Field Song, in its vinyl form, is an AAA album. This means that from the original tapes, through the mastering process, to the lacquer cutting and the record pressing, the audio was never digitized. The magic of the sound of AAA recordings is much like the magic of analog photography. When you take a photo on film, it is an actual capture of the light from the moment, rather than a digital representation consisting of small bytes of information. In this same way, an all-analog recording means that you hear the direct descendant of the original sound waves committed to tape.
This ideal is not all that easy to accomplish. Between carting the significantly heavier and bulkier analog gear around and dealing with the limitations of switching out reels and using analog EQs, there was plenty of extra effort and difficulty required to realize the AAA vision. The NAGRA with its twelve D cell batteries alone weighs 15 lbs, and each 5” reel at 15 ips could only hold a little less than 12 minutes of recording before I had to switch out reels. In one early iteration of this project, an ant actually crawled onto the NAGRA and into the tape path mid take, resulting in a botched take and the ant’s unfortunate demise. However, when you listen to the vinyl edition of Field Song, you’ll hear the difference. I was lucky to work with Greg Reierson at Rare Form Mastering on this project, as he had the equipment and the know-how to execute the post-production process. We played the tapes from the NAGRA directly into his custom analog console to create the master tapes, and then he used his vintage Neumann lathe to cut the lacquers.
Preorder vinyl for Field Song on bandcamp, or come to the release show August 9th to get your copy.
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