New Mark de Clive-Lowe Album

On his blog, Mark de Clive-Lowe is talking about a new album project with Dutch trumpeter Rob van den Wouw. Mark, who's spending his last days in Europe before moving to his new home Los Angeles, has spent 20 days on the beautiful Dutch countryside to record in a perfectly equipped studio.

Here's an excerpt from the original post:

I’m on the final couple of days mixing down the new album I’ve produced for dutch trumpeter Rob van den Wouw. All done it’s been 20 days from inception to completion and we’re all really excited by the results 🙂 it’s an album of jazz, funk, soul and twisted beats in the mashi fashion. ha.. Rob was at the Numoon Festival I played almost two years ago in Rotterdam. I was there with Bembe and the Numoon Collective band doing an improv set. Rob liked what he heard so he hit me up to do a gig fusing the mpc and synths with his big band (heads up… Jan 9 2009 in Rotterdam!), and by the way “I’d love to get you to work on my next album”. Everything fell into place from there…

We started with two days pre-production out at Bullet Sound Studios near Amsterdam. What a sick sick studio - 30 min out of the city in the countryside, with everything you could want or need. Walking in we were greeted with pictures of some people who'd recorded there - Lenny Kravitz, Prince working on the Studio One desk and at the grand piano… the place felt good straight away. Starting off in Studio Two with a great sounding SSL E series desk, Rob played me some simple demo sketches and I’d reinterpret them on the mpc and radias synth. Some of the tunes were pre-produced just on those two machines, some of them with logic running as well. After the two days we had 12 tracks pre-produced and ready to go. The next two day session was recording the band along with the pre-production tracks. Rob brought in his band – keys, guitar, bass and drums – and I had them playing to the pre-production tracks with little sense of arrangement, just the dynamic changes I’d direct during the sessions “play the next 16 bars more open”, stuff like that. The band found the process a bit vague at first – I know what I want to hear from them, while they don’t have a clue about the finished track I’m hearing in my head. It made for some fun exploration and some magic moments coming out of the blue. We added one track at that session where the band played a jazz flip on an ambient interlude… it’s one of many highlights for me.

Those sessions followed with a week of intense editing and arrangement, going through all the live session tracks, editing parts, getting to the core of each tune and building the arrangements around that. That 8 days I worked about hours grabbing a few hours sleep in the hotel when morning hit each day. It was a trip!

Well, sounds like it's busy times from MdCL, can't wait to keep you updated on the things happening! You should already know, that the Freesoul Sessions London Finale is taking place at Cargo early November.