Trever Keith

Face to Face – Live / Trever Keith – Melancholics Anonymous vinyl reissues

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Two long-anticipated vinyl reissues (of records I worked on!) are now available from Antagonist Records.

The classic Face to Face album Live, originally released in 1998, has been repressed in a deluxe 20th anniversary double-LP edition, in three colors.  Visit the Antagonist Records site for details and ordering.

The live album was the first Face to Face record I worked on (following our anomalous remix collaboration for the Mortal Kombat: Annihilation soundtrack album), beginning a series of creative adventures with the band and its individual members that continues today (see Viva Death – Illuminate).

I mixed the tracks for Live, with Trever and Scott producing, at The Complex studios in West L.A.

For its 10th anniversary, Trever Keith’s 2008 solo album Melancholics Anonymous has been pressed on vinyl for the first time ever, in a limited orange vinyl edition with redesigned artwork.  Visit the Antagonist Records site for details and ordering.

Sonically and emotionally unrestrained, Melancholics Anonymous is considered by many Face to Face fans the successor to the band’s 1999 art rock masterpiece Ignorance is Bliss.  Trever’s distinctive melodic style and voice are in top form here, wrapped in rich layers of heavily effected guitars and drums, electric piano, vintage synths and drumboxes, and copious magnetic echo machines.

Trever and I co-produced the album, I did some drum programming, recorded in various studios in and around Los Angeles, and mixed at The Eye Socket.  Listen here:

Trever Keith – Melancholics Anonymous

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Melancholics Anonymous

The solo album Melancholics Anonymous by Trever Keith (best known for his band Face to Face) was first unveiled back in 2008 when we did a brief North American tour to support it, but the release was limited to a short run of hand-numbered CDs sold at the shows.

Earlier this year Trever re-released the album on CD and digital download, with a slightly different track listing (including the originally unreleased track “Another Diversion”), available directly through his Bandcamp site.

Trever and I put a lot of love and care into this record, and I think it’s pretty great. But I’ve never written about it on my site before, so this seemed like a good time. I’m especially proud of the tracks Incommunicado, Polish, Absolution, and Bleeding Out. Listen here:

Recording notes: This album was several years in the making, and comprises recordings made at Cello Studios in Hollywood, CA (drums, bass, guitars, recorded to Studer A-800 at 15ips) and Audio International in Ojai, CA (more drums), along with many other instruments performed and programmed at The Eye Socket and at Trever’s personal studio. Rustic keyboards feature prominently throughout the album, including Trever’s Wurlitzer 200A and Clavioline, Mellotron, and Hammond Extravoice. Vocals were recorded at The Eye Socket (mostly) on a modified Neumann CMV-563 with a BLUE omni capsule. There are copious amounts of tape-based echo and doubling effects all over the record (Klemt Echolette S, Tesla Echolana 2, Maestro Echoplex, Fulltone TubeTapeEcho, Rheem Califone), along with the trusty Sherman Filterbank and plenty of other weird noisemakers and processors. We mixed at The Eye Socket to 1/2″ analog tape (on an Ampex ATR-102 running at 30ips). Joe Gastwirt mastered.

FER002: Viva Death – One Percent Panic

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One Percent Panic
One Percent Panic

The second Viva Death album, One Percent Panic, is available now from Functional Equivalent Recordings (on limited edition CD and digital download).

Watch the “Broken Nose” video on our MySpace page or download it at vivadeath.com.

Viva Death – Broken Nose