Of Cole Avenue which appeared on 1969: The Velvet Underground Live rather than the faster rendition, missing the bridge, featured on 1970’s Loaded).
Since its initial release, Cowboy Junkies’ ‘Sweet Jane’ has gone on to appear on numerous film soundtracks, including Natural Born Killers, The Good Girl and Flight. For his part, Peter J Moore is in no doubt as to why their version of the classic song has stood the test of time.
“It’s Margo’s delivery,” he says. “It’s just so haunting. It’s the lonely girl in Alabama on the porch on a hot night and she’s just slowly getting the words out of her mouth.”
Microphone Experiments
The unusual circumstances surrounding the recording of The Trinity Session can be traced back to Peter J Moore’s days as a DJ specialising in punk and new wave on the CHRW‐FM station of the University of Western Ontario in 1976. “Radio shows had to be around 40 percent Canadian content,” he recalls. “It was a great idea, and if it hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t have had a Canadian music industry. There was very little punk music being recorded or commercially available, especially the Canadian stuff. So as a matter of necessity, I started recording. Not because I was wanting to be a recording engineer so much as I wanted to fill my 40 percent slot so that I could then play all the British imports.”
At the time, Moore was at the university doing his masters degree in anthropology, which also involved him doing some recording. “I was doing a lot of Nagra and mic recordings of indigenous music,” he says. “I was a crazy audiophile though. I built my own Dynaco amps when I was like 12, 13 years old. I was really very much into electronics. I built my own speakers when I was 14.”
To fill his Canadian quota of punk bands, Moore began going to clubs
and recording live performances using a Kunstkopf dummy head microphone. “Sennheiser made one, the MKE 2002,” he remembers. “It came with a mannequin which had defined ears, or you could take the mics off and wear them yourself. So for a lot of live shows, I would wear them myself and walk around until I found the best‐sounding place in the room and stand there and record. But then later I would gaffer tape a tripod with the dummy head onto a pub table, and that way I could dive in the crowd and keep dancing.”
Quickly, Moore’s radio show, which he presented under the name Simon Less, gained a reputation for his recordings which aurally airlifted listeners directly into the middle of the Canadian punk scene. “‘Cause it was binaural recording,” he says, “we’d tell them, ‘Put your headphones on at home’. That was the most invigorating thing for them. ‘Cause you felt like you were right in the mosh pit.”
From here, Moore began his own punk label, Silent Head, recording bands in a rehearsal space he’d set up in his house. By this point he had moved on from the Kunstkopf to a pair of Fostex ribbon mics. “I was using them as a Blumlein pair, so that’s two figure‐of‐eights at 90 degrees, one over the top of each other, producing a clover‐leaf pattern,” he explains. “I built my own mic preamps designed exactly for the ribbon mics. So I was using the Valley People module and Jensen transformers and I had all handpicked military resistors. Really esoteric, crazy stuff. It sounded amazing. I built my own plexiglass rigging, so it would be easily mounted and I could get the mics in close.”
Further encouraged by the results, Moore founded his company MDI Productions and began to record other forms of music, including classical and jazz, before beginning to work for ADCOM Electronics in Toronto designing studio spaces, giving him a deeper knowledge of acoustics. “I realised that no matter how much money you spend on your bloody sound system, if you’ve got a shitty‐sounding room, you’re not gonna get anywhere,” he laughs. “So I started learning about how to make bass traps and how to properly contour the sound of a room.”
For the punk club recordings, due to its portability, Moore had used a TEAC PC10 cassette recorder. “It was one of the very first attempts at a professional cassette deck recorder, with balanced XLR ins,” he says. “Then I had a Revox B77, later on a PR99, which I used for my more serious recordings.”
The Blumlein Group
It was in 1985 at a dinner party thrown by Greg Keelor, guitarist/
singer of Canadian country rock band Blue Rodeo, that Moore found himself sitting across the table from Michael Timmins and Alan Anton of Cowboy Junkies. “We were talking about digital recording,” he recalls.
“They’d just got back from England and they’d heard about someone using Sony Betamax digital recording. I said, ‘Well I’ve just started doing digital recording with my Blumlein setup.’ They were quite interested in whatI was doing."
At this point, Moore had developed
his Blumlein recordings to factor in musicians sitting behind the microphones, meaning he could now include larger groups of players and position them across the stereo spectrum. “When you have
a Blumlein setup,” he says, “in the front of the microphone, along the lateral line, you have our universe. Then behind the mic, you have a parallel universe. So you can put things around the clover leaf and space them away from the microphone in such a way as they all appear as coming in stereo in front of you.
“I couldn’t put everyone on top of each other to get close to the mic. So I came up with the idea of spacing everything in the clover leaf properly so it could create this beautiful stereo image, but then I could bring everything closer to the mic.”
In exploring this technique, Moore
was in effect live mixing the musicians, employing the same kind of floor ‘marks’ that are used for actors in stage and film. “So the mandolin player, that’s his verse position,” he says. “One foot closer is his chorus position, and another foot or 18 inches in would be his solo position. I’ve got faders on top of their heads [laughs]. People said, ‘What summing amplifiers do you like?’ I’d go, ‘Air.’”
October 2015 / www.soundonsound.com