Recording work on Tony Levin's solo album "The Waters of Eden" is complete and released on Narada Records. Though there are nine songs on the CD, I'm only on five doing synth arrangements on Tony's new songs. Many different musicians appear on the album, but the interesting thing for my own personal history is that Tony, Jerry Marotta and I worked together on more than half of the tracks. This was the first time the core of the "classic" Peter Gabriel band has worked together since some sessions we did for another artist, Pamela Golden, in 1986. (We haven't all worked together with Peter since 1983).
Tony has a lot of background about the project up on his site including photos during the recording. Visit Tony's web site at www.tonylevin.com for general information, or visit papabear.com/passionatebass.htm for pictures and Tony's diary of the recording.
The way the album was recorded was interesting, too. It was done entirely on computer hard disk--no tape rolled during the record--using Macintosh-based Emagic Logic Audio (Tony's recording in Woodstock, NY) and Mark of the Unicorn Digital Performer (at the Synergy Studio in New Jersey). I spent a few days in the studio in Woodstock with Tony, his co-producer Artie Traum, and guitarist David Torn planning the tracks. Then I took clones of the multitracks from their Mac back home on CD-R, loaded the tracks into my computer and worked on the arrangements. Tony had another project to complete in California so every day or two I made MP3 reference mixes and emailed them to him. Tony could listen on his Powerbook and email his comments back to me. When all was okay, I made submixes of my parts to CD-R and sent them up to Woodstock to be conformed to the master. If we had higher bandwidth available at both ends we probably would have used the internet for that last stage too. Next time...
