The story behind Epic Listening
24/09/2007 12:28:08 By Jupiter Muke
The Epic Listening EP stemmed from a fascination with film music. Ennio Moricone, John Williams, Roy Budd, Quincy Jones, John Barry are a few of my favourites. Having written the tunes, I started performing them with my band on what is essentially the London Jazz circuit. Clubs, pubs and festivals - this was in the first half of 2006. However, the music needed more development - it needed to sound much bigger, more dramatic and less like a jazz-funk band. So, I felt the thing to do was to record the material and then develop it in the studio and add some real epic flavour.
So in June 2006 we travelled to Sweden to a beautiful studio called Rommarö, nestled 10 miles down a dirt track at the foot of an archipealgo in the middle of a dense forest. There were 6 of us; Barnaby Dickinson (trombone), Ben Castle (sax/flute), Phil Peskett (piano/keys), Richard Pryce (bass), Davide De Rose (drums) and myself (trumpet/cornet/horn/producer).
We arrived late on a Sunday evening and were met at the airport by Hans Frederikkson the studio owner and engineer (he's the son of Freda from ABBA btw!) We followed him in our hire car from Stockhom airport south toward the Trosa Archipealago. As we turned off the main road onto the dirt track everyone was stunned at the beauty and remoteness of where we were (except Barnaby who was concerned he had no mobile phone reception). The full moon was huge and low and so bright that we didn't really need headlights. Wow this felt remote. Welcome to Sweden!
After a quiet night's sleep in our individual Swedish style huts scattered around the seashore, we got straight into the recordings. We had a lot to cover in 4 days. In all we got 11 tracks down. These included the 4 tracks on this EP, plus another 4 originals, a cover of Roy Budd's "Getting Nowhere In A Hurry" from Get Carter, an Epic three part arrangement of music from the Bond movie "Live and Let Die" and a cover of the theme from the movie "A Constant Gardener". And if that wasn't enough, we recorded nearly 2 hours worth of improvised late night jams, in complete darkness in the studio. By the end, we were all fucked but the job was done.
Since then, the sound of Epic Listening has evolved through a lot of studio time spent mixing and overdubbing. Vocals have been added to several tracks by Joanna Swan (of "Ilya" fame) and Tammy Payne, guitars have been added by Dan Brown and Stew Jackson of Robot Club, Bristol, Luis D'Agostino and Jerry Haglund, plus additional samples from various sources.
The work continues on the remaining tracks and plans for a revamped live show are underway (in my head)!
Thanks for reading - more soon.
John
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