About A Reflection -

Why The Fuck Am I Doing This?

I ask myself all the time. Why do I make music? Or more often, since I think of myself more as an artist who works with sound than as a musician, why do I make art? And why has reworking existing pieces over and over been such a huge part of my process since the beginning? I believe it’s because I experience the act of producing music more like a painter experiences painting or a sculptor experiences sculpting. Outline an idea on the canvas, paint the canvas, paint over everything, start again. Something like that.
To be clear, songwriting is not what I am talking about. At least not the traditional notion of songwriting, which entails putting a melody and lyrics over a chord progression. I do write songs. I have written or co-written hundreds. And songwriting is an art form of it’s own. But what I am talking about is the act of arranging, producing, recording, and mixing the song. The song is the foundation. It’s the the essence that you can’t live without. Well, until you pull one of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategy cards and find yourself deleting that one thing you think you can’t live without and learn that you actually can live without just about anything. You always do. Because Brian Eno is an artist who works with sound too and he knows that there are no boundaries.
I’m talking about the fact that I have recorded and re-recorded and remixed the same song multiple times, sometimes with very different arrangements and production, in the same band, or even the same song in different bands. Are there more versions of “Sleep” by underwater, or “Drug Doctor” by Allegra Gellar, or “dim” by We Are Parasols? I think the answer is “dim” only because I’ve gotten more efficient at the replication process as I’ve gotten older and technology has improved. And here we are presenting you with yet another version of “dim”, this time as part of a new version of our album, Inertia. Except now the album is called, A Reflection (Inertia Redux).

Why?

We are currently working on three of these projects and each is being approached a little differently. First, A Reflection, which I am mostly focused on here, is the most drastic reimagining. But in the next year we will also be releasing a second project, No Center Line (Special Edition) and a third, Body Horror (Special Edition). We are essentially revisiting the majority of the We Are Parasols catalog, excluding our first album, Infrastructure, which was itself almost entirely made up of reworked versions of songs from our previous bands.
A Reflection is a severely edited version of Inertia. It’s as close to redoing the album as we think we would make it now without actually re-recording the album from scratch. We have edited ourselves and reduced the album to eight tracks instead of the original thirteen. We have also edited the instrumentation within the songs, mostly removing parts and sounds that we now view as unnecessary filler. A couple songs, including “dim’ have additional arrangements or new parts added. The new parts are for the most part changes we made over the years while playing the songs live that we have grown so attached to that we just can’t hear the songs without them now. All of the songs are re-amped, a process where I took the original tracks, recorded at 44.1kHz, sent them out of my audio interface, through outboard pre-amps, EQ, compression, effects, and transistors, and re-recorded the tracks at 96kHz. All the songs were then mixed and mastered at 96k.

Again, Why? Well, why redo the album? Or, why 96k?

We redid the album because, to put it plainly, we feel like we fucked up the first version. Inertia was the first album we did as the three-piece that has been the band since then - D, Alec and I. It was a super ambitious and probably somewhat bloated concept record. We were still using ProTools as our primary DAW, which is only important to mention because the other two band members, aside from myself, don’t know how to use ProTools. Everything after Inertia has been done in Reason, which everyone uses and we swap files back and forth, enabling us to be far more collaborative and creative than before. On Inertia, I was experimenting with unusual mixing techniques, trying to somehow use the overall sound to convey the sci-fi concept. The mixes were not good and lead to an unpleasant and frustrating mastering experience. Over the years since the album came out I’ve come to the conclusion that I made a series of bad creative decisions that didn’t serve the songs or the overall record.
For the new version we stuck to only the strongest songs. We also leaned away from the sci-fi concept and let the songs exist as individual pieces, some of which never had very much to do with the original android story line at all! I mixed the songs completely differently (and in Reason) and the mastering process was smooth.
The new version has a new title, A Reflection (Inertia Redux), because it is a reflection of and a reflection on the original album.

And now a word about 96k.

I don’t want to wade too deeply into this pool. There are people who think that recording and mixing at higher samples rates is pointless. I used to be one of those people. Humans cannot hear above 20kHz, which is within the frequency range covered by recording at a 44.1kHz sample rate. And, until about 18 months ago I didn’t have a computer that could handle mixing at 96k. So, I did everything at 44.1 and told myself it was fine. Most distributed audio will have the sample rate reduced to 44.1kHz anyway. (Bandcamp is a notable exception to this rule and allows for the download of full resolution 96k WAV or AIFF files.)
Last year I got a new computer and shortly afterwards Reason did an update that modified how it used multi-core processing. Suddenly I could load up a session that previously struggled to play at 44.1 and it would play smoothly at 96k. So, I did. And the difference was staggering to me.
There are a few things going on scientifically to explain the differences between recording and mixing at different sample rates but I’m not writing this to try to explain those technical details. That’s another essay and there are plenty of people, who are better at explaining it than I am, who have already done that. Google it. Ask ChatGPT. I’ll let you go down that rabbit hole. It’s a deep one. Good luck!
But, when I called Adam, our mastering engineer, in the midst of an existential crisis, having just completed mastering on the Body Horror album (recorded and mixed at 44.1kHz) a couple days before this new discovery, he told me two things. First, yes, it does sound different and the main reason isn’t any of the frequency math. It sounds different because almost every plugin on the market works better at 96k and I use a ton of plugins! That adds up to the staggering difference I was hearing. Secondly, he reminded me that while I, the recording and mix engineer, could hear a staggering difference that nobody else in the world, having only heard the 44.1 version, would ever know anything different, and that even my band members, being presented with a 44.1k mix and a 96k mix might not hear the difference. I am obsessive. So, Adam, very rightly, talked me down from remastering Body Horror. At least for that version!
Later, after more experiments, I realized that just bouncing the same file, originally mixed at 44.1, out at 96k, sounded different but it didn’t always sound better. It was different because the plugins reacted differently and audio relationships shifted. Mostly it fell into the better camp but to truly make a better sounding version of the album I would need to actually mix the album again entirely at 96k so that I could make small adjustments based on the new information and space I was hearing in the mixes. And upon that realization these three new projects were born!

I decided to do A Reflection (Inertia Redux) first. It was the oldest album, the one I wanted to change the most, and would require the most work. I did No Center Line (Special Edition) second. No Center Line isn’t edited or rearranged like A Reflection. Again, No Center Line was done start to finish in Reason, it was the first project we worked on that way and we are still very happy with it. But, in my opinion, the new 96k mixes are much better (clearer and more open), Adam’s mastering is superior to my original master, and we have included a bonus track, “Run For Defense”, which was not on the original EP. As I write this we are still working on Body Horror (Special Edition) which will include the Body Horror album, as well as the Orphaned EP and our stand-alone singles, “Feels Like I’ve Had Enough”, “1995”, and “Waste”, plus a new single, “Tell Me When It’s Over”. The complete Body Horror era. I wasn’t originally going to go all out for Body Horror but it looks like I’ve changed my mind and the entire project will include new 96k mixes and masters but no arrangement changes even though I have considered it!

But still, why?

For me, being an artist is a never ending process of learning, growing, and improving. It’s a life-long quest. I used to think all of this reworking was about trying to find the right or correct version or mix of a song. It was about being a perfectionist. But over the years it has been made clear to me that there is no right version, technically even the same version will sound different in every different listening environment and on every different listening system and to every individual’s very different set of ears. I am absolutely positive that as much as I think the version of “dim" on A Reflection is the best one so far that someone out there, maybe you, will wholeheartedly disagree and think the Inertia version is the best, or maybe the re:Mixtape version, or maybe the Product By Design version. But it doesn’t matter to me anymore. For me it’s now entirely about the process of making these pieces of art. Every new version we make brings me new knowledge. I am constantly learning, which always makes me feel like I’m a little better than I was yesterday and inspires me to see what I can do tomorrow. I also learn which songs are the ones that hold up to being examined over and over and which ones don’t and should maybe just be set aside.
Finally, I have recently had a realization about my younger self. I was one of those supposedly gifted kids. I don’t know if I believe it anymore. But I was told I could do anything that I wanted. And school was legitimately very easy for me. So easy that I was bored and distracted much of the time. I now think that I started making and playing and recording music because it was hard for me. Music and art in general has provided me a new challenge every day, unlike anything else. Of course, the self-doubting part of myself says I probably wasted my life doing music when I was better suited for any number of other professions. I probably could have been more successful doing something else. But I’m pretty sure I would have been bored. And believe it or not I am never bored making music, even when I’m recording and mixing the same song over and over just to see what the next version sounds like.

Jeremy Wilkins. November 2023.