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columba
kos
I started
this retrospective off with the second hour, with the idea that
it would offer a flavor of the music that I recorded between
1995 and 1998. The first hour came on the heels of the second,
and I put it together to add a balance to the late stuff.
Hour one
covers the period starting in 1980, ending in 1984. Although
I recorded in the years 1985, 1986, and 1994, none of those
recordings made it on to this selection.
Most of
the music presented here is that, music, rather than, say pop
songs, which I've also made in abundance. But the reality is,
I've recorded about two hours worth of pop music over twenty
years, and the life of my own repertoire lies in the abstract,
incidental music that must number seventeen hours by now.
So, much
of what is presented must be drawn from the incidental music
pool, and a deep pool it is, particularly in comparison to the
cardboard pop songs that I like to construct.
There
is a thematic congruence to this musical package, and that is
no accident, since I like to revisit old themes, and see no
reason why I shouldn't. Themes that I came up with early on,
and then visited later include the iotas cycle, and synthetics.
There
are rough edges here, some of the music is what is called hardcore
ambient. Other recordings (only a few), were made on the most
basic recording instruments. I don't apologise for this, because
you do with what you have when you are doing it, and anyhow,
these days, anything goes.
With only
a handful of exceptions, these recordings were all made by bouncing
tracks on a single tape machine. The ambient music was made
with two identical tape recorders set up as a delay line, or
tape loop. Bouncing tracks, also called sound-on-sound, is a
monaural recording system, All of the music presented here saw
its inception in mono. Stereo content was added toward the end
of the recording process, with individual channel editing and
spatial content being added to the sound during the mastering
stage. Since all of the process of recording, mixing, and mastering
took place with headphones on, this music sounds really good
through them.
There
is a high binaural quotient to this music, although the bed
for all of these songs is monaural. Part sleight of hand, but
mostly masking is responsible for why the stereo content presented
here seems real. Regardless of how many multiple tracks were
involved in the making of any particular recording (mine or
otherwise), the fundamental sound that the listener experiences
as the end result will be nine parts center image, one part
distinct content to either side of the soundstage. It doesn't
have to be this way, but it generally is.
Binaural
presentation differs from stereo presentation, but only in a
minor way. Stereophonic sound is designed to sound good through
loudspeakers, while binaural is clearly aimed at the headphone
listener, taking advantage of the precise displacement opportunities
presented by headphones to give the listener a truly three dimensional
listening experience. High binaural content recordings are often
considered to have a superior soundstage when heard through
a properly installed system, but will often sound compromised
in poor acoustic environments with improperly positioned loudspeakers.
As I state
on the cover of this album, optimal levels for listening pleasure
are to be found between 62 and 74dBa. I offer this as general
listening advice. Since few people can measure sound pressure,
think about it in these terms: you shouldn't have to raise your
voice to talk over the music to stay within these limits or
9 and 11 o'clock positions on a volume knob (3 to 4 on a scale
of 10) will probably correspond nicely, in general. I should
also like to offer a general caution to headphone wearers to
keep the levels reasonable. Oh, and wear earplugs when you see
live bands or ride the subway or a bus with rattly windows or
air brakes. And so on....
From
LEVITICUS to Charles Kos. Part One...
Link
to MP3 Playback by clicking on song title - Complete
List
1.
Why? (indeed) 3-81 This song is a taste of a waltz that
I never recorded, although it is one of my oldest songs, and
even had lyrics ready to go, had I chosen to complete it at
the time. It is one of three on Part 1 to have been recorded
on portable cassette tape recorders.
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2.
Iotas1 3-81 Recorded shortly after Why?, this track
was one that I constructed out of some music that I found,
liked, altered, and found myself singing to. It is my
first song that employed a single open-reel tape recorder
and sound-on-sound.
3.
Like the rest 1-82 The only thing close to a pop song
to emerge out of a series of music that I recorded during
a Montreal cold snap. It is a simple voice piece that
I did to experiment with harmony.
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4.
Thematics 3-81 This is the first of four pieces of incidental
music that as a whole were called Thematics. I couldn't present
the whole piece here, so I chose this one, as it has within
it the intensity that I was looking to express with music.
5.
Flashback 1-82 An extremely simple construction that was
done in two recording passes, Flashback has intensity, and it
was fast in the making (fifteen minutes to finished song). It
would sound good buried deep in the sountrack of a second rate
horror movie.
6.
Sitvac-Continue 9-81 This song is a beat treatment of a
pop song that I recorded in January of '81, called Situation
Vacant. It has some "shouting" in it, since it was an expression
of peril, excitement, and in a form, birth. The song marks the
end of my first company (Studio 7) and the birth of the
second (and still extant Over Land Studio). Since I was particular
about documenting when recordings took place (and where), I
can tell you with certainty that this song, and Over Land Studio,
were born on a Monday, in the last week of September. I stuck
a photograph of a detail of a switch labelled O.L.S. (which
meant over level supressor) on the door leading into my studio,
with the comment attached "disregard the O.L.S." The actual
name for the new studio entity came about shortly afterward.
I suppose I was thinking about Polaroid - Land - Camera at the
time.
7.
Not Your House 9-81 Another repeat. This is a dance version
of Please Forget (track 14.). I added the singing live in February
of '82, and have no copy of the earlier version which had more
impact, in some ways.
8.
Rain 10-83 Here, I'm singing over Frequency1, which is an
ambient piece that I had just completed. I recorded three hours
of ambient sound in October of '83, and Frequency1 was the lead
off piece in that series.
9.
Voices 1-82 Voices on voices on voices for effect.
10.
Creeping 1-82 Another simple construction with a bit of
crazy exhuberance mixed in. This song would sound strange in
any time, so it has aged well.
11.
olsx82-83c 2-84 This is a mix of two unrelated pieces of
music, one of a tiny handful that I did for a 1985 cassette
that I released with the catalogue number OLSIF3, titled "If..."
Way back in '83, I had a tape out titled, "If things were different,
how could they change?" That name got truncated quickly to the
Lindsay Anderson-ish "If..."
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12.
One Day 11-82 2-84 I recorded this song with a
cassette tape machine, and later mixed in some incidental
music from Frequency. It originally had a vocal part
at the beginning, but I chose to cut it down to
just the piano-ambient mix. Chris Wodskou (a Toronto
music journalist) once called One Day's vocals a bit
coctail-lounge-ish, and I think that he was right. |
13.
Studio7 Theme 11-80 I used a school tape machine to come
up with this collection of manic sound. I was a film student
at the time, and I wanted some music to accompany the opening
trailers that I was developing to precede my films.
14.
Please Forget 3-81 This song is as close as this collection
gets to my first group of recorded songs, and it's probably
the most brutal of the bunch. But it is also humorous. A warning
to the listener that this song was made to sound hardcore and
nasty by 1981 punk-rock standards. I felt no compulsion to soften
it out.
15.
Synthetics 2-84 This is my second foray into the world of
tape loops. Frequency, the first, employed two tape recorders
that were identical (Akai 4004's as I recall). On Synthetics,
I used different machines, and had to spend weeks getting the
machines to work together, an excruciating process that led
to hours of failed recordings, and, eventually, a coherent piece,
here or there.
16.
Fracture 2-84 is an early template for my later ambient
work.
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to columba kos: Part Two
1.
Game Show 1-98 This song was recorded very quickly, but
despite that, is very complex. By the time I got around to this
recording, I was working aggressively in stereo in the late
stages of the process. This is the only song that I have recorded
that employed synching completely separate recorded tracks (done
manually, in analog), but I did this to make the busiest possible
soundfield with the least number of actual recording passes.
A problem with sound-on-sound is that the original recorded
sound will eventually disappear under the layers of newer sound.
2.
Camp 1-97 Originally released on "Daylight Coming" (DC),
Camp has to be one of my all time personal faves. It is actually
a complimentary song to one recorded by 'The League of Gentlemen'
in 1981. I've been carrying it around for a long time, and this
recording sounds very much like the one that I had in my head
for so long. Sometimes it is really hard to capture that sound,
by the way, and that is one reason that I have for revisiting
songs from time to time.
3.Iotas2
10-96 This is the opening music from "Who Would I Be?" (Who?),
a rock-opera that I released in 1996. It is a maturation of
the original song, and corresponds to the opening musical portion
of Iotas1. There is also a recording of the song part, by the
way, it came out on DC in '97. But I included this one here,
because I like the sound of the piece, which is distant, as
if you are sitting toward the back of a church listening to
an organist play.
4.
Iam 7-96 My first recording in a long time to employ some
sort of percussive element (thanks to my benefactor Karmen),
Iam was a song that I pulled out of a red book of song lyrics
that I wrote for a rock-opera titled "Malaket", back in the
Fall of '82.
I changed
the lyrics a bit to fit a new purpose, but the song, and certainly
its refrain, dates back to the time when I was living in Banff,
Alberta. I played it on the piano, back then, I'm certain.
5.
Worst Nightmare 6-96 This song is a forensic examination
of evil presented in the first person. It is one of the earliest
songs that I wrote for Who? and I wanted it to be as real an
expression of being an evil person as I can imagine.
6.
olsx97-2 11-97 One of a series of hardcore ambient pieces.
7.
The Laughing Horse 11-95 This piece goes back to 1983, when
I first started assembling it. A far more "concrete" rendition
appears on If... This version is part of the anniversary collection
that I assembled in '95 to mark year ten of If...
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Daylight Coming 12-96 An earlier recording of DC, it
was rejected for the release in favor of a later version.
I have presented it here because in retrospect, I like it
better. |
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9.
Mercicalia 2-98 An uptempo incidental work. It is one of
several songs that I recorded in '98 that were plagued with
tape defects, invariably not discovered until after the point
of no return had been reached. Still, this song has an intensity
of tempo and a shuffling of arrangements that makes it unconventional
and organic.
10.
olsx97-1 11-97 A placid ambient piece which is a small portion
of a much longer work.
11.
Syntetica 3-98 Synthetics revisitied. This song takes a
section of the theme from Synthetics and folds it back onto
itself to form a conventional, if mysterious sounding song.
12.
olsx97-3 11-97 A long piece. This work, the last piece of
ambient music that I have recorded to date, is possibly the
most complex ambient recording that I have made. It applied
multiple instruments to multiple passes of a tape loop. It may
be considered an elaboration of the style that I employed on
Fracture, which was recorded in one pass with multiple sources.
ols-al-99
©1999 Over Land Studio
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