Long Night with Vish Khanna

For the last two years I've been handling the live tapings of Vish Khanna's Long Night. Long Night is a live talk show that takes place as part of the Long Winter Festival. The show is held once a month in the Black Box Theatre in the basement of the Great Hall and usually involves 3 - 4 guests, a musical act and/or stand-up comedy and features The Bicycles as house band. Vish posts the shows on his Kreative Kontrol podcast.
It's a fun, flying by the seat of your pants type of gig. Set-up time is minimal (there are usually acts on right before and right after the show) and there is no soundcheck. It's a minor miracle that it works and the results are usually quite good.

In Drift

I've been doing some mixing for Toronto surf/space/new wave band In Drift. The tracks were produced and recorded by guitarist Colin Thompson (with drums tracked by me at 6 Nassau). All songs were mixed at 6 Nassau with final polishing done at The Junkshop.

Matt Foy - åtte

Matt and I continue our long running collaboration on his new record åtte. It was written and recorded over 2 days at 6 Nassau in Toronto. As always Matt wrote the songs on the spot and played all the instruments. 

Before we started we had talked about how great it would be to make the record on tape. Unfortunately the studio only has a 2 track mix down deck. Never ones to give up we decided to record each element through one track of the tape machine to Pro Tools. Every element was recorded using a combination of three microphones - a close mic, a room mic and a far room mic. The mix of the three mics went to the tape machine and into the computer from the playback head. If you're a recording nerd and curious about the process there's a lengthy discussion of it here.

If you aren't a recording nerd and just want to hear the results you can listen below.

Ishaq - BERGSDORF (Documentary)

Last year I mixed a beautiful record for the Italian band Ishaq. It was produced and engineered by my good friend Tobin Stewart of Carpet of Horses at his Ballroom studio in Bergsdorf Germany. The band have just released a documentary about the making of the record. If you enjoy post rock, the German country side and people making beautiful music in the freezing cold you'll probably love the film.