Welcome to Workbench Recordings, an online record label / multimedia project specializing in experimental folk, rock, song, improvisation and composition. Every Tuesday morning at 7 a.m. (New York), we put up a post (the page that you're on is the first of these) featuring a single track by myself or another artist. Each of these posts contain cover art for the track, a text, and buttons for playing the track, downloading it, or buying a CD-quality version in FLAC format. This first post focuses on "At the Foothills", the first track from the album Astral Law.
The album was finished before I had any ideas about the Workbench Recordings website. It was going to be a small-run CDR, with a card sleeve, like my previous two albums. But when it came time to design the packaging and put the mastering and manufacturing in motion, I found myself feeling lukewarm at the idea of another small run release, with its limited reach and brief circuit under the spotlight.
The idea for the website took shape over the course of a week or so, with help from writer/editor Jim Hanas. The initial idea of putting the album Astral Law online grew into something bigger. Not only would the album get posted, but a whole framework could be built so that singles could regularly be added, building up an online catalog of albums, singles, texts and artwork.
Astral Law is going to appear serially, but not consecutively, since we'll be featuring other artists' work on Workbench Recordings as well.
"At the Foothills" was recorded on April 20, 2009. It started out as one of a series of tunes I was composing early in the year called "Easy Pieces". The series title was an unfortunate conceit, since it turned out that some of them weren't in fact so easy to play. Two "Easy Pieces" made it onto Astral Law in their solo guitar arrangements, but "At the Foothills" only came together when I broke it into two guitar parts instead of one, and put it on steel-string rather than Spanish guitar.
The recording was painless; dismantling the unsuccessful arrangement made it possible to relax and play with new options. Improvising, I changed the piece during the first few takes, dropping the intro section, and adding what became the second half (at 1:20 on the recording). It became a different, better piece. Sometimes it works out that way. And when it does, it's a good day.
Have a look around the site. The About page in particular has a lot more information about what we do. Next week's post features track two from Astral Law. See you then.
-- James Beaudreau
