Föhn: the string session, and the end of Blitz

I have had the first half of this in drafts since the album came out in April. I am posting it now because Kolja Brandt rang me on Monday morning, and I will come to that.

The session

"Föhn" has strings on four tracks. Kolja wanted a real section in a real room, and that meant a church in Giesing, about ten minutes on foot from where he grew up. He knew the organist. We had two days last October with twelve players, a 4-3-2-2-1 section, all people he knew from the conservatoire.

The room has a reverb time of about four and a half seconds in the mids, measured by bursting a balloon at 8.30am. It suits strings and is hopeless for anything with a four-to-the-floor kick, so we recorded to a click in the headphones with no kick anywhere in the building. There was a spaced pair up in the organ loft, a stereo pair over the section and spot mics on the basses. Kolja's own microphones were on the room, and he placed them himself.

What went wrong

Two things.

First, the bell. A clock in the tower strikes every quarter hour, and the man with the key to switch it off was in Rosenheim. Every take therefore had a thirteen-minute window. One stroke remains on the record, at the tail of "Kaltfront", because it was the best take. If you hear it on a big system, that is what it is.

Second, the Föhn itself, which blew on the first afternoon. Half the section came back from lunch with a headache, and that is where "Kopfschmerz" got its title.

"I walked out of that school fifteen years ago, and I went back and paid them to come and play." Kolja Brandt

Blitz

Blitz in Munich finished this past weekend, 31 July to 3 August. It was in the old congress hall of the Deutsches Museum, and the operators said back in February that they would be leaving. The museum cites renovation. The operators say they were not offered a long-term extension and are looking for a new site.

I care about this for acoustic reasons. Blitz was a room inside a room. It was built out of shaped beech panels, tuned to the hall, with a four-point VOID rig with towers in the corners, plus ceiling tweeters they called the Blitz horn. Few clubs go to that length over what a kick drum does in a space. The label ran a Long Count there in December 2023 with Kolja and Frieda Lux, and I stood in the middle with a meter and, for once, put it away.

It was Kolja's home room. He was not on the bill for the last weekend and went on the Saturday as a punter. When he rang me on Monday he did not have much to say. He asked what the reverb time in there had been, and I told him I never got a clean reading, as it hardly had one. He said he had been standing by the left-hand tower for a long time and his ear had not come back yet. Then he went to bed.