Tension Studios

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Tension Studios client C’est la Mort has just released their debut CD along with an EP of remixes.  Tension Studios mixed and engineered the album, Empty Words Fill Lonely Spaces, plus contributed a remix to the EP (In the Soft Focus Light of I Love You) as well as mastering it.  The CD is getting great reviews, like this one.

Just finished mixing the debut album for C’est La Mort, I’ll be doing a remix of one of the songs too.  Also recorded some backing vocals for bathyscaph and Eben Eldridge.  Details and links to come as soon as I get them.

This is an excerpt from Liquored Water, a track that appeared on the Control-Alt-Delete Cat Compilation II. This was one of those songs that was born overnight. I literally stayed up all night writing it because I didn’t want to lose any momentum. It started off with the original guitar loop that I recorded through a couple of pedals. The rhythm was slow and had a wave-like quality to it that I reinforced with the offset cycles in the percussion and other instrument layers. There are only a few places in the song where the different cycles all align, so that adds to the feeling like the song is being washed over you.

While I enjoyed the song as an instrumental, I felt like it needed a little more for inclusion on the CD so I had an acquaintance of mine (Zoe aka Betty X) add some lyrics and vocals. Heavy chorus and overdubbing was in order to make the vocals sit inside the music instead of bobbing on top.

Composition, production, engineering, stereo mix

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This is an excerpt from a piece that I wrote a few years ago with one of my favorite colaborators, Daniel Blackmoore. This was one of those songs that was inspired by a couple of samples but I needed some initiative to flesh it out. Daniel provided me with motivation and a fresh perspective, but most importantly is that he did this all in a non musical way. He didn’t suggest chord progressions or notes, instead he would say things like “try going up instead of down” or “let’s try it with a totally different instrument”. He was like a real life Oblique Stratagies deck.

Composition, production, engineering, stereo mix

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