Recording Wild Animus
For a long time, Rich couldn’t imagine how he was going to record Wild Animus himself, much less get the contributions of additional musicians for the entire two-and-a-half hour experience:
“I’m not a performer. I didn’t have a band. I didn’t have a collection of musicians who knew my stuff and could walk into a studio and nail the pieces in a few takes. The free-form compositions were complex, and nothing was written down in a form that anyone other than myself would understand. Plus, the only parts I’d written were my own. I could imagine other sounds, other instruments. But I couldn’t figure out how to create them or integrate them with what I’d done. Digital editing technology evolved in the nick of time. And I’d spent all these years with computers, so I could understand the stuff. I remember being in Boston in the early 90s, hearing about Pro Tools and thinking, ‘this could make it possible.’”
The biggest challenge was to get a group of musicians to contribute to Rich’s free-form pieces—without sheet music or written arrangements. The loop recording function played an important role.
“The trick was to isolate each musical passage so that the musician could navigate it in an improvisational fashion. He could hear it over and over again, and immerse himself. You could repeat that for the next musician, do it for a whole piece, and then puzzle everything together. All of the musical contributions to Wild Animus were tracked one instrument at a time, and almost all of them were tracked against my solo recordings.”
As for the musicians: “I looked for people who had musical sensibilities that seemed to connect them to Wild Animus. Most were people whose music I loved, apart from my project. On their side, they had to get comfortable doing something that was unusual, supporting someone who had no history or reputation in the music world. I love the idea that people from so many different backgrounds were involved.” Over the course of the project, artists like Jim Campilongo, Jim Keltner, Hutch Hutchinson, Charles Bissell, Marc Ribot, Iva Bittová, and many others—over 30 in all—added their statements to Wild Animus.
“The trick was to isolate each musical passage so that the musician could navigate it in an improvisational fashion. He could hear it over and over again, and immerse himself.”
