The house next to mine is under construction. At least, it's supposed to be under construction, but it sounds more like some kind of war is being waged. From nine in the morning to seven at night there is a constant barrage of drilling, yelling, dropping of tools, stomping around, more drilling. Sometimes the walls shake and hairline cracks appear in the plaster. Sometimes I am convinced that the drillbit is going to come through the wall and into my head.
I avoid being too close to the walls.
Sound does funny things. I'll hear someone talking, or fiddling with something, and it sounds like it's coming from my bathroom. Or the opposite wall. In fact, it's always coming from next door. Yet my brain is so fooled that I've started almost having hallucinations. I hear something, and my brain presents me with an interpretation of it. 'Someone has just come in from outside and is trying to steal your kitchen table' it says.
My dreams involve giants and backhoes.
This has been going on since July.
Nevertheless, I've been mixing the record. Or at least trying to. When my roommates aren't home and I'm not working or rehearsing or going away or running errands or in one of those weeklong segments where I hate all my songs and have no wish to play them on full volume -these are the times I am mixing. It's time consuming, mostly because I recorded the record myself, and this is something I don't necessarily know how to do. Sometimes I hear some sort of high pitched noise, or some kind of interference, and then it takes me an hour to figure out that last year, when I recorded the vocals for a song, I had my printer on in my room and it somehow communicated a completely inaudible sound to the microphone, which dutifully recorded it and passed it on, unrecognised until I got these two massive mixing speakers from Long and McQuade. They are merciless. You can hear everything on these things. Even the secret language of printers and fluourescent lights.
Did you know that the sound of the earth rotating can be detected at 4 Hz?
I have found that hearing is a matter of context. What we hear depends on what else we hear, or what we see. For instance, when you listen to somebody sing, you don't hear all the little noises they make with their mouth, because you are selective. You select what you want to hear - the voice - and block out everything else. That's why recording can be so tricky.
I often record thirty to forty tracks on my songs, mostly of random, unplanned embellishment. In the final mix, much of it will be mostly inaudible, but it adds strange colours. In one song, I swear that I can hear the sound of a tap come on, and water start to flow. This doesn't happen of course. I'm pretty sure that sound is the combination of some hiss on a percussion track and a particularly sharp note on banjo. I'm not sure. But I'm fascinated by the visual picture my brain presents me with. In another song, a phone rings in the far background of a chopped up drum track. In the context of the song, it is impossible to tell there is a phone there. If I zero in on the sound, it is a fraction of a second long, but the song suddenly seems more urgent.
It's hard to focus, here amongst the drills and power saws. And I need to re-record a few things, which is impossible given the current climate here on Bellwoods. But I will perservere. This album needs to be finished.
Next week: more on why it's taken me four years to record an album.
