{"id":4557,"date":"2012-07-29T19:14:11","date_gmt":"2012-07-29T18:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/?p=4557"},"modified":"2012-07-29T19:14:11","modified_gmt":"2012-07-29T18:14:11","slug":"reblog-ensemble-epomeo-the-making-of-a-cd-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/2012\/07\/29\/reblog-ensemble-epomeo-the-making-of-a-cd-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Reblog- Ensemble Epomeo: The Making of a CD part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reblogged from Broken Thirds, the Epomeo blog<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hello everyone<\/p>\n

We thought it was about time we took a moment to update you on the artistic, rather than\u00a0financial progress<\/a>\u00a0of our CD project.<\/p>\n

Our recording of the trios of Hans G\u00e1l and Hans Kr\u00e0sa comes out in September, but our journey with the project is very much on the home straight- the disc goes to the factory this week.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to forget that a physical CD is more than just the music- its design also meant to please the eye, and the liner notes should help to illuminate the listening experience. We\u2019re very, very lucky to be releasing this disc on\u00a0Avie Records<\/a>, whose model of artist ownership gives musicians every opportunity to shape their message and to make the entire CD, from the notes we play to the liner notes we write, reflect what we\u2019re trying to put across about the music and ourselves.<\/p>\n

Not all musicians want to get involved in the minutiae of writing notes, and fewer still have the skill sets to actively participate in the design process, beyond suggesting pictures and giving designers a bit of feedback. Not so in Epomeo- our violist, David Yang, studied architecture and design in a previous life and was very keen to return to dust off his design chops for this project. Everyone in the group and at Avie thought that, because this is our CD debut, the cover needed to introduce us, but also needed to be appropriate for a recording of some music shaped by extremely serious historical events. Most of you will have seen David\u2019s striking design for the CD cover, but we thought some of you might be interested to see the covers we didn\u2019t use:<\/p>\n

I think we called this one \u201cFrench Connection\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I think we called this one \u201cRussian Mob\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I really liked this one:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And my personal favorite<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

However, there\u2019s more to designing a cover or a whole CD than coming up with a bitchin\u2019 picture and slapping some text on it. CD covers and booklets need to conform to fairly rigid templates, and be encoded in a way that will ensure the colours and proportions end up printed in the right way.\u00a0White Label Productions<\/a>\u00a0do the booklets and design for\u00a0most of the UK CD industr<\/a>y, including all the Avie recordings, and they\u2019ve worked closely and tirelessly with us in translating David\u2019s designs into something ready to go to the factory. It takes a great deal of patience, attention to detail and an awareness not only of what looks good, but of how people read and take in information.<\/p>\n

So, with our factory deadline approaching, we\u2019ve been working to not only get the designs right, but to get the entire booklet finished- notes, bios tracklists and acknowledgements. I (Ken- the cello player) wrote the liner notes back in February and early March, and they\u2019ve since been translated into French and German by White Label\u2019s crack foreign language team. Now that they\u2019ve been formatted into the booklet, I\u2019ve had time to forget what I\u2019ve written and read it with a fresh eye and ear, and, invariably I\u2019ve found a few things that could be improved, and caught one factual error that nobody else had noticed. Of course, there are bound to be typos in all three languages that need to be sniffed out. Nobody catches everything, and usually the author catches the least, so I\u2019m glad I\u2019ve had some great proofreaders to help. I\u2019m amused that I seem to have gotten away with using the expression \u201call hell breaks loose\u201d in one essay- it\u2019s not typical liner note language for a chamber music disc, but, in this case, all hell does break loose, so unless someone insists on a re-write before tomorrow, I think that will be in there. I\u2019m pleased.<\/p>\n

Communication on a project like this can be complicated. Everything needs to be checked and approved by the design team at White Label in London and the senior Avie team in Massachusetts, New York and Oxford. We\u2019ve also been busy sourcing photographs for the booklet from our own photographer, the amazing Benjamin Ealovega and historical images from the Hans G\u00e1l Society in Edinburgh, the Jewish Museum in Prague, the US Holocaust Museum and the Wiener Holocaust Memorial Museum in London, all of whom have been incredibly helpful in finding and licencing the images we need to tell the stories of these two composers.<\/p>\n

Then there are the three of us in the trio: Ken here in Cardiff, Caroline in Maine for several days and now back in Brooklyn and David, who was in a remote corner of Canada at a chamber music festival for much of the work this month on the booklet, and who is now hard at work in an even more remote corner of Italy. It hasn\u2019t been entirely smooth sailing on the technological front- we\u2019ve had issues with different versions of Acrobat Reader yielding some comically varied versions of the designs on different machines, the hard drive on my MacBook died a few days ago, and David has had to go to some extraordinary lengths to find a WiFi signal in Italy. Here are some of his reports:<\/p>\n

-Hi ken,I am sitting out in the middle of the street, if you can believe it, and piggybacking on some \u00a0unknowing soul\u2019s internet. I was desperate to send this stuff this morning. It really is the middle of nowhere here but strikingly beautiful.<\/p>\n

-Here I am in the street again. A stray dog and mangy cat are watching me. They are now my friends.<\/p>\n

-The mangy cat just walked away. Got bored, I suspect.<\/p>\n

It really is a glamorous life\u2026<\/p>\n

So, tomorrow morning, we\u2019ll have a final look at the proofs, and hopefully, we\u2019ll be done with everything but the music.<\/p>\n