Are factors like mood, ergonomics, haptics and technology for you? What were criteria when setting it up and how does this environment influence the creative process? How important, relatively speaking. Fancy studios and the greatest equipment mean nothing next to great songs, great sounds and passionate songwriting. It's a far better album than anything he's done since, given his constantly increasing budget for recording expenses. It's absolutely his best album in my opinion, and that happened to be recorded in very lo-fi means on a 4 track cassette. An example that quickly comes to my head is Iron and Wine's The Creek Drank The Cradle. I don't think there are, or should be, any universal rules for what constitutes a good recording. In this case it's my job to always do what the artist wants, it's their music after all, and they absolutely have the final say in the matter. There are times, however, when I'm mastering a song and I think it needs one thing, but the artist doesn't agree. Fortunately this is the case 99% of the time. The hope is that MY vision and the artist's vision are in sync and we're both happy with the mastering. Maybe it's more space in the high frequencies, maybe it's a tighter, punchier bass, and maybe it's a narrow, more focused sound. So when I’m mastering I try to achieve what I think sounds better, whatever that means. It can't NOT be personal, because I’m the one doing it. In how far are the objective, universal and measurable parameters for what constitutes quality in a recording? What are currently your main challenges and ambitions in terms of your approach to mastering to further these quality standards? The location, time and story unfolding around us were absolutely vital to the music. If the five of us including Marcus Fischer, Simon Scott, Corey Fuller, Tomoyoshi Date and I, got together to make an album under different circumstances, it would have had a totally different outcome. This recording could not happen anywhere else for all of those reasons. We recorded spontaneously in a 200 year old Japanese building on this particular day, tour, and everything that was a part of our experience. It was a meeting of not only friends, but also a very particular and amazing moment in time and location. Location has been never been more important than with my Between CD on 12k. Simple processes like field recording are vital and can be done very easily in very high quality these days. The whole album was about the exploration of these surroundings. On my recent collaboration album with Seaworthy we did a lot of field recording in the forests and streams around my house, which was then mixed with recordings in the studio. With the idea of conceptual recordings, location becomes very important. I definitely prefer to do the bulk of my recording and mixing in my own studio with my complete set of tools, but I have absolutely taken advantage of portable technology to record and write in specific locations. Music really can be written and recorded anywhere. It's pretty wonderful that there are such high quality and portable musical tools and technologies now. How do you see the relation between sound, location and space? Recording can be related to a particular location, but thanks to technology, it no longer has to be.
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