15 febrúar 2012
Mandy Parnell Mastering Björk’s Biophilia
The mastering engineer’s role is changing as artists explore new formats. And as Björk and Mandy Parnell discovered, what works for the iPad might not work on CD...
Mandy Parnell.
Mastering is supposed to be the simple part of making records, right? You bring your stereo mixes along to someone with a fresh pair of ears, a nice monitoring system and a bunch of gold discs on the wall. He or she checks that there’s nothing wrong with your files, runs them through some specialist equipment you can’t afford in order to make them sound ‘finished’ and then generates production masters. Simple.
Simple, that is, unless you’re Björk, and your latest album is Biophilia, the ‘world’s first app album’, released in conjunction with Apple. All of Biophilia’s 10 tracks are being issued as apps for iOS devices in collaboration with Scott Snibbe, an interactive artist who combines his visuals with images from National Geographic and narration by David Attenborough. They explore a variety of music- and science‑based themes, forming a multimedia collection “encompassing music, apps, Internet, installations and live shows”.
Björk debuted songs from the album during a series of performances at the Manchester International Festival before it materialised in conventional music formats on CD, vinyl and MP3. By this time, a few months had elapsed since the music had originally been ‘finished’, and having performed the songs live, Björk decided there was more she could bring to the project. She asked long‑term collaborator Leila Arab to help with some sound sculpting, and Leila suggested she should consult mastering engineer Mandy Parnell.
“The idea of the original mixes for the apps,” explains Mandy, “is that when the song are played through the iPad speakers, you hear the mid and top end of the mixes, and when you plug your headphones in, this whole other dimension with all the sub‑bass comes through. The app album was deliberately mixed with this in mind, so when you listened to the original master, it was very prominent in the sub‑bass area and the top end, but slightly lacking in the upper bass and lower‑mid area. When Björk received her audio CD back from mastering without the visuals and the experience of hearing through headphones, she was not so convinced of the mastering for the CD. It really works amazingly for the apps, but she felt the album needed to be fuller. At the point where she had received the references for the CD, Björk had already performed a month’s residency in Manchester playing 10 incredible shows, so she had a completely different emotional and sonic connection with the album. The music had morphed into a different experience in the time that had passed, so after finishing the shows in Manchester she decided to go back into the studio with Leila Arab and rework the album.”