Robert Ferbrache's two older mixes - Uphollow and Ian Cooke (5.1 dts)

[GOS]

ok, looks like the backwards album is stereo and starts at the end of the album as credits roll on the 2009 DVD.
Yep @ogrequad there are two 5.1 mixes. Bob's mix is wonderful and powerful. It is also pretty compressed and heavy on effects as many mixes of that time were, and as was his style. A rock mix, basically. I tried to go in and do from a more natural perspective. Honestly I think my mix misses some of the power. On a positive side it brings on less fatigue, and is more accurate to how we sounded. It's weird to hear it because my opinion changes every time.

The 2017 DVD has a bunch of other stuff though; we did a commentary track where Cooke and I share some background on all of it. Bob Ferbrache actually is in there for a tiny bit too. He is in Vermont now, and Cooke is in North Carolina. I haven't seen either in quite a while so it was interesting to hear their voices.
Also there are a couple more recent videos on the DVD of us playing those songs with the Colorado Symphony. I wish I could release our two sets with them in 5.1 on bluray. Maybe someday. It was really magical to be able to play with them three times. The conductor was an absolute genius and the players were robots. It was very odd.
Ah, what else about The Fall I Fell...some videos, a reeaallly old doc I made about how we made it which is embarrassing but funny. I knew it was a really well-written album when we recorded, but I didn't know yet, you know? This was the beginning of a really wonderful creative streak for Cooke.

Thank you for those comments. It's amazing to have that insight!!!

 

[popshop]

@humprof indeed the FLAC is the 2017 mix.
@ogrequad yes the 2017 mix is kinda hidden on there. Bob's is the main mix and the 2017 mix is with the commentary.
I personally really like the song Kursk, written about the Russian submarine and sailors who died. Bob's 5.1 mix is fantastic, as is the video.
Darkening is lovely as well, and is very different and better live than on the album. So it goes.
Same for the climax, The Rot as well. On the DVD (and youtube) are live versions of The Rot which include Gimme Gimme Gimme by ABBA and Monkey and Bear by Joanna Newsom. Also on youtube is a full cover of Money and Bear. Pretty insane song actually, 9 minutes of layers of insanity. If it could be legally it would be included with The Fall I Fell. In some ways it is the most ambitious thing we ever recorded.

Also worth nothing is that the song Flood includes all sorts of stuff by Jamie White, who a decade later did a bunch of stuff on The Flight I Flew (and played in the live band). In addition, I used a lot of his sounds from Flood as samples on other songs on The Flight I Flew. Of course there are many thematic and lyrical connections between the two albums, but the sequencing and instrumentation are deliberately similar too. In between are Fortitude and Antiquasauria, also part of the journey. Glad that some folks are appreciating Cooke's weird art.

 

[ogrequad]

The videos on the 2017 DVD are fantastic! I’m just on the solo performances right now - what Ian is able to do with looping and tapes is quite impressive. And the discrete 5.1 mix is excellent. Can’t wait to get to the songs with the orchestra!

 

[ogrequad]

Love this version of “Music” with the string quartet!

 

[ogrequad]

Anyone who enjoyed "Fall I Fell" should definitely check out "The Flight I Flew". I just listened and the mix is even more discrete than "Fall". Lots of interesting things happening in all the speakers, with "Web of Sound" being a particular highlight. The DVD also includes 5.1 instrumental mixes, which I haven't listened to yet. @popshop - Are the instrumental mixes the same as the others, with the vocals simply removed, or are they dedicated mixes?

Overall, I'd say that I like the material on "Fall" a bit better, as there is more variety, but the mix of "Flight" is more adventurous and discrete. Both are excellent and highly recommended!

 

[popshop]

hey everybody, thanks so much for the orders. I'm going to make a big trip to the post office Monday morning so that I don't leave the house more than necessary. So, with that in mind I'm happy to make deals if you want more than one thing.
Uphollow's Jackets For The Trip (4 left), Cooke's The Fall I Fell, The Flight I Flew, and Antiquasauria. PM me with questions.

For anyone with a The Fall I Fell 2017 DVD that plays wonky, I'm happy to send you FLAC files for free. I'm sad and baffled by all that.

 

[popshop]

@ogrequad thanks. I agree with everything you said. The unique thing about The Flight I Flew is that the songs were written - and technically commissioned - for a series of dance performances. For the first time ever, Cooke had a hard deadline. He had a year to write enough songs for the show. I pushed the idea of making it an album to have available at the series of shows, so then we had a much earlier deadline due to the time it took to press records then. The plan became that he would have a week to write each song, then a week to record each. Totally insane, right?
Amazingly, for the first 9 weeks in a row (January 2017) Cooke wrote a new incredible song. It was such a wonderful joy to sit down each Thursday morning and hear him play a brand new song, usually completely finished. I will never forget how happy I was when he played the verse of Beam of Light. One week he wrote a song about his Dad - which is lovely but didn't fit the concept. Otherwise it was all kept. Then things got crazy in real life, some weeks were missed - but we had a chance to step back and determine the concept. That's where I came in and built some songs from parts and made suggestions on how to make it more of a cohesive album and such, with Flow and Ebb, and Return to You being the last pieces. Throughout this time, Jamie White and I were sending ideas and sounds back and forth via email. We both were recording sounds of water in bowls, hitting furnaces and plumbing, drums, etc and then manipulating them. Jamie had a huge impact on several songs. I also recorded Sean Merrell on drums on two songs and manipulated his performances. His performance on Nine Moons is really wonderful - - - and I think it's one of the best songs Cooke has ever written. It is the album center and maybe should have been the title of it!
TO FINALLY ANSWER YOUR QUESTION - yes the instrumental mix is maybe better than the album because Chris Jusell (Colorado Symphony violinist) plays all of the vocal melodies on violin or viola. It was so amazing to record because he did almost everything in one take from memory (!!!) and then would say "oh hey let me add a harmony there" and just do it in one take. Totally insane because this was after we had just spent six months recording thousands of takes. He is a genius (also was just now out on tour with Nathaniel Rateliff before it was cancelled). In addition Cooke did some melodies and Whit played some on toy piano. The surround mixes are also different. I shifted stuff around with the vocal change.

- The Fall I Fell is essentially a dozen of the first 15 songs Cooke ever wrote - but written between 2002? and 2007.
- The Flight I Flew was all written and recorded between October 2016 and July 2017. The similar concepts and the personal events in Cooke's life that led to the songs and concepts is a whole other saga, but that's ...a whole other saga.
I would agree that in general the songs on The Fall I Fell are better, and more or less this was a long way of saying that The Flight I Flew was deliberately created within a timeframe, which was my fault, haha.
Thanks for allowing me to ramble! It's nice for me to get perspective on it. 3 years ago feels like 30 years ago.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on the music and mixes.

 

[humprof]

@ogrequad thanks. I agree with everything you said. The unique thing about The Flight I Flew is that the songs were written - and technically commissioned - for a series of dance performances. For the first time ever, Cooke had a hard deadline. He had a year to write enough songs for the show. I pushed the idea of making it an album to have available at the series of shows, so then we had a much earlier deadline due to the time it took to press records then. The plan became that he would have a week to write each song, then a week to record each. Totally insane, right?
Amazingly, for the first 9 weeks in a row (January 2017) Cooke wrote a new incredible song. It was such a wonderful joy to sit down each Thursday morning and hear him play a brand new song, usually completely finished. I will never forget how happy I was when he played the verse of Beam of Light. One week he wrote a song about his Dad - which is lovely but didn't fit the concept. Otherwise it was all kept. Then things got crazy in real life, some weeks were missed - but we had a chance to step back and determine the concept. That's where I came in and built some songs from parts and made suggestions on how to make it more of a cohesive album and such, with Flow and Ebb, and Return to You being the last pieces. Throughout this time, Jamie White and I were sending ideas and sounds back and forth via email. We both were recording sounds of water in bowls, hitting furnaces and plumbing, drums, etc and then manipulating them. Jamie had a huge impact on several songs. I also recorded Sean Merrell on two songs and manipulated his performances. His performance on Nine Moons is really wonderful - - - and I think it's one of the best songs Cooke has ever written. It is the album center and maybe should have been the title of it!
TO FINALLY ANSWER YOUR QUESTION - yes the instrumental mix is maybe better than the album because Chris Jusell (Colorado Symphony violinist) plays all of the vocal melodies on violin or viola. It was so amazing to record because he did almost everything in one take from memory (!!!) and then would say "oh hey let me add a harmony there" and just do it in one take. Totally insane because this was after we had just spent six months recording thousands of takes. He is a genius (also was just now out on tour with Nathaniel Rateliff before it was cancelled). In addition Cooke did some melodies and Whit played some on toy piano. The surround mixes are also different. I shifted stuff around with the vocal change.

- The Fall I Fell is essentially a dozen of the first 15 songs Cooke ever wrote - but written between 2002? and 2007.
- The Flight I Flew was all written and recorded between October 2016 and July 2017. The similar concepts and the personal events in Cooke's life that led to the songs and concepts is a whole other saga, but that's ...a whole other saga.
I would agree that in general the songs on The Fall I Fell are better, and more or less this was a long way of saying that The Flight I Flew was deliberately created within a timeframe, which was my fault, haha.
Thanks for allowing me to ramble! It's nice for me to get perspective on it. 3 years ago feels like 30 years ago.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on the music and mixes.

Ian, we may need to cobble together all of your posts here, spruce them up a bit for continuity and style, and issue them as a new electronic liner note!

 

[ogrequad]

Thanks so much, Ian, for all of the insights into the making of these albums - as a musician myself, I’m always fascinated by these inside stories about writing, producing, and recording music. Now I can’t wait to check out those instrumental mixes!

 

[popshop]

Thanks, it's helpful for me to try to recall also. I'm not sure if they should go on the poll pages or stay in this thread?
Speaking of the poll pages....this album needs one more vote! The Flight I Flew
The Fall I Fell doesn't have a poll page as far as I know.
Someday I will mix all of Fortitude in 5.1. I just listened to a song I mixed in 5.1 in 2015 and was pleased.
Later I'll type something about Jackets For The Trip.

 

[popshop]

Jackets For The Trip was the final album Uphollow recorded. Whit and I formed the band 10 years earlier and changed drastically album to album. Uphollow was a punk band. For most of the '90s we were playing with Fugazi, Hot Water Music, Jimmy Eat World, Avail, and similar. Then in '99 all of our gear was stolen, I moved to Australia, Whit went backpacking in Europe. We stopped. I wrote a new album.
In 2001 I met Ian Cooke on "the internet" and he joined on piano and cello, we recorded that album, and by 2003 he started contributing songs. His first four were Kudos, Monster, Sleeping Bag, and Wine and Honesty, all on this album.
Whit wrote Stay The Night and The Writer, and I wrote the rest - so it was both a strength and a weakness to have three very different singers and songwriters. Oddly, about a third of the album was written in Spain. Whit was living there and Cooke and I were traveling there at the time (2001-2004).
Mostly what I remember is that this was the era of change from Tape or ADAT type recording using a board towards computer-based recording. I had just started using Nuendo and if I recall the basic tracks were recorded at a traditional studio with a big board and all that, then transferred to a drive that I recorded the overdubs on, at home. Then we brought everything back to mix at the studio on a physical board. All in the early days of that. Nuendo 2.0, if I recall.
During this era I was really becoming interested in surround sound generally, mostly because of the Cornelius Five Point One album - and happened to meet Bob Ferbrache at one of our shows. We hit it off and soon after started working on a 5.1 mix of the album.
With Bob, that means drinking wine with him until 4am while he LOUDLY plays you other stuff he is working on. It took a lot of wine (Cotes du Rhone varieties) and a lot of time to get it done. He taught me about hockey and prog rock and we became friends.
One interesting note is that Cooke re-sang Wine and Honesty, and I re-sang This First so the 5.1 is different in those regards. If I recall the reason was just that months had passed and we weren't happy with our initial performances.
Another item is that the last song Timed Clock was the first time I worked with Jamie White, who contributed to both The Fall I Fell and The Flight I Flew. I recorded guitar and vocal in his closet and he did everything else. I don't remember if it was before or after everything else, but completely separate, and I was uncertain if it should be included at all. Oddly, it acted as a preview of the direction I would go.
Throughout the mixing time, my buddy Zach Putnam was working on the visuals. Certainly now some look like screen-saver type stuff, but they were time-intensive, cool, and fun. Zach also did the Vasoon origami cello video later. Bob authored the DVD and figured it all out, which I recall being tricky for various technical reasons. There is an easter egg too, very of the time.
The title is a lyric in Wine and Honesty about actual jackets for an actual voyage the three of us did take, south to Portugal from Spain, but there is also a psychedelic trip side to it, and the shell cover image matched both the visual trippyness and the physical security of a sleeping bag type thing. Wine and Honesty is fantastic. Sleeping Bag is fantastic. Honestly, Cooke's songs and Whit's song The Writer are fantastic. I don't enjoy listening to my songs.
I just talked to Whit and his recollection was different, of course. He said he came up with the album title, from the Cooke lyrics, and said today: "songs can be sense of comfort as you're going through life, songs are this jacket to keep you warm."
Jackets For The Trip: original shell today, with CD cover from 2005.

 

[popshop]

Thought some would appreciate Ian Cooke playing Vasoon yesterday:

From The Fall I Fell album, for NPR's tiny desk.