Hello all. Happy to announce that the first Six Organs of Admittance record to be released on my own Hermit Hut label will be For Octavio Paz on vinyl. You can pre-order on bandcamp now. It will also be in store on July 5th and available/distributed through Revolver USA.
This record was originally released on Time-Lag Records in 2003 in edition of 500 and sold out at the label in 24 hours (Nemo and I were very surprised). It was later put out on CD but was never pressed on vinyl again after that initial run. I decided that if i was going to re-press it I might as well remix it and remaster it as well.
The term “remix” can mean a lot of things, but in this case it just means taking the original 4 track cassettes and mixing them again down to a digital file while trying to remain as faithful as possible to the original mix. One of the reasons to do this was that technology is just simply better now than it was in 2002 in terms of analog-to-digital. The original record was mixed directly from my 4track cassette to a DAT machine, which is 16-bit. With these new recordings, I did not go into a studio but kept the same home recorded vision while using newer equipment, mainly, my Universal Audio Duel Apollo, which afforded me a 24-bit transfer. Without getting too technical, what this means is that more of the analog sound is reproduced. I did not go in and clean up tape hiss or remove the sounds of the occasional car or siren or atmospheric noise. I just wanted to fully capture the sound that was on the original tape in a manner even more faithful that the original transfers. There was also some fixing of mistakes, such as transferring with the correct type of noise-reduction. Turns out some of the songs, like Elk River, where originally transferred with noise reduction on when they were not recorded with any noise reduction. This lead to weird warbling and phase issues, making a recording that was already playing with dangerous intonational factors on my guitar even more precarious. And we won’t even get into how I used to originally use a Holy Grain guitar pedal on a aux channel on the 4 track for reverb, which is cool sounds but totally annihilates any fullness of tone on the guitar.
The old version will always be available to download or stream on Spotify, etc. But now there is a version on vinyl that sounds warm and full, the way the original recordings were made.
Here’s a review from Pitchfork from 2004
