Here: Chicago Sessions

We knew we had to do a session in Chicago for Braden King's film HERE.

Although the film was created half way around the world in Armenia, the origins of the movie belonged in Chicago. I remember my first conversation with Braden about the film in his tiny room in that giant loft in downtown Chicago off Michigan Ave, right across the street from the famed Chess Records recording studio. You could tell he loved maps by the way his walls were covered with them from floor to ceiling. Road maps, highway maps, ancient maps all marked up with pen scribbles, magic marker borders and little pins. HERE, the followup to his documentary film about an isolated fishing community in the Aleutian Islands was going to be road film about a cartographer mapping the lands somewhere between the Soviet Union to the north and the middle east to the south. I believed him.

Those were great days. We isolated ourselves in our little world up there on the 4th floor with our makeshift recording studio, makeshift editing suite and makeshift everything else. We called it The Truckstop. Thats where I met everybody, Jim Becker, Jim White, Tim Rutili, Fred Lonberg-Holm and all the other misfits that would come in and out of there doing what they do. There is a great picture out there somewhere with all of us huddled around the kitchen table with empty Chef Luciano containers and a pile of old Onion newspapers three feet high.

Eventually most of us went our separate ways. Braden and Jim head east to New York, Rutili headed west to Los Angeles and i ended up moving to the desert. As the greatest Beatle once said “All things must pass”.

Several years later Braden finally made his beautiful second movie. Armenia turned out to be the perfect backdrop for his “Antonioni-esque” road film. The original plan was that Braden would shoot the movie and head back to the states for editing and at some point we would start work on a score when the edit was far enough along. Eventually while filming HERE Braden realized that the Armenian ethos was such an important aspect of the film that it was of paramount importance we book some scoring sessions immediately after the shoot in Armenia. Within 48 hours of wrapping the shoot and with the help of my dear friend Shahzad Ismaily, we found ourselves in an old abandoned Soviet Recording studio in Yerevan, improvising to massive projections of rough footage from the shoot. That music we recorded in Armenia would eventually become the soundtrack for HERE.

As the edit for HERE began to coalesce, Braden thought we would be remiss not to convene in Chicago and record additional tracks. I agreed. Once again flights were booked and sometime in the fall of 2010 we scheduled two days at Electrical Audio in Chicago. The session included Jim Becker, Shahzad Ismaily, Fred Lonberg-holm, Tim Rutili, Jim White and myself. Greg Norman engineered. I preferred the B room with its big open space and high ceilings. I remember setting up in the room all together sans isolation in front of a screen, playing to edited scenes.

It was a quick session, two days. I had Greg running all the takes to two track so I could feed Braden different pieces. Eventually I was going to go through and properly edit and the tracks.

It became clear pretty early on that the Chicago tracks would most likely not work for the film. For as beautiful the Chicago pieces sounded, the Armenian sessions had worked their way into the fabric of he film in way that became inseparable from the images. Braden and I had the talk and the Chicago sessions were subsequently abandoned.

Rob Jones and I worked on a record a while back comprised of “unheard music” from a documentary film I worked on years ago. I remembered the Chicago session from HERE and dug up a few recordings and was pleased he was eager to get the music out into the world. I was excited and nervous to start sifting through the sessions since the music was recorded over five years ago and I hadn’t really listened to or thought much about the session since its recording. As I was making my way through the recordings I was struck by how much i forgot about that session and how much I enjoyed the music from those two days. I enjoyed the loose unedited nature of the recordings and decided that to edit and remix everything would likely rob the spirit of the music. I hope the listener can forgive the loose ends and occasional bum notes and enjoy the sounds from a tiny sliver of time in a microscopic corner somewhere just west of the Blue line in Chicago Illinois.

The Chicago Sessions.

- Michael Krassner, June 2016