During the summer, we started mixing Gina Birch's music for an installation that she will be working on in November. Most of her album was finished but I co-wrote some songs with her to complete the album, and it seemed to make sense to mix it ourselves. We have spent a few hours on one of the first tracks, To Please Is To Forget Yourself and I've just listened to the mp3 of it.
Oddly, it's a bit like gardening. You put loads of graft in and don't have time to inspect what you've done. The perhaps the next day you go out there and think 'That's really made a difference!'.
For us, it's all about listening rather than being technical exercise. Or rather, it is a technical exercise in service of what we want to hear.
It is intriguing for me to work on music that is so different in genre from that which I record myself; with your usual stuff you default to particular sounds and techniques, but with this it's a big experiment and that is exactly the way Gina likes it. It's liberating for me, as it takes me away from old habits and puts playfulness back on the agenda, and Gina is a natural collaborator so it benefits her too. I am really looking forward to our next mixing session.
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