After a long, cold, idle winter, the remnants of what once was the Broken Mixer Sessions had decided to reunite. On March 7 Fredrik Gisselsson and Josef Bergmark of CloudStudy teamed up with their old affiliates Jonas Edenbrandt and Frans Karlsson for a jam at Josef’s place. There had been a slight change of instruments. Fredrik and Josef had switched their strings for a MicroKorg and a Sp-303, while Jonas had brought abandoned his bass for an Edirol midiclav, which he used with Reason 4 on Josef’s laptop. Frans used reason 3 on his computer and his NordLead as a midiclav. The idea was to irate a moody, sedative tune using glass and piano samples which Josef had recorder earlier, pad sounds played by Fredrik, warped glass, synth and Lee Perry samples and Meters-drums from Frans’ laptop and a range of ambient synth sounds created by Jonas.
Setting up the instruments was an easy job, as was structuring the song. Recording was done in two takes, as they felt satisfied with the second and Fredrik had to go to work. The hard part occurred when Fredrik had left the building. They had used a Sansui porta studio dating from the late 80’s which made it easy to record and mix the channels. As soon as they felt the volume, EQ and panning pleasing they decided to digitalize the music. This turned out to be one of the greatest nightmares ever, as the signal in kept distorting and clipping no matter which computer or audio recording program we used. They had about lost all hope to multiply the track from the tape (the song had been down-pitched which meant could not be listened to in anything but the porta itself) when Frans finally managed to decrease the line in volume, and thus record the song onto his computer.
They named the song “Light bulb”, aiming at giving more attention to a great invention.
On their way back to Lund, Frans and Jonas experienced the bus sudden
ly colliding with something. When the driver stepped on the gas pedal, the bus wouldn’t exceed 10 km/h and oh, the bus was also rapidly filled with smoke which smelt of burnt rubber. Panic broke out among the passengers, and after a while the lot stood outside on the sidewalk. As the driver tried to bandage the scrubs of the bus, a rumor was spread among the passengers. Apparently, the bus had collided with a Badger!!! Bear in mind that most of the passengers were drunk people who were going home after a fancy club evening in the metropolis of Malmö.
Now the song floats around cyber space (http://www.myspace.com/brokenmixersessions) and if I’m not mistaken, it has been played circa 41 times. It seems the Mixer Sessions need to find more friends to post bulletins
to. How else will our music (attempting to release itself from the commercial rubbish that attacks us every day) reach new people? I guess our music has a purpose. It might be to multiply. Hope y’all enjoy it!
