Experimental ambient acoustic music from the heart of Music City USA and the body and soul of one man. Aquariums takes the familiar aspects of music to an unfamiliar territory in this wildly dynamic album.

13 MP3 Songs
AVANT GARDE: Electro-Acoustic, POP: Psychedelic Pop

Show all album songs: Conceptual Realizations Songs


Details:
This album is a collection of songs written and recorded from January 2006 to July 2007. Some of them took over a full year to reach their final form contained herein. It was all recorded by me at the various houses and apartments I have occupied in the past year and a half. It started as one song written while reading the memoirs of a North Korean man who was put in a hard labor camp in North Korea from the age of nine to eighteen called The Aquariums of Pyongyang by Kang Chol-Hwan and translated by Pierre Rigoulot. Aquariums and Escape were both written about this book. Aquariums was written about his life prior to his familyâs imprisonment, and Escape is about his journey out of North Korea into China and eventually to South Korea. The rest of the songs were written to put down different emotions that I have had in the past year in musical form.
This is a very personal album and has taken a long time to come to fruition. Recording it alone gave me the opportunity to experiment and explore with instrumentation and sound without being pulled in a different direction by anotherâs influence. The songs were for the most part written in a similar fashion. None of them were complete before they were recorded. Many of the songs were allowed to grow through recording into something that is impossible to replicate alone. The lyrics were often the last part of the song to fall into place. They were often written separately and then adapted to fit the song. I wrote a lot of the lyrics for this album while either on the road or out of town. I find it very helpful to remove myself from Nashville in order to clear my head and actually get something done.
The recording setup used was a rather low budget hodgepodge of gear and programs, and also a very hot process as I had to turn off the AC while tracking to eliminate the noise. Everything was tracked to Cool Edit Pro 2 and then exported and mixed in Nuendo 2. For the first year an old Nady 16 channel mixer was used and the stereo signal out of that was fed directly into the line in on the soundcard. In May of 2007 the soundcard stopped functioning and would only spit out a distorted signal. After this an m-audio mobile pre 2 mic pre USB interface was used to finish up recording the project. Everything was recorded with this setup except for the drums on tracks 9 and 10. These were recorded at outside sources and the audio files were then imported into the sessions.
This album was recorded with a very small collection of microphones. All of the vocals were recorded with an Octava MK 012 and a pop filter. And most everything else was recorded with this mic and/or an SM 57. The only exceptions to this are the drums.
Since the soundcard was non functional and the mobile pre does not have enough power to adequately drive monitors, the entire album was mixed on headphones and then taken elsewhere for referencing. The whole mix philosophy used was not to make everything sound enormous, but to give everything its space and to try to make sure the different parts were audible and clear. âConceptual Realizationsâ was mixed in the box with Nuendo 2 and mastered with ProTools and various outboard gear.
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Martin Schneider: vocals, acoustic guitar, electric guitar,Fender Rhodes, melodica, synthesizers, bass, piano, vibraphone, Celeste, organ, and drums on track 9

Clark Simmons: drums on track 10 and percussion on track 8

Claire Adams: vocals on tracks 8 and 9

Written, Recorded, and Mixed by Martin Schneider at the various places he has lived from January 2006 to July 2007.

Mastered by Bart Morris

Art by Walter Schneider
All songs © 2007 Aquariums music