Michael Brook Quotes

"When I arrived at Real World to record Srinivas's traditional record (Rama Sreerama, 1994), there were so many musicians around that I thought that it would be possible to squeeze another record out of it. So before we recorded Rama Sreerama I withdrew to Peter Gabriel's writing room, called The Shed (a stone's throw from the main studio building), and with a Roland S770 sampler, DX7 and Atari/Notator, worked out some bedtracks that Srinivas and other musicians could play to. One of them was Caroline Lavelle, whom I recorded during this period at The Shed, when she improvised to some of these grooves."
Michael Brook

"The Srinivas album involved two days of recording, a week of making an inventory of what we had, and a month of making it into a record."
Michael Brook

"With today's MIDI-plus-audio sequencers, the cost of moving vocals around or experimenting with different arrangements is lowered, and the result is that you're more likely to try that kind of thing. I find it silly sometimes when people say: 'well, you can do it this or that way', yet they never seem to acknowledge how much time it's going to take them to do it, and what price they'll have to pay when if it puts them in a different state of mind. The problem is that to do these kinds of edits you have to shift into a kind of 'computer operator' state of mind, thinking in a logical cause/effect mode, rather than asking 'what aesthetic effect is this having upon me?' This may detract from your ability to make good musical decisions."
Michael Brook