Head Light - the inside story

Trance Mission “Head Light” [City of Tribes 1996]
The 3rd TM CD. By this time we were not performing so regularly, mainly because Kenneth Newby had relocated back to Canada and we were stretched over both time and distance. Like the Meanwhile model Trance Mission, we spent a week or so intensively bringing ideas to the rehearsal room [in late November ‘95] and built a series of sometimes vague, sometimes specific maps for pieces.

By now John had his home studio set up so we could all play and be monitored on headphones. This revolutionized our composing/listening habits and I think it made our sense of texture within the music and the creative process that much more acute. Once again in the studio we layered rhythm tracks with John, Kenneth and I sharing the multiple percussion parts. On Head Light Kenneth’s suling [Indonesian bamboo flute] playing really came to the fore. Both Beth and I played less of our primary instruments.

The clarinet and didj parts were more sparing over the whole CD. I played almost as much Cello Sintir as the didjeridu. We got more into the digital atmospheres. John found an outrageous snippet of Ethiopian chanting on a b-movie soundtrack and we built a whole arrangement around it. Beth put her alto clarinet through the wringer on the title track. On In Frog Pyjamas we cobbled together a series of different ideas from all sides into a wonderful Indonesian/S.Asian Polyphonic Reggae Stew with a Quasi Tribal Congo trumpet beginning played on multiple didj toots. We tracked once again at Mobius, but moved to mix at Coast Studios, where, in that particular piece, we ran mikes recording the street noise of downtown SF live into each mix we cut.

Eda Maxym, singer of Beasts of Paradise, had always been around the TM creative push, already featuring on the first 2 CD's, especially on Meanwhile where her input was significant. Here we included an all out vocal piece, Worksong where she took the lead. This was built on a cello-sintir riff I remember coming up with while we were working on the mixes for the 2nd Beasts CD, Gathered on the Edge. It is in 7 - like Monkfish, which had a truly Gnawa spirit to its inspiration and opens the CD brilliantly!

Some pieces – eg Alpha Swim and The Sun Cries Part 2, were a study in minimalism around Kenneth’s shimmering atmospheric treatments of acoustic sound sources on the computer. Head Light was a very satisfying project, in its way as potent as Meanwhile, but with an entirely new outlook and sophistication. I am only sorry that for that particular group of musicians it was our swansong. John and Kenneth moved on to other projects within a year of Head Light’s release. C’est la vie!