Austro-German Revivals: (Re)constructing Acoustic Recordings

This album was recorded during the final year of Inja Stanović’s Leverhulme-funded research project (Re)constructing Early Recordings: a guide for historically-informed performance. As the title suggests, this project focused upon the technologies used to produce early recordings and, more specifically, the ways in which those recordings reveal performance practices of the past. The project was highly practical: a series of performing musicians were invited to produce brand new recordings, albeit using early recording technologies, period instruments, and historically-informed performance practices. The aim was to reconstruct and study the circumstances in which historic recordings were originally produced, in order that we might better understand what they reliably preserve of past performing musicians that are, nowadays, a rich source of inspiration for musicians of the present.

This is a rather unusual research project in which we made a series of recordings using wax discs (modelled on what recording artists did around 1910 - 1920). My part in the research project was as recording engineer and audio post-production specialist. The album (as per all recorded albums throughout history) has the musicians/performers as central figures, but as a research document (which this very much is) my role was crucial in terms of finding an appropriate context and method in which these recordings could be presented to a public audience.

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