Chinese Crisis: Recording Hanggai's Folk Music

Deprived of their budget at a stroke, the two Englishmen had to radically revise their recording plans: what had been planned as demo recordings became album sessions proper, and with any notion of hiring a studio eradicated, there was no choice but to record at Robin's Beijing apartment. "I took out a guitar, a G3 Mac laptop, an M-Box and a pair of SE1 mics, and I had a Rode NT2 in my luggage. Rob had his laptop and a budget large-diaphragm SE mic. So basically we had two budget large-diaphragms and two small-diaphragm mics, which we were going to do sketches with."

In musical terms, then, the problem was how to retain Hanggai's distinctive sound, yet give the album enough diversity and structure to appeal to Western audiences. This, at least, was something the band were open to. "All the guys in the band are young, probably younger than us, half of them started out playing in punk or rock bands and they've come to this sort of music later on," explains Rob. "So it's not like we were going to some village in the middle of nowhere and doing fieldwork recording proper folk musicians. They think about it like a rock band playing these songs. The songs are original, but there was always flexibility in the arrangements. Beijing is in northern China, and the grasslands are just outside Beijing, and within the Chinese psyche, that's the wild west, where the cowboys and horsemen are; it's dangerous and exotic. And that whole culture plays a big part in the Chinese psyche, so what we wanted to do was make an album based in the city, thinking about the grasslands — imagining this culture and these songs, from the city."

Any thoughts of tracking the band live were erased by the need to rely on Robin and Matteo's 'sketchpad' equipment, which limited them to recording two sources at any one time. "It was a very strange way to do things," admits the latter, "with guys who had never multitracked, who weren't used to playing by themselves. So that was the first thing: how do we exert a certain amount of control over the project, but at the same time allow them to express themselves musically and rhythmically in a way that was important to the style?"

In most cases, addressing this question meant creating a click track or tempo map in Cubase ("Most of the songs increase tempo naturally, that's part of their vibe," explains Matteo) before recording Hanggai's two principal instrumentalists, banjo player and bandleader Ilchi and fiddle player Hugejiltu. "They're not used to tracking, but they play all the time so they're very good live," says Rob. "We put both of them together playing against the click. Often they didn't like that, because their music goes in and out of tempos."

"When we single-tracked them, they were drifting in and out of the click, sometimes quite wildly," adds Matteo. "We wouldn't play that to the other guy, because we wouldn't want that to influence his timing, so he would play individually to the click. I thought they were just drifting in and out of click and they couldn't slave to it, but when we took the click off, they'd both be completely out of time with the click, but perfectly in time with each other. Unbelievable. And we realised that these things have a natural rhythm all of their own."

"We'd have a large-diaphragm for the body of the sound and a pencil picking up the 'atmosphere' of the bow against the string," agrees Robin.

"One thing that surprised us is additive things in the texture," adds Matteo. "In the very first bars of the whole album there's a string line that kind of sounds orchestral. All it was was the martotune, which is the horsehair fiddle, on one side, and the surhu, a bowed metallic instrument. They weren't separated completely, so they kind of blended together, and that blend sounds like a new instrument, or a string section. It sounds almost like it's been effected in some way."

In their bid to broaden the musical palette of the album, Robin and Matteo incorporated Western elements such as electric guitar, and also various percussion instruments — some Chinese, some more universal. "There's nothing inherent to the music except maybe hand percussion," explains Matteo. "When they play live they have the classic cowbell, but not as we know it — a real cowbell with the bell inside, and they shake it. They have simple things kind of like djembes. For the djembes, the best sound that we found was not to mic the skin, not to put two mics on, but actually to use one mic capturing the reflection off the floor at a 45-degree angle. For some reason, that seemed to be absolutely the most defined sound."

"We had one drum that I'd borrowed from a guy in Western China," adds Rob. "He'd had to trek for days into the mountains to find the one guy who still made these drums. We were going to use this on the album, but I put a big wooden beater through the skin."

"It was such a beautiful sound, and it goes all the way through the album, but I think we only hit it about three times before it packed up," laughs Matteo. "We had to go back to the recording and put it into Reason and trigger it for the rest of the album."

Fortunately, the time spent moving mics around and working on arrangements proved well worth while in the end. "It always winds me up when producers say 'I didn't do anything, I just miked it really well!' but that was certainly true with this. Last night, to refresh my memory, I went back to the mixes, and I couldn't find an EQ. The only thing I could find was a little bit of C4 multi-band on the vocals, really gentle. Normally I'd group instruments to send them to a group and then effect them, but here it was just for volume rides. We spent a lot of time bringing in instruments with the rides, while the vocals generally stayed at the same level.

"I would normally set up a reverb send, or maybe two or three reverbs, but for this, I used Waves RVerb on the bus for a lot of tracks, and that was it. The one reverb that I really love though is the Timeworks 4080L, which is a really old reverb, I think I got it in 2002 -- you wouldn't use it to recreate real acoustic spaces, but to give depth and construct lusicous soundscapes it's in a league of its own, so some of the stringed instruments went to that, but generally it was a reverb on the bus. Also, I did mix through a compressor most times, but the real star of the show was the [PSP] Vintage Warmer."