*The Loneliness Of The Long-distance Mixer
Somewhere along the line, Miles puts his hand up to mix the album. He has been doing progress mixes of the songs and everyone seems to like where they are going. He reads up on everything he can about this black art. Some things are confusing and some things are revelatory but he relishes the challenge and wants to see if he’s up to it. The rest of the band is very supportive and supply detailed notes about what it is they’d like to hear in the final mixes. (The very generous) Jonathan Nix agrees to lend Miles his new digital mixing desk. Jonathan is a brilliant animator/director who is also a brilliant musician. Having mixed lots of his own projects, Jonathan knows what Miles is letting himself in for even if Miles doesn’t.
After much digital editing it is now March 2007. One dark, rainy morning around five a.m., Miles loads his entire studio into the back of Danny’s car and drives south of Sydney for about six hours. He arrives at a holiday house in Dalmeny (near Narooma) on the south coast of New South Wales. The house has been lent to him for two weeks by the family of his girlfriend. It’s a beautiful spot. A large, detached three-bedroom cabin set back in a small wooded area about 150 metres away from the beach. The living room looks out into the trees through large windows and seems a great spot to set the studio up in. Unfortunately, the room is too woody and the ceiling too high. Fears of the sound bouncing around too much rule it out of contention.
Instead, Miles goes to the smallest room in the house and pulls out all the furniture. He sets up everything facing a drab white wall with only one window to his right. He figures that a bit of sensory deprivation and isolation will keep him focussed on the task at hand- to mix one song per day. So begins 14 days of 6 a.m. starts incorporating three, four-hour sessions of mixing interspersed with three meals and one afternoon swim in the ocean. Danny and Simon arrive for two days in the middle of the mixing and manage to scoop Miles out of his room for a much-needed night out in Narooma. After many drinks they wind up with a bottle of wine on the Dalmeny beach talking cods-wallop under a galaxy of stars.
For another week, Miles ploughs on through his monastic existence. Sometimes, lying in the utter pitch black of his bedroom at night, he finds it hard to differentiate between the sound of the waves in the distance and the whistling tinnitus in his ears. It is probably the strangest thing he has ever done. His head swimming with music and a version of the album mixed, Miles, reluctantly leaves the tranquillity of the coast to head back to Sydney.
*Setbacks #2
No one is jumping up and down about the mixes. Everyone is kind about how they sound but Miles agrees with Simon when he reckons that it’s about “70-80% there”. Jarrod wants one of his songs (a tune called Whistle Stop) dropped from the album altogether as he reckons it’s been recorded too slow and doesn’t have the groove or feel of the original demo. Their’s a bit of disappointment about this as Dan had put some great, atmospheric slide on the track. However, getting the bass right was “a nightmare” (according to Miles) so the album is now down to just 12 songs.
Later that week, a band member and his wife have their first child. This beautiful baby girl is born with quite a severe hearing impairment. It’s obviously a bit of a blow (particularly for a musician Dad) but it certainly proves not to diminish their joy at being parents. Then, in May, (a month or so after quitting his day job to re-focus on music) another band member’s girlfriend walks out on him. It’s a bit of a dark time and the mixing naturally takes a back seat for a while as life continues to go where it does.
The New South Wales winter of 2007 proves to be one of the coldest and wettest on record. Miles minds Dan’s new house whilst he and his partner go overseas for ten days. It rains solidly for nine of them and floods Dan’s basement whilst gale force winds bring down a tree at the side of the house (which Miles completely fails to notice). Simon and Miles mix Better Days on the coldest day of the year. Despite bone-chilling temperatures in Miles’ studio they do a cracking job- getting the build of the song just right whilst creating the brilliant, bionic-skitter-scatter guitar effects on the middle eight.
*If The World Won’t Listen… Keep on, keep on, yeah?
The mixing is once again in progress. Miles finds his feet during a remix of She’s Not The One. He finally begins to get the balance between power and clarity right. You can hear it after the line, “He tore it right up in my face!” as the echo dies away and a hard panned guitar buffers the vocal and is then joined by another in the opposite speaker. Then, dead centre, a harmony vocal and a beefy kick drum join the round. It’s a very classy build up, giving the track the urgency it requires.
With the prospect of a finished mix, the band turns its thoughts to mastering and distribution. In the vain hope of getting some outside financial assistance, Major produce a four-track teaser on CD to send to various record companies and the like. Luckily they have a staunch and ever-loyal ally in Angela Crews. Angela is the National Promotions manager for Sony BMG but grew up loving local Sydney indie acts. She provides Major with a comprehensive list of contacts to send the CD to. Dan comes up with some great cover art and the teaser is despatched to ‘whatever’ land.
After a few weeks the stony silence is broken only by email ‘out of the office’ replies and returned packages landing in the letterbox with ‘not at this address’ stamped on them. A few so-called-friends who work in the industry fail to even reply to the arrival of the package. Even so, Major press on regardless and moot the idea of a second teaser. Luckily, Dan forgets to do more artwork and the band are spared the time, money and embarrassment of throwing more plastic at a brick wall.
Miles continues mixing and feels he’s getting better at it. Alibi gets the final thumbs up from its writer, Jarrod with everyone wanting to hold lighters aloft for the classic, fade-out finale. So Ordinary is certainly the most compact mix of the album despite all its assorted insanity. Fuckin’ Up is the track that most sounds like a band playing live whilst the bucolic feel of the ‘Walk right back’ section seems, bizarrely, to capture the effect of emerging from a forest at sunset into some wide, green valley. 2007 is wearing on quickly and there’s only one song left to mix.
Go To Part Five