My personal "age of 4-track tape recording" ended with this large scale ambient work, which I still regard as one of my early highlights.
It's a concept album, depicting the genesis of a planet (not necessarily Earth) - Part One is about the formation of landmasses and oceans, but also about the unfolding of the initial unity into multitudes of form; Part Two about early ocean life, Part Three about prehistoric life on land, Part Four, erm: to be honest, I have no clear memory about what exactly it was about, but it *could* have been about prehistorc cultures, or the dawn of consciousness, and Part Five is about the rise of modern cultures.
The different steps in evolution also were reflected directly in the composition: Part One is based on just one big note and it's harmonics, Part Two is based on two chords, Part Three is pentatonic, and Parts Four and Five, I think, both make use of many chords and "all notes" (well, there were particular concepts for both of them, too, but I can't exactly remember those, either).
But basically, there is a musical "evolution" from the simple, or unitity, to complexity, or multitude...
In spite of the album's title, it's doesn't actually contain New Age music, but (mostly calm and introspective) ambient/drone soundscapes with very few tinges of Berlin school (only in the last track).
Due to the basic equipment I owned at the time, to achieve those complex, ever-shifting layers of timbres and sounds was one of the most complex recording and composing tasks I ever have accomplished (only a few years later, equipped with hard disc recording and - better sounding - virtual synths, the same effect would have been much easier to realise).
As instruments, I only had one sample based entertainer keyboard, an electronic organ and another sample, based synthesizer (no resonant filters, but at least I could program my own sounds).
Most of their sounds on their own and without modification sounded rather cheap and boring in a late 80s / early 90s sort of way, so to get warm and rich sounds with liquid timbral evolutions, I multiplicated every sound as often as the system would allow (3 x 16 Midi-Channels, using 3 x 128 voices), and morphed between the various components of one sound by the use of MIDI Volume commands. To bring those countless elements into an interesting and convincing balance at any point of the album, I had to apply GAZILLIONS of micro-adjustments, which took me weeks on end.
Basically, I recorded two very complex layers of sound that way for each piece on the album in stereo (effectively using up all four tracks of my tape recorder), but with this, the pieces were not finished. I could have bounced the four to only two tracks and than carry on with the recording in good old ping-pong fashion, however in that case, the sound quality would have suffered.
So instead, for each (of about only a few) cassettes that I produced, I added more sounds (usually a bordun / deep subbass note and various FX and nature sounds) via the two extra input channels I had, mixing down each track in realtime; which means, each stereo "copy" was in fact a live recording (of sorts), turning out slightly different every time. I had something of a "score" scribbled down on the inlay card of the master cassettes, with instructions about which sounds to use, about manual fades and when to bring in which sound effects etc.
It was rather adventurous.
"A New Age" received it's - now - final mix only in 2006/2007, when I was working on my promotional CD boc "No Single Single", and digitalised my old 4-track recordings (...the fact the cassettes started to age and their sound started to suffer was one of the initial reasons to do that box). Some of the original extra sounds (which were mixed in in realtime) were not available anymore, so I had to replace them, and also the original effect devices which I had used to process the sound in 1997 did not work anymore. Which means, that the final version from 2007 sounds slightly different from all earlier versions (but then again, as said above, none of the early versions sounded exactly like any other anyway...). I would have loved to add a copy of one of these early versions for comparison, but actually I gave them all away, only keeping the original master tapes.
So, the format of "A New Age" was a 90 minute cassette (containing five extended tracks), which couldn't really be transferred to the 78 minutes running time of a CD-R.
Therefore, for the doubel CD-r set, I had to split the album into two parts, and added some bonus material on the second CD (ambient tracks that were recorded around the same time) - a compromise that I rather hated to do, but now, at least in the format of a digtial download, the original running order is restored...
* * *
Full content of the download:
1. A New Age - Part 1 30:34
2. A New Age - Part 2 17:52
3. A New Age - Part 3 13:27
4. A New Age - Part 4 24:05
5. A New Age - Part 5 13:45
Bonus Tracks:
6. Klimpic System. 05:53
7. Pieceful. 09:58
8. Ambient Humm Shuffle. 07:15
9. A New Age - Part 4 - Short Version. 12:52
(Please note that the order of tracks on the physical version is different, due to the maximal running time of the format…)
credits
released February 22, 1997
Michael Brückner: Yamaha PSR 2700, Yamaha Electone Organ, Korg 05/RW Midi Module, Bamboo Flute
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