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KARMA COUNTY - INTO THE LAND OF PROMISE | |
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We recorded this album in different ways in different places. In December '98 we spent 3 days at Megaphon in Sydney with Tim Whitten (Clouds, Powderfinger, Love Me) engineering. This was for some of the bigger drum sounding songs like "Circus" and "Lasso" where some isolation is desirable though the sessions also turned up tunes like "the Man That Midas Touched".
In March '99 we relocated to a big old, former Marist Brothers retreat house on the NSW south coast for 7 days, again with Tim Whitten engineering. We took a lot of gear from my home studio plus some hire stuff and set up a very efficient 16 track system in a big comfy room overlooking seven mile beach.
These sessions gave the album the atmosphere we like because there's no pressure. We could go swimming when the weather was good and play late into the night without being bothered by anybody else or for that matter bothering them. These sessions yielded the bed tracks for 8 of the album songs and some B sides. It was a great way to work. Some evenings we'd set up the barbie on the front lawn, cook some seafood and have a few beers and then move inside to play some more. Can't beat it!
In April/ May we finished vocals and other overdubs in my home studio in Sydney plus a couple of days doing some string ensemble and piano overdubs at Megaphon.
In June we transferred the tracks from 3 DA 88s onto 2" tape in the Phoenix Room at Studios 301 in Sydney. This involved processing the sounds to tape through some very nice old Focusrite units care of Jeremy Allom (Massive Attack, Specials, Vika & Linda etc.) This is my third album with Jeremy (Olana and Jimmy Little's "Messenger" being the others) and it was great to be mixing with him in the big room at 301 with all the grown up's toys. Jeremy was a panoramic sonic vision who can really bring out the warmth in the music. We mixed 14 songs over 10 days. There was one song that we abandoned mid mix because it wasn't up to scratch. Maybe next record.
We mastered at 301 with Don Bartley mid June. I love mastering. You turn up at 10am and Don sends one of the boys out for breakfast and you sit there with a nice coffee while Don puts together the picture for you. That's when an album comes alive. Love it.
As with our other albums, I look after production and Stuie does the art work and layout. The primary image on the cover was a photo in the Sydney Morning Herald in late '98. The accompanying story was a fairly mundane piece about wool prices but the picture of these freshly shorn sheep emerging from an old tin shed set against a cloudy sky was very powerful. It was taken by staff photographer Andrew Meares on a property at Crookwell near Goulburn, NSW. The image worked in very well with our working title of "Into the Land of Promise".
The title came from a Scandinavian Film, whose name I can't recall, starring Max Von Sydow. In his preamble to the movie, film critic John Hinde (sic) spoke about the story of a young boy and his elderly guardian taking the boat across the water to 19th Century Denmark where there was work. It was the land of promise. Not the promised land where the "milk and honey" were provided but where there was opportunity, a place where the possible could happen. The image of three freshly shorn sheep casting off their old skins as it were and bounding off into a new experience resonated with that idea of a land of promise, over there. In fin-de-siecle Australia it has some currency. The idea was to give the cover a book like quality. Like encountering Neville Shute's "A Town Like Alice" for the first time in a bookstore. I think Stuie succeeded.
Brendan Gallagher 2000
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Warners Records
Overall "Into the Land of Promise" is just that. A record of unparalleled beauty and emotion. A stunning and bold attempt to bring back those old fashioned values of songs that sing to the ...more |
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