then I pointed out how nice it would be to hear that sound on these songs.  It would always remind him of the compound. 

Rags was surprised but he agreed that it was a great idea.  The initial plan was to try and track basics of acoustic guitar, vocal and upright bass live.  But that plan quickly morphed into the method Rags is more accustomed to working; we first tracked Rags acoustic guitar to a click, and then we added a lead vocal track over that.  Bass was sent out to Baba Elefante in Los Angeles.  He sent his tracks to me through the web.  Bobby Furgo and Lisa Mednick Powell came way out to my Solar Powered Cabin for violin and accordion overdubs. Tim Chinnock also came out to the cabin for some drums and percussion overdubs.  Tim, Faith Chinnock and Atermis all recorded backing vocals with Rags over at his studio.  And Gar Robertson recorded pedal steel down at his Morongo Valley studio, Red Barn Recorders.  I did the mixing at my Solar Powered Cabin and Dennis Moody handled the mastering.  This was the second project I got to work on with Dennis, The Resolectrics being the first. 

I'm very happy with the vibe we achieved on these three songs.  Rags voice sounds intimate and clear.  I can hear Rags place in these tracks.  I hear the desert and I hear a good friend expressing beautiful sentiments in these three songs. As a producer, this hit the bullseye for me.  Joe Garcia deserves a special mention too as he helped water the original seed. 

Take a listen.  Come visit the desert by giving yourself up to these songs.
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/5S2RsR46c9eLtSyv3Bx2sW

Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FQSGHG9

We moved in full time to our homestead cabin in the Mojave Desert in May of 2017.  I was up and running quickly and in June 2017, I mixed Feel Alright's album, In Bad Faith.  It was my first album length project with the new set up.  Working without a mixing console was taking some getting used to.  I figured out how to use my analog compressors in the mix live without the mixer and I was beginning to enjoy my latest setup, both it's limitations and it's new possibilities.  But there was a new factor in the set up that I was still getting used to: the fact that I was my own power station.  Our cabin made it's own electricity on an ancient solar set up.  It was both outdated and under powered.  It was a twelve volt system.

But there were positives. The inverter for the set up was old as well, but it did a pretty good job of mimicking a sine wave.  My equipment ran really quiet.  There was plentiful sun.  If I worked during the day, I had enough electricity to run... most of the time.

I have worked with Craig Fahner on at least four or five projects over the years starting with a Mandates album and some singles, and there was a country band in there somewhere to.  I can't recall the name, but that was a fun album to mix.  Craig is a talented recording engineer up in Calgary and I had mixed those projects for him in the past.  Feel Alright is his baby.  It was an honor to be asked to mix this album and I want to formally thank him here on my blog for his extra patience while I "mastered" my off the grid electric situation during the mixing for In Bad Faith.  In the end, we only suffered from a slower than expected work flow.  We figured it would take about four days to mix the record.  I believe we were at it for about a week.  This was because I expected to work the eight to ten hour days I was accustomed to before our move to the desert.  Due to our energy situation, the days were shortened to around 6 hours.  Those were good hours though!

Mixing is my favorite part of the recording process.  Feel Alright had excellent songs and recordings for me to dig my ears into. Craig's sessions were edited and ready to go and I could get through a first pass of a mix in less than three hours. I used real analog delays in the mix; a space echo and an Ibanez AD202.   A Distressor, 1176, two Chandler LTD2s and an AMEK/Neve 9098 were all used live in the mix as well.  I monitored on ADAM monitors through a 300 watt CROWN amplifier. Not bad for an under powered little twelve volt set up! 

Just a few months after mixing this album, we upgraded to a more robust, pure sine wave, 48 volt system.  But that's another story I hope to tell you sometime later.

Here's a review for In Bad Faith.  The album streams here too.
http://exclaim.ca/music/article/feel_alright-in_bad_faith_album_stream

Feel Alright on Bandcamp
https://feelalright.bandcamp.com/

The last days of PermaPress Recording were a blur.  Well, it was more than the last few days.  It was more like years.  I found myself perpetually juggling seven or eight different albums, all in various states of creation, at the same time.  Mixing these three, tracking these two, mastering one, tracking and mixing one at the same time, and in preproduction with one too.  While that was going on, people were coming in for one off days here and there to make demos, the occasional rapper or hip hop producer would rent the studio (I think just to take pictures with the mixing board), and I was sometimes running off to Northern California to work with Jerry Joseph at TRI.  With escalating cost of living in Portland, and running a business that barely makes the margins anyway, staying this busy was the best way to keep getting by.  The upside, I worked a lot.  That's alright.  I love to create music.  The downside, sometimes I was probably so burnt out, I didn't enjoy a record that I was working on like I really should have.

Back in June, my good pals from Calgary, Canada - The Mandates - began announcing that they had a new record coming out a little later in the year called Dead In The Face.  The cover, pictured above, is awesome!  I was totally jealous.  I had worked on a lot of records with this band over the years.  I love them!  It was their love of The Exploding Hearts that brought us together. 

I first worked with their guitar player, Brady, in the band The Fun Funs.  No joking with that name.  Lots of fun if you can find that record. They came to Portland and we kicked out a record in two or three days. Not much later, Brady brought me his new band, The Mandates.  I mixed their self-titled debut and then a single or two before they drove the van from Calgary to Portland, OR, to record their second album, In The Back Of Your Heart.  Now that was a memorable time.

We had so much fun recording that LP.  We worked hard and played hard.  Around then, the dive bars in Portland hadn't quite disappeared and we hit them every night after the sessions.  I think Wickens (The Mandate's other guitar) even stayed around for a few extra nights.  Was that around Halloween? 2013? We made a tough little rock record.  It was the reflection of us; a midnight gang of gutter club musicians. It rained a lot.  It was a perfect session. And you can listen to it!

So you can understand my jealousy when I found out about this brand new album coming out called Dead In The Face... with the killer album cover. I found out it was streaming on Exclaim! and I caved.  I had to listen.  I think I was just doing it because I wanted to make sure that the albums I had done with them sounded better. I hit play, first song starts shredding my little radio's speakers with ripping guitar. This sounds really good.  God damn...

Then it starts to sink in.  I know this song.  I look at the title; Baby, I'm an Outsider.  Yeah, I mixed this one once.  Did they redo it? I begin to read down the song list. Ramalama June, On the Run, Louder Than Before, In My Bed, and Hello T'Jane    I've mixed all of these songs before.  But this isn't either of the first two albums.  When did I do this? 

I began reading the article on Exclaim!  Yep, tracked by Craig Fahner and mixed by Pat Kearns.  It said it right there.  I laughed pretty hard at myself.  But I don't want to make a habit of this kind of thing happening.  I mean the forgetfulness, not the laughing.  Being able to laugh at yourself is a good thing. 

It's a goal of mine to get The Mandates down here to the desert.  I hear that Canadians like to come here.  Not much sun up there in the winter, I bet.

Stay tuned for more on Craig Fahner.  That guy is something special.

Listen to and buy Dead In The Face.
https://mandates.bandcamp.com/album/dead-in-the-face-5

I closed PermaPress Recording in Portland, OR in late April, 2017.  It took five days to break the studio down and pack it into a Penske Rental Truck.  Currently, much of the studio is living in a Yucca Valley storage unit, waiting for the next studio to be finished.  The studio's guts - some mic pres, outboard analog compression and my AD/DA convertors - are set up beside a picnic table in our 550 square foot cabin in Mojave Desert.  For a few months more, I'm mixing and mastering and doing some tracking in our little cabin.

One of the last records to be completed before shutting the doors to PermaPress was The Resolectrics' second album, Open Seas.  I recorded and mixed their first album, High Water, in 2011.  It was released in 2013.  Open Seas was recorded in late 2016 and early 2017.  Finishing the mixes to Open Seas was one of the last tasks to be completed at PermaPress. And if I have one regret about shuttering my Portland, Oregon, recording studio, it's this band.  I love them. I love working with them.  And I hope that moving a thousand miles away won't inhibit us working together again.

The songs on Open Seas are all A+ tunes.  Excellent tones are played by all the three Resolectrics.  This band is a perfect balance between the three core members; Tate Peterson on guitars, Bob Dunham on bass and John Becher on drums.  Tate and John split the lead vocals.  More than once, while mixing this band, somebody has knocked on my studio door asking,  "Who is this great band?"

The Mojave Desert makes a small appearance.  My pal out here, the amazing Dennis Moody, did the mastering.  This is the first project that Dennis and I have worked on together and I'm thrilled with his work. 

The Resolectrics rarely make it outside the Pacific Northwest.  Maybe someday, we can bring them down to the desert.

That Much Further West Podcast review of Open Seas

The Resolectics on iTunes (both albums!)

The Resolectrics website

After about eighteen months of living and working full time  off the electrical grid - powered by the sun, the first fruits of my labor out here in the desert are becoming available for your listening pleasure.  The Terry & Louie album, "... A Thousand Guitars," might be the most anticipated of the bunch and it's well worth the long, long wait.  The album is all killer, no filler; ten powerpop rockers as you should expect from Terry Six and King Louie Bankston - even if it took them a full fifteen years to follow up their old band, The Exploding Hearts' classic album - Guitar Romantic, it's well worth the wait. 

Terry Six tracked the album expertly in San Francisco and Oakland studios and then sent me the ProTools sessions to mix down here in my cabin.  We passed mixes back and forth sporadically for a few weeks before Terry took the drive out to the edge of civilization to finish the mixes with me here in the Mojave Desert this past April.  Ardavon Fatehi, the director of the upcoming official documentary about The Exploding Hearts, also joined us with a film crew to document the completion of the mixes.  I'm sure my face went pale when I saw the film crew's lights being set up in my studio apartment sized home and work space.  I was pretty sure, due to their size and the light's intensity, that the film lights would crash my power, but fortunately, it was all smooth sailing.

The title track is my pick for you to put on your stereo right now.  Make sure you crank it up to eleven! 

I'll be posting about a few other recent releases in which I'm involved later this week. 

Get Terry & Louie - ... A Thousand Guitars
https://itunes.apple.com/album/id1422744635?ls=1&app=itunes

Tuff Break - Terry & Louie's label

I'm preparing to leave the Mojave Desert in the next few days to head up to Oregon for shows in Cottage Grove and Portland this coming Thursday and Friday, October 4 and 5.  And I've just added this one back home in the desert in Joshua Tree.  I'll be playing music before the screening of Chritiane Cegaske's "Blood Tea & Red String" on the Up To Mischief Stage back by The Sun Alley Shops.  As of now, I don't know anything about the movie, but I did just watch the trailer below and it looks wonderfully creepy!  Cool soundtrack too.  All show details here.