“It’s like you’re having a baby”

“It’s like you’re having a baby”, said Bullet on my anxiety over the mix we did last night.

Me, Fendi and him spent the Friday night and the whole of Saturday morning mixing the new recordings at our recently departed friend’s studio; a small room at the side of the AVXS office on Robson Heights.

Usually used for vocal recording/dubbing and video editing, it’s adequate for simple mixing sessions but too small to fit in a drum set to do a proper live recording. However, the room’s properly sound-proofed and features a decent pair of monitoring speakers and a small powered-mixer.

It’s a bit strange to be there without Jalil. But his legacy is all over the place. The left-handed Epiphone guitar he used to strum is still there, his reading glasses, his treasured Sony 3CCD video cam and banks of DV tapes and I bet there are his songs in the hard disk on that PC he always used.

Funny how we ended there only after he died. Jalil had been telling us to use the studio for whatever projects we have in mind and it never happened. If he was there, I would get him on one or two tracks, letting him loose with some crackling bluesy solos. The man’s a very good guitarist, but I guess he never really recorded anything proper.

Anyway, Bullet mixed eight songs from about 11 PM till 9 AM. We left Aku Mau Anjing Mu aside as we still need to get Yandsen’s saxophone in there, but the others had the their tracks tweaked as far as we can go without losing the rawness.

The neighbourhood is sparse and quiet, there are only five houses on the street, and we blasted the sound every so often with the door opened, but there was no complaint. And I managed to catch some sleep on the couch there but both Fendi and Bullet didn’t sleep a wink.

When I got back home at about 11 AM, I crashed on the couch. When I woke up, I put the mix on and listened. And listened again. I got into a bit of panic. I thought the mix is too smooth; all the raw edges cut down.

So I called up Bullet and that what he said. “It’s like you’re having a baby”

Yes, we are.