Odelion
Northern Lights
"All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind,
from inner stillness"... - Eckhart Tolle
Margriet Sjoerdsma - vocals & guitar
Jeroen van Vliet - piano & effects
Vera van der Bie - violin & effects & vocals
Isabella Petersen - violin & effects & vocals
Annie Tangberg - cello & effects & vocals
Louk Boudesteijn - trombone & vocals
Pablo Martinez - bass trombone & vocals
Romain Bly - french horn & percussion & vocals
Total time: 62:31
"You don’t want to miss a single note from this fairytalish musical paradise called ODELION.
ODELION is a new Dutch pearl that needs to be discovered!"— OOR Magazine
Read more: Northern Lights - Odelion
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"When I got to the end of the road the Silence began. I had driven 2340 km from Amsterdam to
reach my destination; a small log cabin at the North Cape of Norway.
I needed to get away from everything. I had finished a very busy period of touring with
'A Tribute to Eva Cassidy' and my 10 year relationship had come to an end.
I decided to spend 3 months in solitude, just me, a bunch of books and my mother's old guitar.
I had no goal except for being alone and if possible, let time stop.
I took long walks and did a lot of crying but after a while the chaos in my head got replaced by
a pristine calmness and out of that calmness the songs started to appear.
'Forgiveness' came first. 'I can't heal the heart that longs to stay broken' being the essential
sentence of the lyrics. The song became a mirror, I was forgiving myself.
Now each long walk became the start of a song. It was as if the chaos that was in my head at the
beginning of the journey had sorted itself into labeled little boxes, and each box when being opened
would blossom into a song. The North Cape changed me. I stopped analyzing every aspect of my life
and learned to "be happy anyway" even in times of adversity."
Odelion
We love when we are able to record musicians playing together without headphones. When not 'separated' by headphones musicians interact much more as they would do in a concert situation,
creating their own musical balance which makes the need for compression to control levels unnecessary and since everybody is in the same room, the boxed sound which is so common in many modern recordings is absent. Instead the beautiful sound of studio 2 helps 'glue' the sound of the recording. When creating the sound stage, we spent a great amount of time getting the balance of the little orchestra as optimal as possible using the ambient microphone stereo pair placed in the 'sweet spot' in studio 2, before adding the spot microphones.
We have created a sound field that is intimate but also with enough depth to have a visual representation of the instruments.
The idea is to let the melodic part of each instrument stand out yet never overshadow the whole. The benefit of this approach is that you can visualize the ensemble in front of you; trombones and French horn left, voice in the middle with the piano placed slightly further to the back and the strings to the right.
This is NOT the commercial radio friendly approach, with the instruments piled on top of each other straight down the middle.
In a sense we are old fashioned, maybe we listened to too many old jazz recordings, but on the other hand as the great Louis Armstrong said; "The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the backyard on a hot night or something said long ago".
Frans de Rond & Peter Bjørnild
Recording and mastering by Frans de Rond
Mixing by Frans de Rond, Margriet Sjoerdsma, Vera van der Bie and Louk Boudesteijn
Produced by Peter Bjørnild
Recorded at MCO, Studio 2, Hilversum, The Netherlands, on March 24-25th, 2018
Piano tuning by Naomi van Schoot
Catalog Number: SL-1042A
Original recording format DXD 352,8 kHz
All other formats are converted versions of the original.
Used equipment:
Micpre's: Merging Horus
Microphone cables by AudioQuest
Speakers: TAD Compact Evolution One
Poweramp: Moon 760A
Mixing headphones: Sennheiser HD800S / AKG 702
All power cables and power conditioners by AudioQuest
Video by Yani
Other vocalist at Sound Liaison:
