It all began in 1973 when Sascha and Tim met in Grade 7 at Saint Agnes Catholic School.
In 1980 Paul and Carl heard the beat of a different drummer. From that moment to the present, ‘so many songs, so many fresh and brave ideas’ were created, performed and recorded, but this time it was all about it just being ‘good to see you’.
The four of us all wanted to create a full body of work and capture it as a ‘performance of the moment’. The majority of this body of work is just that – live off the floor – along with a few tasty overdubs.
1998 – We set up a loose schedule that consisted of 2-3 full days each week in a rehearsal studio, with as many consecutive weeks as possible. Here we could write, play, create and fine - tune our interplay. We’d record each day as a means of cataloguing our ideas, then review, edit, re-compose and finally capture 3-7 performances/interpretations of each piece of music on tape or hard disk.
1999/2000 – Comping – composite tracking – taking various performances of the same song and combining them to create the final version.
2000/2001 – Overdubs – For us it was a given that we would be ‘sweetening’ the tracks. Each time we ‘jammed’ a version of a piece of music, we would work on different parts of the orchestration – from hard rhythm tracks to loop jams, simply playing variations on a theme for 10 minutes gave us what we needed/wanted.
2002 – The Mix – 4 weeks – 6-7 days a week – this is what it took to mix 13 compositions, consisting anywhere from 24 to 60 individual tracks per composition. We compiled a healthy amount of outboard equipment and embarked on the mix adventure with mix engineer Michael Barlow
2002 – The Mastering – It really should only take one or two days to put the final sonic sheen on a body of work, but in reality it took more like four or five days, as there was always ‘just one more thing’ that had to be addressed. The Lacquer Channel’s Phil Demetro had great patience and understood the scope of the project.
And so it went – almost 5 years of what some might call work -conversations, feeding, contradictions, criticism, controversy, chatter, rehearsing, reviews, fine tuning, recording, editing, altering, creating. All that wrapped into 70+ minutes of music. Are we happy?
Well, hell YEAH! Are we done? No!
2002 – 2003 - Artwork – Say What Communications – Our good friends Grant Ivens, Brian Low and Christopher Stratton take on the heady project of realizing our concept name The Harrison Fjord and the album title Machine Tree and taking it to the next level – the visual. 6 weeks in July of 2002 became 6 months (ending in March 2003), when we finally all had the focus and the peace of mind to give the artwork a collective thumbs up!
2003 – Production / Manufacturing – We’re in – we’re punching out copies and we’re in the ‘Here and Now’
Thanks for your support. We promise the next body of work won’t take sooooo long to deliver!