Maxwell D. Russell - guitars
Wayne Sides - keyboards
Jake Berry - bass
produced by Ascension Brothers
and Chris Mansel
mixed and mastered by
Jake Berry in August 2009
at 9th Street Laboratories
Florence, Alabama
photography by Wayne Sides
contact:
ascensionbrothers@gmx.com
Available for purchase now at Amazon.com/mp3 and iTunes and eMusic.
Here is some background to the album’s origins by Jake Berry (writing to Jeffrey Sides via email and copied here from Jeffrey's Facebook page):
“Two years ago, perhaps a little more or less, Max (Maxwell D. Russell) recorded four long solo guitar tracks. I think they might have been for a project that was never completed. One night when he was here working on songs for another album he mentioned the tracks and suggested they might be something we could work with for an Ascension Brothers album. I was eager to hear the tracks, but booth of us were involved in multiple projects as usual and I never managed to get them from him. Then a few months ago Chris Mansel and his daughter were visiting Max at his music shop and Max gave Chris the tracks. Chris made films of three of the tracks just as they were. They can be seen and heard on Youtube via the following links:
http://www.youtube.com/wat
http://www.youtube.com/wat
http://www.youtube.com/wat
These are the raw tracks just as he recorded them. Chris brought a copy of the CD of all four recordings. I loaded those into the recording program on my computer and invited Wayne Sides to add keyboards (Wayne and I founded the Ascension Brothers in the late 1990s). Wayne recorded a keyboard track to accompany the first of Max's tracks. Then a photography project called him away. Looking back through my old files I discovered that we had recorded and entire Ascension Brothers album that had never been released. These contained multiple keyboard tracks, all played by Wayne. I asked his permission to extract some of them and use them in the new context. He agreed.
The next challenge was to find tracks that contained notes that were primarily consonant with Max's tracks. Once this was completed I had to decide how broad the harmonies might be and how much dissonance to leave or add. There was also an issue with dynamics. I had to choose sections, or sometimes individual notes that worked dynamically with what Max had recorded. Once that was accomplished there was a matter of how to process both Max's tracks and Wayne's in order to make them blend in one way or another. Most of the time I simply applied layers of reverb and echo, but sometimes, I added tremolo, flanger, wah-wah, and other effects as well some pitch shifting. In the last case this meant adding a track that was a duplicate of the original, but then shifting the pitch above or below by a third or a forth or so on. The idea throughout was to come up with an original work that was sourced in the original tracks, but had become a new piece entirely. When I had a rough initial mix of their tracks I added bass tracks to each of the songs myself and put those tracks through a similar process of working with effects. All of this involved a great deal of editing. It is in a sense a means of composing with available music. This happens all the times with various forms that use the mashup process - reggae dub and dubstep, as well as various forms of ambient music are examples of where this technique has been applied.
After all the tracks were recorded, processed and edited I shifted to mastering them so that the tracks could be effected all in the same way. This would have the effect of making them sound even more like a single piece of music. At every phase there was a great deal of trial and error. How much consonance, how much dissonance, at what point should individual parts be panned apart or panned together, how many layers, at what pint should one instrument rise out of the mix and then recede and so on. Working for several hours each day I was able to complete the album in about three weeks.
I don't think there is anything revolutionary about what I was doing, but what we have always tried to do with The Ascension Brothers is keep in mind previous similar music, from ancient music like Gregorian chant and the Notre Dame school of composers to Indian Ragas to 20th century composition on up to the Ambient work of artists like Bran Eno, Harold Budd and Daniel Lanois among others. The significant thing we wanted to do differently was to add an edge to what we were doing so that, in the words of Mike Miskowski regarding an earlier recording the music 'would lull you to sleep then rip your brain out.' We want to generate a comfortable sonic atmosphere that the listener can use as background if he or she liked, but also something that will reward close attention.”
“Two years ago, perhaps a little more or less, Max (Maxwell D. Russell) recorded four long solo guitar tracks. I think they might have been for a project that was never completed. One night when he was here working on songs for another album he mentioned the tracks and suggested they might be something we could work with for an Ascension Brothers album. I was eager to hear the tracks, but booth of us were involved in multiple projects as usual and I never managed to get them from him. Then a few months ago Chris Mansel and his daughter were visiting Max at his music shop and Max gave Chris the tracks. Chris made films of three of the tracks just as they were. They can be seen and heard on Youtube via the following links:
http://www.youtube.com/wat
http://www.youtube.com/wat
http://www.youtube.com/wat
These are the raw tracks just as he recorded them. Chris brought a copy of the CD of all four recordings. I loaded those into the recording program on my computer and invited Wayne Sides to add keyboards (Wayne and I founded the Ascension Brothers in the late 1990s). Wayne recorded a keyboard track to accompany the first of Max's tracks. Then a photography project called him away. Looking back through my old files I discovered that we had recorded and entire Ascension Brothers album that had never been released. These contained multiple keyboard tracks, all played by Wayne. I asked his permission to extract some of them and use them in the new context. He agreed.
The next challenge was to find tracks that contained notes that were primarily consonant with Max's tracks. Once this was completed I had to decide how broad the harmonies might be and how much dissonance to leave or add. There was also an issue with dynamics. I had to choose sections, or sometimes individual notes that worked dynamically with what Max had recorded. Once that was accomplished there was a matter of how to process both Max's tracks and Wayne's in order to make them blend in one way or another. Most of the time I simply applied layers of reverb and echo, but sometimes, I added tremolo, flanger, wah-wah, and other effects as well some pitch shifting. In the last case this meant adding a track that was a duplicate of the original, but then shifting the pitch above or below by a third or a forth or so on. The idea throughout was to come up with an original work that was sourced in the original tracks, but had become a new piece entirely. When I had a rough initial mix of their tracks I added bass tracks to each of the songs myself and put those tracks through a similar process of working with effects. All of this involved a great deal of editing. It is in a sense a means of composing with available music. This happens all the times with various forms that use the mashup process - reggae dub and dubstep, as well as various forms of ambient music are examples of where this technique has been applied.
After all the tracks were recorded, processed and edited I shifted to mastering them so that the tracks could be effected all in the same way. This would have the effect of making them sound even more like a single piece of music. At every phase there was a great deal of trial and error. How much consonance, how much dissonance, at what point should individual parts be panned apart or panned together, how many layers, at what pint should one instrument rise out of the mix and then recede and so on. Working for several hours each day I was able to complete the album in about three weeks.
I don't think there is anything revolutionary about what I was doing, but what we have always tried to do with The Ascension Brothers is keep in mind previous similar music, from ancient music like Gregorian chant and the Notre Dame school of composers to Indian Ragas to 20th century composition on up to the Ambient work of artists like Bran Eno, Harold Budd and Daniel Lanois among others. The significant thing we wanted to do differently was to add an edge to what we were doing so that, in the words of Mike Miskowski regarding an earlier recording the music 'would lull you to sleep then rip your brain out.' We want to generate a comfortable sonic atmosphere that the listener can use as background if he or she liked, but also something that will reward close attention.”
