Bruce Russell, Ralf Wehowsky

Bruce Russell : acoustic guitar, vocal, analogue Tape treatments, mixing and composition. Ralf Wehowsky : sitar, digital sound processing. Recorded 2003-05, Lyttelton, New Zealand and Eggenstein, Germany. Digital mastering at the Temple of Music. “It is Midnight during the summer of 1951, the scene is a rural Crossroads somewhere outside Paris. A man called Pierre Schaeffer is sitting in the grass by the side of the road. As the village clock strikes the hour he invokes Eleggua, the Yoruba god of Crossroads and tricksters, and throws a reel of analogue recording Tape over his shoulder. The rest, as we say, is history… Well, no doubt it did not happen that way, but the relationship between the Blues and ‘old school’ electro-acoustic music is not as distant as it might at first appear. Both the Blues and sound recording are children of the twentieth century. In fact, the Blues are the first musical genre to owe their ongoing historical existence – their ‘tradition’ – almost entirely to the technology of sound recording … This album took form as a purely conceptual project, several years in advance of its actual realisation in sound. Part of my intention was to evoke the ‘sound world’ of the old Blues, by using analogue recording technology; the hiss and grainy analogue texture of the sound is integral to the concept. Ideally I should have mastered it to acetate before making the digital transfer. I also aimed to make use of the limited technical palette of ‘old school’ Tape music to create an ‘homage’ to the Blues heroes. Equalisation; speed changes; Tape splicing, looping and reversal; reverb; and ring modulation; these were my colours. I recruited Ralf Wehowsky to throw in some wild cards of computer sound processing, which I then returned to analogue Tape and put under my razor …” Bruce Russell (liner notes’ extracts)