Don't do this at Home

The background for this chapter is the live recording of Nils Petter Molvær’s collaboration with the National Broadcasting Orchestra (KORK) in Store Studio in the spring of 2019. According to all the involved parties, the process and the concert went really well. However, in hindsight, perhaps with one exception: the orchestra was only close miked. Considering that the orchestra was recorded together with Molvær’s band, this was a logical choice. In situations like this, one has to compromise. At the same time, close miking inevitably leads to close sound. For mixer and producer Jan Bang, this fostered the idea to re-amplify the whole orchestra in Kilden Concert House in Kristiansand. Rather than bringing in the orchestra, they brought in the ProTools-project, 64 speakers, and rigged the concert hall for a regular orchestra recording with Decca-tree, room microphones and microphones on different instrument groups. For Molvær, there was also a musical motivation for re-amping the orchestra parts of the recording: Creating a distance to the whole of the orchestra for musical purposes allowed him to “use” the whole orchestra, the dissonant chords, the sonic space from the concert hall, as more ambient textures in the recording. In this chapter, we will present our observations from the recording process, alongside outtakes from interviews with Molvær, Bang, and some of the other technicians involved in the process, and discuss this in relation to the role of the orchestra in the finished recording.