Yukon musician/producer Matthew Lien has released his 25th album and his most ambitious to date. Seven years in the making, Full Circle features many of Lien’s trademark characteristics spanning acoustic styles from folk to pop wrapped up in environmental soundscapes, and all of it has been produced in Lien’s new award-winning immersive format developed especially for earphones.
“When I first started recording in the 1980s, headphones were rarely used,” Lien said. “But with the proliferation of smartphones, they’re everywhere!”
From his earliest recordings, Lien was interested in expanding the boundaries of how sound is perceived. Many of his productions employed the Roland RSS or Desper Pro-Spatializer systems (used by Sting, Deep Forest, Roger Waters and others) to expand the stereo soundfield. In 2005, he received support from the National Research Council to expand the perception of 5.1 surround sound, while working with Sony engineer Lon Neumann at Bryan Adams’ Warehouse Studio.
But it was his first experience with binaural sound that raised the bar. One fateful morning, his recording engineer Michael Harris brought a DIY binaural microphone into the recording studio. It looked like a beat-up mannequin head with rubbery ears and wires underneath. Harris played a recording of himself walking around the studio while talking and shaking his car keys. “Listening on headphones with my eyes closed, I thought nothing of it because it sounded so realistic, until I opened my eyes and Mike wasn’t in the room,” Lien exclaimed. “I couldn’t believe it had been recorded, and I realized this microphone was essentially a periscope for the ears, able to put someone aurally into any space.”
With a loan from his father, he purchased the holy grail of binaural microphones – the Neumann KU100 – and started experimenting. The biggest challenge he discovered which had vexed others attempting and abandoning the binaural format for mainstream music production, was the matter of reverb (the smooth echo you hear in churches, for example).
Most studio music is recorded in layers, so that each instrument can be treated uniquely for tone, position, dynamics, and the sense of space it occupies. That space is usually applied with artificial reverb, so vocalists can sound like they’re in a chapel while a piano can seem to be in a small room.
When artificial reverb is applied to binaural recordings, it causes the immersive quality of the recording to collapse. So, Lien started experimenting with another type of reverb called convolution reverb. This involved recording a special tone within an acoustically pleasing space and using the binaural microphone to capture a digital fingerprint of the space (called an impulse response). His use of a binaural microphone, and broadcasting that tone in 45-degree angles, was his breakthrough.
He then travelled Canada, Europe and southeast Asia to capture impulse responses in many historically significant spaces which, he realized, impart immersive spatial qualities onto the instruments while also contributing cultural qualities to his songs, since the spaces he would later apply to his recordings may include the Marble Hall of the St. Florian Basilica or St. Martin’s Church, the oldest Christian church in the English speaking world. “I’d become an acoustic archaeologist,” Lien observed.
While most songs on Full Circle are personal compositions from Lien’s life and travels over four decades, the album has two cover songs recorded as tributes to those he’s lost. Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah was re-imagined by Lien for his father who passed away while Lien was in the studio. “He often requested k.d. lang’s version in the hospital,” Lien said. “I promised to develop my take on the song, but he passed away before he could hear it.”
The other tribute is for his friend and the bassist on many of Lien’s albums and tours, Paul Stephens. “When Paul received a tragic diagnosis with only months to live, I called him and asked if he wanted to record one last song,” Lien recalls. I’m Gonna Pray was composed by Paul Gatien and Leah DeForrest, close friends that Lien and Stephens had in common. The recording became an international undertaking involving eighteen musicians in six studios with seven engineers in the Yukon, BC and California. The day after the final mixing session, Stephens and his wife Maureen returned home to Canada where he passed away days later. “The project served as a beautiful way for many friends to say goodbye, and it filled Paul’s final months with what he loved most in life,” Lien said.
Overall, Full Circle was curated from forty years of songwriting, and recorded in six countries and eighteen locations, with fifty-two musicians, eight engineers and four foley artists; and with binaural impulse responses (digital acoustic fingerprints) captured in twenty-two chapels, cathedrals, caves and caverns across North America, Europe and Asia. All of this – including the 22 acoustic spaces – was recorded in the binaural format with the KU-100 microphone crafted by Neumann, the renowned manufacturer of high-end studio microphones.
The album was mastered by Grammy-winning engineer Michael Romanowski. “When I heard of Michael and his award-winning work on immersive projects, I asked if he thought he could improve on the music, a challenge he thankfully accepted and he’s elevated the immersive quality significantly,” Lien said.
Full Circle is released under a new distribution deal secured with Interstellar Music who represents artists like Taylor Swift and Jackie Chan in southeast Asia, and who’ve just re-released fifteen of Lien’s previous titles. Full Circle is now streaming on all major platforms, so get your earphones on.
