Walk around the sun
The making of...
At the end of 2008, I started to feel it was time for a new CD. My first CD’s (Altar, Kusjanga and Side by Side) had all been recorded in just a few days at Bloomline Coryphée, a studio specialised in acoustic music. For the earlier CD’s, specially for Kusjanga, we had tried to re-create the kind of sound experience that people knew from the groups, with very few changes or additions. Recording my third CD, Side by Side, we already started to create a more complex kind of sound. For example, on Side by Side’s track 6 (‘Lost’) I sang two different melody lines, and we added soft voices in prayer, spoken by Sifra Nooter and Nico Handgraaf, two friends who were present at the recording.
For a new CD, I did not want to recreate the exact kind of sound that people can hear in the groups. But what that meant exactly, I had no idea, I just knew that it had to be different. Also, I wanted to work without a deadline and without planning. I trusted that if I found the right kind of studio we could let the whole thing develop as a result of the synergy between me, the people in the studio en the melodies that I would choose.
I found the right kind of studio like this by pure chance, just a ten minutes bicycle ride from my home. I had been leading a group in the Netherlands, and one of the participants, Ramon Tiernagan, send me a ‘thank you’ mail afterwards. The email had an automatic autograph which mentioned a studio and website (www.ramontiernagan.nl). I visited the site and saw that Ramon had a recording studio where he makes commercials for radio and TV. I contacted him and told him of my wish to record a new CD, but without clear plan or a time limit, and that I just had a few melodies I felt I had to include. Ramon was in for the adventure, and in March 2008 we started the recordings. At that moment we did not know we were starting a process that would take nine months to complete. Whenever my travel schedule permitted it, all those months we would meet in the studio two times a week for sessions of four hours.
We started by making a few very basic recording of melodies I wanted to include. Then we would choose one of these, and we’d start working on it. The drum obviously was essential. Ramon made many recordings of my drumming, choosing small fragments, weaving these together in new ways. He created wonderful different sounds patterns. When you listen to the CD, you will hear that the drum sometimes has a dark and very deep voice, sometimes it is much more light. Sometimes it pushes, sometimes it lags behind a bit, sometimes it dances. All the drumming sounds you hear on the CD were played on the same drum, sampled and mixed by Ramon. At an early stage of the recording sessions, I realised I wanted to include extra sounds, preferably sounds of nature. Ramon had a truly amazing sound archive, with hundreds of thousands of sounds. If we wanted ‘wind’ the archive would offer us at least several hundreds of various kinds of winds. The computer would cough up the weirdest sounds. For example, when we looked for ‘lava’ we found not only hundred kinds of lava flows but many more things, among them the sounds of the market in Bratislava. When we looked for ‘people talking’ we ended up at the strangest places, such as a party for Basque sheep herders.
When we had recorded and pre-mastered five or six tracks, the question came up how they should be organised. Which one should come first, which one second, and why? Did we have enough tracks, or not? For some time, this was a puzzle. We tried various orders, but nothing seemed to work just right. Then one day, I realised the tracks could be placed on the wheel of the four directions. On the wheel, the four seasons have a place, and the four elements. Suddenly there was a structure that worked very well. For some tracks it was immediately obvious where they should be placed. For example, ‘Summer walk’ should be placed in the south because that is where summer has its place on the wheel, but it should actually be in the south-west, the late summer. We had already added the sounds of a hundreds of singing crickets to the melody, a sound which you can hear only in high or late summer in Southern Europe. So, Summer walk got its place in the south-west, the time of high summer, before autumn starts. After choosing places for the tracks we wanted to include, we saw that there were a few open places still, but from then on we had a structure we could use to choose melodies: we simply had to find melodies and sounds that would fit on the still empty places on the wheel.
So, the CD takes you on a journey through the four directions. Starting in the north, the place of winter, night, silence and wisdom, you will pass through the east, the place of spring, morning, beginnings and childhood. Then comes the south with the summer, maturity and interconnectedness, followed by the west, which is connected to fall, evening, letting go and turning inwards. Finally you will arrive again in the spacious and silent north. Our planet completely circles the sun each year. When you listen to the CD, in a way you will walk around the sun yourself too.
start 'walk around the sun' next green spot homepage website Daan van Kampenhout
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