I recorded an evening of poetry and musical performances in front of a live audience at the Holy Trinity Church in Leamington back in 2007.
I had been asked to record the event by the poet Julie Boden (Poet in Residence at Birmingham Symphony Hall) – we subsequently went on to record several other spoken word and poetry events together and she also recorded her collection of poems “Cut on the Bias” in my studio.
I recently discovered that Julie had posted one of the poems “Wasted Lives” from the Holy Trinity recording session on YouTube (see below)
The evening was an interesting one with Julie performing several of her poems with accompanying contributions from a range of musicians including at different times 2 harpists, a flautist, saxophones and clarinets plus the church’s own pipe organ (also heard in this recording).
It was a challenge to record this interesting ensemble of instrumentalists while also providing a feed to the church’s PA system for the voice mic that Julie was using. All the performers were set up on a platform in front of the altar and I had spot mics for each player.
In the video there are two tracks taken from the CD I produced – “Musical Interlude” and then “Wasted Lives” and they were the concluding section of the second half of the performance.
For the musical piece the clarinet player, Dutch Lewis, was playing whilst walking up the aisle of the church – Julie and I had discussed whether a roving mic should follow him for the recording but in the end I used the sound from a spaced pair of behringer mics I had set up to get the ambient sound of the church and performers. I had a spot mic for the organ and used a mixture of the sound from that with the sound from the spaced pair.
Julie was recorded using an Audio Technica AT4033 into a mic splitter so that the signal for the recording also fed the PA. The recording was originally released as a limited edition CD.
A further run of additional CDs were produced from new masters in 2013.
You can find out more about Julie Boden and her poetry on her website julieboden.co.uk
Chris Radley – dVoiceBox
Tags: Julie Boden poet, poetry and music live recording, spoken word performance CD, spoken word recording