Being a huge Canterbury scene fan since a young age I never had the chance to work on anything related to that special style of progressive music -well maybe besides recording and mixing for Brainville 3 's (Daevid Allen Hugh Hopper & Chris Cutler) Trial By Headline cd.
Anyway I was more then delighted and thrilled when Steve Feigenbaum of Cuneiform Records and the legendary Wayside Music mail order asked be to take part and work on restoring and mastering Soft Machine's NDR Jazz Workshop -Hamburg, Germany 1973 cd+ dvd.
So this was kind of like making a full circle for me since most of my knowledge about all things Canterbury came mostly from reading those colorful Wayside Music catalogs .
The original audio that came with the broadcast video left a lot to be desired for(the problem was it had only a part of the audio content and the fidelity was a bit low). Knowing there was also a stereo radio broadcast of the show So Steve set out on a mission to locate these tapes and after a few weeks of searching negotiating and nail biting (audio files caught in a massive snow storm) I was delighted to finally receive the fresh transfer of the master tapes.
Working on the audio of this concert was a pleasure -The performance of the group is extremely good the playing was energetic and gave a strong sense of liveliness On my part:Some enhancing of the stereo image a bit of work on retaining the dynamic range of the original performance ,making sure the tonal balance is optimized and voila !
The last task was converting and laying the audio from the radio broadcast on the video (which looks fantastic btw) and making sure its fits the picture with 100% accuracy (utilizing the latest software programs).
So this is one of the projects I recently did that i enjoyed immensely - Thanks a lot to Steve Feigenbaum ,Aymeric Le Roy and Joerg Reinicke !
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