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Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog****Our Instruments *** Unspecialized****Buy Our Music
Performance***Notation***Slow, Low, And Varied***Our Recording
The Street Singer****Home****The Indian Music Scene

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For more than 20 years we’ve been doing music differently.

Back when we were settled in Varanasi India we started inventing, building, and playing our own strange instruments, and right from the beginning each of us made it a point to play all of them ( Our Instruments and Unspecialized ).  Then a decade later when we had enough of our own instruments, we stopped playing conventional ones that had conventional music built into them by default.

We didn’t mind this steered our music away from conventional tonality and were pleased when freer tunings encouraged us to take the further step of abandoning conventional rhythms ( Notation and  Slow, Low, And Varied ).

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Also we decided to avoid performing, both because we didn’t like to do it and because in Varanasi we saw so many friends lose their innocent love of playing music in their rush to assume performer identitites ( Performance ).  But we still wanted to get our music out there, and so instead of performing we taught ourselves to record and engineer our music at home.  ( Our Recording )

Furthermore we accepted that taken together, all of this somewhat inevitably meant we would be playing only our own music.

Obviously this program did not emerge fully formed 22 years ago.  To the contrary, at that point our music was just part of the laid-back low-budget life we were leading in Varanasi, something we did in between cups of chai and going down to swim in Gangaji.

Back then it was merely something we were doing to entertain ourselves, though it’s true that our immersion in and subsequent disillusionment with the Varanasi music scene was an early source for many important insights ( The Indian Music Scene and The Street Singer ) that you will find in more developed form throughout this website.  And of course it was in India that we started to build our little orchestra of original instruments.

Rather than developing as a result of clear thinking, our radical program evolved slowly and naturally as we groped our way towards a musical approach which suited us.  Though after the fact we suspect for us following some such unconventional path was the simplest, most direct, and probably even the only way of insuring we would eventually arrive at a truly original music.

Anyway, in 1998 the depressing decay of Indian culture combined with increasing pollution ( noise, shit, people, cars…. ) forced us to regretfully flee our sweet little life in Varanasi, and so after briefly checking out Japan, we returned to the United States.

Still we will remain forever grateful that we started our shared musical life in India.

Instead of struggling ( and probably failing ) to maintain our integrity in our own countries ( Japan and the United States ) during the booms and bubbles of the late twentieth century, we were living a life that got progressively simpler and more ancient.

Instead of being bombarded by recycled rock, jazz, and rap, instead of being pacified by various varieties of lame fusion, we had the ( admittedly bitter-sweet ) privilege of listening to and being immersed in the beautiful last notes of the great dying classical Indian music tradition.  ( The Indian Music Scene )

And we were particularly fortunate to be living in Varanasi, the oldest city in India, a place so stubbornly conservative that we heard more dhrupad, bhajans, and thumris than slickly produced, carved-down-to-fit-a-record ragas.

A place where the over-amplified fake Bollywood devotional singing which every year boomed more obnoxiously from the loudspeakers of more and more temples, was still balanced by the soft ringing of temple bells, the humble chanting of devotees on the way to bathe in the holy river, and even the occasional magic music of some Street Singer who’d by taking a wrong turn a thousand years ago had accidentally wandered into our sad shallow modern world.

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Return to the Modern World
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Unfortunately returning to the modern world had serious financial implications.  Clearly the $100/month which had easily covered all of our expenses in India wouldn’t do the trick in the States.  So for the first time we started thinking about trying to make some money from our music ( while stretching our funds by moving into a charming but rotten trailer nestled under perpetually damp old growth redwoods in northern California. )

But we knew we didn’t want to do it by performing.

Indeed, right from its beginning our music has been our play and spiritual ( a good word which has been hijacked by all sorts of con men ) discipline rather than something we could do on demand in front of other people.  Sure we’ve learned to do an imitation of ourselves playing music that’s good enough to impress listeners, but we can’t fool ourselves.  We know that when we’re “performing” we’re sticking to the safe stuff, we’re playing only what we can do easily, and this of course steals the magic from our sound.  ( Performance )

So since we couldn’t get our music out there by performing, in 2001 we took a deep breath, bought ourselves entry level recording and editing equipment ( Our Recording ) and then in our trailer created “huhnandhuhn”, our first CD.

But though it turned out to be a more interesting and more finished sounding first try than we’d dared to hope for, it failed to get even the tiniest bit of attention from the gatekeepers of the official music world ( folks like critics, djs, successful musicians, and professors ).  Instead these people with power and position totally ignored us, and “huhnandhuhn” was played only minimally on the radio and did not receive a single review.
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It really was very confusing because we knew we’d produced music that though very imperfect, was still in part beautiful and very new.  How, we wondered, could all those important “music lovers” be so closed minded?

Back then we were innocent and did not understand that one of  the primary responsibilities of these gatekeepers was to turn down anything new that was not “new” in some already approved of way.
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Naturally our initial reaction to this total rejection by the very people whose help we needed to spread word of the existence of our music, was to get very depressed.

But then we got furious, and fueled by this anger got back to work.

Since we realized many people make music with guitars and drums, the first step was to put away ours ( which before this we had been playing every day and which are featured on 3 cuts of “huhnandhuhn” ), so we could focus on building and playing more of our one-of-a-kind original instruments.

Of course we did this with some regret, since we loved singing with our guitars and Indian drums ( mostly our pakhawaj ), but we felt that if we were going to show the bastards, the way to do it was to plunge even more deeply into newness.

So it was very gratifying that after making this change and moving to New Mexico, our music began to grow at a great speed.  Indeed the beauty and the power of the music we created in 2005 for Sweet Heresy, our second CD, proved that we had been fully justified in following our very unconventional musical path.

Unfortunately most of the official arbiters of good taste once more studiously ignored us.

This meant we sold very few copies of Sweet Heresy and instead started plunging ever more deeply into debt, until soon we had reached the point where it felt like the only remaining choices were to either slit our throats or to find another way of supporting ourselves.

What we didn’t know back then, and this was probably just as well, was that this severe financial crisis was only the start of a long period when we would often be struggling to pay the bills.  A period when we would always be either tumbling into debt or working too hard.  A period when our total lack of financial security would encourage us to take a very hard and often painful look at who we’d been, who we were, and who we wanted to be.
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Forgive us for running on about the precarious state of our finances, but to understand our musical development and our songs, it’s useful to know that during this period we were in the midst of falling from our earlier over-privileged condition.  Because if like most of our “birth class” we’d continued to live in unearned comfort, we never would have had to learn how to do things ourselves and how to make things work (which are of course essential steps towards “doing things differently”).  We would have continued to depend on “experts”, and so would have had a vested interest in not seeing that most of them don’t know what they’re talking about.  We would have been more likely to believe that our old friends actually meant what they said, and less likely to notice the difference between their raps and their actions.  We never would have been accepted by our wonderful new working class friends.  We never would have understood the importance of localization….

For more about this check out the posts accompanying our songs Dark Clouds and Hand in Hand.

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But it was also a period of great triumph.

It was a time when our wildflower gardens developed to the point where they could be appreciated even by those with less than sympathetic eyes.  A time when we further perfected our very non standard diet and turned out one delicious, elegant, cheap, and nutritious meal after another.  A time we built many pieces of beautiful furniture and a second lovely quartertone kalimba ( Kalimba Family ).  A time when we read deeply in both the eastern and western classics.  A time when we got stronger, thinner, and more flexible.  A time when we shed more of our old upper class conditioning while gaining new working class toughness.  A time we learned to behave well in the face of anxiety.  A time when we fell more and more in love.

And of course as a direct result of all this it was a time our music grew like it had never grown before.  Because we became better bigger humans, our music deepened.  Because we learned to be more careful, our music grew more polished.  And because we gained in insight, our music grew more noble, more magical, and more sad. ( Unspecialized )
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A Fruitful Detour Through Translation
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.….Anyway, so there we were, going broke, ready to slit our throats, and desperately looking around for some way of earning money.

Fortunately after floundering about for only a few months, we discovered that by working as a team we could do an excellent job of translating Japanese business documents into English, and for the next few years we supported ourselves nicely by translating hundreds of thousands of words of contracts, surveys, e-mail chains, magazine articles, depositions, and other even more boring documents.  ( In fact we did more than just support ourselves, we also managed to pay off all of our debt. )

But with hindsight we can see that even during this period when we were forced to put music on a back burner, we were in fact learning and growing in ways that prepared us for the surge in creative musical activity which led to Work In Progress.

Perhaps most importantly, translation made us much more comfortable with computers. Not only were we forced to learn our way around every single formatting option of Word and to become skillful with programs like Excel and PowerPoint, we also had to develop the butt and brain calluses required for working long days at a computer.

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Also since producing a translation of which one can be proud is very difficult and demands total concentration, spending far too many hours doing it made us stronger and sharper, and as we were doing it together, further improved the nearly telepathic communication which we already enjoyed.

As a result, now when for many hours we must glue ourselves to our computers to edit one of our musical pieces, we can do it.  Indeed compared to translating some poorly written and fundamentally stupid commercial document, five hours spent that way is a downright delightful experience.

Furthermore without the computer savvy we acquired as translators, we would have done a far less successful and thorough job of coming to terms with WordPress, the program we used to create this website, and Tracktion, the program with which we recorded and edited the music for Work In Progress.

Taking all of this together, we would even go so far as to claim that though doing so much translation meant we had much less time to play music, in fact it set us up to become better musicians.  ( Unspecialized )

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Our Recording Shrine
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In any case, after 2 ½ years of being good little translators, the dude who’d been the source of most of our initial jobs started to go a bit mad, and reading the tea leaves we saw ourselves headed back into debt.  So since we wanted to make sure that if we were again going to be broke, at least it would be with a more capable recording system, we decided to splurge on some new equipment.

Keeping in mind our very limited budget, we carefully considered the options and ended up spending $477 for three 2-channel preamps from M-Audio ( which are far better than the preamps in our old Mackie mixer ), $499 for a lovely 8-channel firewire digitalizer from Echo Digital Audio ( which does an amazing job of digitalizing and works beautifully as a sound card in connection with the Tracktion 2 sound editing software with which it came bundled ), $153 for 4 sets of Koss PortaPro headphones ( which are more than good enough for recording and editing, and comfortable since they’re lightweight and open ), and $133 for a pair of self amplified AV-40 speakers from M-Audio (which considering their size and weight have amazingly good sound, do a much better job of reproducing ring and hiss than the Portapros, and so are valuable for making final decisions about editing and balance ).

Taken together these purchases came to $1,263, which is almost nothing considering the quality of sound they allowed us to get down.  ( Our Recording )

We talk about this in greater detail in some of the posts of our Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog, but basically once we’d finished setting everything up in what we like to refer to as our “recording shrine”, we finally had a system which allowed us to explore things like track-by-track editing, overdubbing, and recording words on top of our instruments, things which for years had been only dreams.

Equally important, by reducing setup time, our new gear enabled us to finally realize our other old dream of being able to always play amplified.  What had previously been mixer settings ( made with physical knobs ) were now just part of a saved project file, while since now we could always change levels, etc. after the fact, we no longer had to be so time consumingly careful to get everything perfect before we started playing…..

This was our first equipment upgrade since we started recording in 2001, and it turned out to be a very big deal.  Both of our earlier CDs had been recorded with a Mackie mixer which was actually a lovely machine, but one designed more for loud live rock performances than for the sort of quiet wide dynamic range stuff which we were trying to record.  While replacing our old Sound Blaster Live Professional sound card and WaveLab Light with the Echo and Tracktion 2, even beyond the enormously greater control which it gave us, made a huge difference in the quality of our sound.
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We Go Broke a Second Time, Set Up a Blog,
and Again Start to Record
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Anyway as we had foreseen, a few months into 2009 the steadily diminishing flow of our translation jobs dwindled away to nothing.

But since we still had to eat and pay the rent, we grimly settled down to sending out resumes and making phone calls to more than 100 translation agencies.  Unfortunately no doors opened and all we succeeded in doing was to make ourselves miserable and uptight.

Finally in August of 2009 we decided that since the jobs didn’t seem to be coming, rather than wasting our time spinning our wheels, until they did we would shift over to doing some recording.  So for the first time in more than 3 years we took out our microphones and with our new equipment bravely got down to work.  At the same time we dove into WordPress and set up a blog on which we intended to post our new pieces…..
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You can still read the posts from this blog in their entirety by going to our Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog.  Taken together they give a detailed picture of our musical development and our state of mind as we were creating our new CD, while the players in them allow you to listen to the finished versions of all its cuts.

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We hoped the blog by directly offering our music to potential listeners would help us make an end run around the musical gatekeepers.  But it didn’t work since though several thousand people came to look at our site, most were primarily interested in our instruments and never even bothered to listen to our music.

However we now understand that this failure was irrelevant and that the real reason we started our blog was to give ourselves a path towards a new CD.

Because back then we were not ready to face the huge job of recording an entire CD.

For the first 4 months of that period, as we anxiously watched our slender savings drip away while we struggled to set up our blog and learn our way around our new equipment, we were too uptight.  Then when we were hit by what turned out to be another quarter of a million words of translation work, we were simply too busy.

However recording and editing just one more piece for our blog, well that was something we could still squeeze in…

And as these pieces slowly accumulated, without even having noticed that it was happening, at one point we realized we were well on our way to a new CD.

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Work In Progress, The CD
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It took about 1½ years to record the music for our Work In Progress CD.

We started in August 2009 by recording and editing bbqq, the first musical piece we posted on our blog, and by the end of 2010 we had most of the material we needed for the CD.  ( I say “most of”, because we didn’t completely finish editing quartus-quartus, which was to be its final cut, until 4 months into 2011. )

This was a period when we were always either worrying about our mushrooming debt or stressed out by the demands of doing huge chunks of translation.

Still it was musically a very exciting time, a time when we were doing many things that we had never done before.

So in our first blog post, Heading Back Up the Mountain, you can read how we bravely threw ourselves into multitrack recording and overdubbing, even though to begin with we didn’t really know what these words meant.  This was at a time when we were still struggling to figure out how to do even the simplest stuff with Tracktion, when things as basic as selecting a portion of a track were still mysteries.

While if you click on this link to Dynasties Fall, our second post, you’ll find an account of our first try singing words on top of our self made instruments.  Of course back in 2001 for huhnandhuhn, our first CD, we had recorded ourselves singing with our guitars and drums, but that had been live recording done with conventional instruments and somewhat conventional music.  Compared to that, what we were trying to do for Dynasties Fall required an enormous leap of faith.

And if you go to our third post, Creative Microphone Placement, you’ll see how we used piles of books, bookends, and rubber bands to improve our miking and reduce the amount of recorded hiss……

But there’s no need to continue this cut-by-cut account of the evolution of our CD, since if you’re interested it’s all there for the reading on our Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog.

The important point is that as we recorded what would become the successive cuts of Work In Progress, both our music and our recording technique steadily grew, even as our understanding of the world and our place in it continued to mature and provide the insights central to words of our songs.
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We’ve resisted the temptation to make ourselves look better by judiciously rewriting some of these blog posts.  Instead we’ve left them exactly the same as when first posted, left them to stand as a record of this wonderful but often confusing and angry time.

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Polishing Our Files
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But there were still a few bumps in the road ahead of us, and we hit the first and biggest of them as soon as we sat down to seriously listen to what we had thought to be the reasonably finished pieces we’d been posting on our blog.

To our horror it was instantly obvious they were full of problems.  Somehow we’d managed to not hear all sorts of miscellaneous playing noises and to not notice long sections were full of basic obnoxious hiss.  On top of this there were also awkward transitions, balance problems, distorted sounds, etc.

So we had no choice except to clap our editing caps firmly back onto our heads and get back to work.

Fortunately at that point we didn’t understand just how much work this would involve, or that in the end it would take us nearly 5 months to track down and eliminate all of the discrete noises and to bring the hiss under control.
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During this period we started to understand multitrack recording did much more than allow us to add an extra instrumental or vocal track on top of something we had already recorded, that it also gave us the power to deal with noises which previously we’d had no choice but to accept.  Since we now had 2 tracks for each instrument, and since most noises were worse in one than in the other, we could often make changes in just the noisy track and have our work covered by the untouched sound in the other.  ( Our Recording )

This stretch of painful editing also confirmed our longstanding belief that for us the quick and easy way is not always the correct way.  For example when we were cleaning up hiss ( which generally was in tracks recorded with our bottom of the line condenser microphones ) we investigated d-essers, gates, and other filters that claimed to do the job.  But ultimately we were able to produce much cleaner files by going with our own labor intensive version of a gate filter which involved putting each note of a hissy section into separate clips that we then faded out with an appropriate curve or silenced.  Of course this was only possible because the slowness of our music meant there was lots of space between our notes.  ( Slow, Low, and Varied )

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Since some of the lovely between-note ring which we feel is vital for our music was in these clips we faded out, at first we were a little worried about this procedure.  But it turned out reducing the hiss improved the ring’s signal/noise ratio, and so even though its absolute amount decreased, that which remained became more clearly audible and powerful.

Here as in much of our editing, it was obviously sensible and even essential to pay careful attention to psycho-acoustic factors…..
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Anyway, it’s easy enough to write about this sort of stuff, but actually doing it was an enormous mind numbing task.  Going all the way through a cut generally took us between 15 and 25 hours of editing time, and during this final editing process we went through each and every one of our 9 cuts at least 3 times.
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Obviously such intensive editing was possible only because we did it all ourselves.  As a result, the 1,000 or so hours of editing which it took to create Work In Progress cost us only bucketfuls of nasty computer sweat and long days of being glued to our screen.  If to do it we’d actually had to pay real money for studio time and sound engineers, it would have been out of the question.
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But we persevered and in the end brought each file to the point where it was clear there was nothing more we knew how to do that would make any significant improvement.  In line with our generally Neo-Confucian world view, it was only then we felt it was OK to call our editing “finished”.

Of course there were other less metaphysical reasons for continuing to edit until our music was almost preternaturally clean.  For one thing, since a regular effect of our music is to take listeners to another world, this uncanny cleanness suits it.  But also since we knew we were musical heretics, we wanted to make it difficult for bad tempered defenders of the status quo to attack us by disparagingly describing our music as crude, unfinished, or unprofessional.

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Mastering
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Once we were satisfied with our 24-bit sound files, the next and last step before sending Work In Progress out for commercial replication was to prepare a master, and it was here we hit another unanticipated bump in the road.

When we made our first CD in 2001 we knew little about sound editing and just had it mastered by the vanity press type outfit replicating the CD.  But when in 2005 for Sweet Heresy we again asked the same people to master, by this time we’d become more critical listeners and were not happy with their work.  So we looked around until we found a local studio which gave us a better sounding master.

To master Work In Progress we went back to the same local studio, but as had happened with the vanity press outfit and probably because our standards had again soared, the second time they worked for us we were not satisfied with their master.

It was full of pops and noises that had not been in our files, and perhaps even worse they’d ripped the guts out of our sound, important ring and detail had disappeared, the noses of the initial sounds of almost every cut had been clipped, while the fades at their ends which we had struggled to get just right had been brutalized.

However since we didn’t know any other local person whom we trusted to do good enough work, we were at a loss about how to proceed……

So we took a few days to chill, looked at the situation again, and concluded mastering was going to be yet another part of the process we would need to do for ourselves, and that the next step was to look for mastering software.
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From start to finish we’ve personally done everything connected to creating this CD.  We built and played the instruments.  We recorded, edited, and mastered the sound.  We designed the cover.  We set up and wrote the website.  This unspecialized approach is not the way things are usually done, but it’s worked for us. 
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At that point we were still buying into the general view that mastering was some sort of arcane art which almost magically made the sound richer.  But we knew we were already quite satisfied by the way our files sounded, knew that as part of our own editing we’d already removed all the noises and done the necessary equalizing, balancing, and limiting.  So to our ears they sounded ready to go.

And indeed as we dug deeper we started to suspect much of the stuff generally included under the term “mastering”, we just didn’t need to have done.  From there it was only a short step to realizing mastering actually wasn’t anything magical and that basically it meant nothing more than preparing a good sounding audio CD which the replication process would then exactly reproduce.

But if this was true, well then we didn’t really need to hire an engineer to master our CD and we didn’t even need “mastering software”.  All we needed was CD burning software, and that we already had since Windows Media Player was installed on our computer！

However since Media Player couldn’t handle our 24 bit files, we first had to dither them down to 16 bits.  Fortunately our dependable old friend Tracktion could do this, and in fact it could do it at playing speed, an option the local studio’s hugely expensive equipment hadn’t even offered！  Next with Media Player we burned our dithered down files onto an audio CD.

Bringing us to the grand experiment….. With fingers crossed we popped the newly burned CD into our optical drive and not knowing what to expect settled back to listen…. Sixty seconds later we had our answer.  It sounded beautiful！  In fact it sounded like our music, not like the master we’d rejected which at best had sounded like a very defective copy of our music.

Clearly we were on the right track, though there were still a few loose ends to tie up, a few questions which needed to be answered.

For one thing we remembered in years past some machines had had difficulty playing home burned CDs, and since under our new plan we would be receiving many exact copies of a home burned CD, we wanted to make sure this was no longer an issue.  So one afternoon we walked around town carrying the CD burned with Media Player, tried it in a dozen different machines ( CD players, computers, and a car stereo ), and it played just fine in all of them, putting an end to this particular worry.

But it was still necessary to boost the volume of our files, and this was something we had planned to have done as part of the mastering process.  Fortunately it was easy to go into the Tracktion files for each cut and boost their volume individually.  And as a bonus, doing it this way allowed us to give everything an extra 6 db rather than just the 1.9 db which the local studio had claimed to be the biggest safe boost.
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Their normalization program had arrived at this 1.9 db figure by looking at all of our cuts and determining that the very highest peaks on our CD could only be given that much extra gain before they would start to distort.  And when we went into our individual files we discovered it had been pretty much correct, in that when we gave our files 6 db of additional volume a few peaks in several files did distort.  However since we were working with individual files and not normalizing the entire CD as a unit, we could just put any distorting peaks into individual clips and then reduce their volume.

This was a kind of “hand normalization” similar in spirit to the “hand gate filter” which we used to deal with our hiss.  And in both cases taking our labor intensive approach and doing things by hand in the end produced a better product than would have resulted from just globally applying a process.
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At this point we decided it was time to run our new plan past the tech people at Dering, the company which would be doing our replication.

So we called them up and they confirmed that yes, there was no reason why we couldn’t use a home burned CD as our master.  However they did steer us away from Windows Media Player, but not because of sound quality issues, rather because it didn’t allow us to properly close our CD ( didn’t offer a “disc-at-once” option ), didn’t allow us to put pauses between the cuts ( so we would have had to put extra time at the end of each cut ), and didn’t allow us to include CD text.

Eventually to burn our master CD we chose BurnAware, a lovely little freeware program which beautifully did everything we needed to do.

We took the final step towards Work In Progress on July 5, 2011 when into a very carefully packed box we put our filled out paperwork, a check, and 2 copies of our home burned master, and then bravely mailed it all off to Dering.

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