Oh Venus

After 3 years another solo CD. It's taken a long time, and again it's not really a solo record either. There
were 6 engineers at one time or another, this was a problem, they all seemed to work in different ways.
I started on the sound tools as ever. I had to make up enough drone or backing sequences for a lot of
music. I had 14 tracks at the beginning, now I have 9, that's flushing out, clearing the woods, as it were.
It's been like buying a large block of blue veined cheese, and cutting all the blue out, finely, and carefully.
'Oh Venus' is the small blue ball, the rest is gash, waste.

I'm listening to 'Oh Venus' CDR 1 now. It's long and minimum, just cut and paste work, no real
instruments added, all just concert recordings from 1972-1997. So to start with I have just cut up sound
from different venues around the country. Different spaces of sound, edited together, too long,
unfinished, mono. I always wondered what I could do with a huge box load of old tape, make a record,
all the sound is there, just cut and paste, fingers crossed. It took twenty days to record all the music,
over a two year period, maybe a day here, three days there. I thought of it as four, five day weeks. But
I had in mind a three layer process, so it was really like three, six and a half days of work per level of
process.

We used two 8 track ADATS linked to the computer, ADATS chasing. I was under the impression
they were fast to work with. Now I know they can take ages. Loading, re loading, saving, re saving...
The second stage is when I started to add bits and pieces. All the songs on 'Oh Venus' are songs, as
opposed to pieces of music. I wanted to sing more. Cut ups again were the only way forward for me,
and in particular an obituary about James Lee Byars, a friend of Joseph Beuys. I also was lucky enough
to spend time in Tokyo with Aki Onda, whose DATS were invaluable. Then Ryoji Ikeda also gave me
tapes, and finally Bruce Gilbert. These sound were spread over all the songs, and for my money, unify
the sound. I was definitely trying to get out of my old process, whereby I used "found sound". I tried
desperately to avoid a cinematic approach. There are many old drum machines used. Revox recordings
going back 25 years.

My secret weapon is Gilad Atzmon, he is from Jerusalem. We met a couple of years ago, and worked
on a documentary together. He came into the studio 2 or 3 times, always late at night. We'd play him the
track, and he'd record instantly, we didn't bother to put him in a room sometimes. His clarinet playing
and brass has changed my life. In June last year ('98) we toured Japan together with Sergio Avila,
Melanie Pappenheim, and Gilad, a semi improv jazz group, my magic band. U-she is a singer from
Germany, Sarah at Mute recommended her, she was in London for the weekend, so I sent her a
cassette to her hotel. She wrote the lyrics in the cab on the way over to the studio. I'd never met her
before but instantly got on, she sang and I left her alone. Pascal Gabriel and I had been working on an
idea and I realised I could edit in a complete new section on one particular song. As we were mixing
finally, I'm afraid I tended to do this, much to the annoyance of Roger and Ebi. At this stage Ebi was
armed with a fine little piece of ammunition, an EMU sampler, so we re/sampling and re/filtering. The
mix took 12 days. As always there are no drummers involved and only a brief bit of bass on one track.
The W30 was my main tool and the engineers all used samplers, the CD was edited by Binners. We've
tried to be as adventurous as possible. There is many mixes in the final cut. Still layering, or cutting,
editing, mono, stereo, false stereo, false mono.

Who do you obey?
 
 

Image from inner sleeve:

'Oh Venus' by SFT was released by Mute Records on 31st May, 1999.