Nowhere Sail by Trse on Bandcamp: https://torsotree.bandcamp.com/album/nowhere-sail

credits

lyrics and music written by Ryuichi Tanioka

produced and recorded by Ryuichi Tanioka mixed by cloudskater mastered by Ryuichi Tanioka

cover art by Ryuichi Tanioka

My friend Ryu got in contact with me back on January 6th of this year, relaying plans to release an alternate version of his album, Nowhere Sail, which was new at the time. He was going to reverse the track list and give every song a new mix, and he wanted me to handle a few of them on my own. Sadly, I was fairly busy around then and was only able to mix this one song, finishing it for him on February 16th. Nowhere Sail (Backspinned) came out on September 18th, 2024. The catchy term is Ryu's own, and I think it fits this odd concept for an alternate version of his album perfectly.

I've been Ryu's archivist for a while now, as he's never saved any files related to his projects after putting them out into the world. This means that, for most of what he's worked on, anything other then the finished, mastered release is completely lost. That includes multitracks and unmastered versions of songs. Being the preservationist that I am, I couldn't let that slide and offered to back up any and all files related to the music he releases, which he took me up on. I've been stockpiling and organizing it all ever since, as it's my pleasure to help a friend rightfully preserve the art he has spent years of his life creating.

So in that case you might assume that I had all I needed to mix any song off of Nowhere Sail for him, but that wasn't the case. We only started talking about preserving his work part of the way through this album's creation, so not all were available to mix from scratch. I was originally asked to mix the songs, Phyton-cide Attack, Totem, Glider Across The Line, Pale Sea Eye, and Versus Angler St. however I saw fit. I picked Phyton-cide Attack as it was the earliest song on the album with multitracks preserved, and I intended to mix the rest in order, though that never came to pass. Ryu wanted to hear how someone who uses a digital audio workstation would handle his songs, as he mixes all his projects on a digital 6 or 8 track. Once a track is sitting somewhere in the mix, it usually has to stay there for it's duration, so one of the things he asked of me was to pan some tracks around the stereo field, which I did here with the electric guitar. More on that later.

As Ryu's tracks never touch a DAW, all of the effects like reverb and delay are applied on the way in to the recorder, meaning they're baked into the audio itself. I don't think he compresses his vocals much if at all, so applying compression to a vocal with baked in reverb was a strange but fun challenge.

I faced an issue with the acoustic guitar. I really liked what was being played and was trying to make it more audible, but the track is mono, the center of the mix was already crowded, and pushing it to the left or right while keeping it as prominent as I wanted felt out of place. The trick was to duplicate the guitar, place the dry signal on the right, and place a version completely wet with reverb on the left. This kept the emphasis in one channel while making the acoustic feel way bigger, but I went further. I wasn't trying to hide what I did, but occasional sounds such as fingers scraping on the fret board made the delay from right to left obvious, and I didn't like that. I ended up cutting those small sections out of the duplicated track on the left, and the cloud of reverb covered up the brief moments of silence. I'm still really proud of that idea. I even made a cut and added a fade in to the beginning of the reverb track so the strummed intro wouldn't immediately highlight the exact timing of the delay.

On the topic of guitars, I wanted the electric to move around the stereo field at some points, and I didn't know how to bring up the pan envelope yet. Why I didn't just search the internet for "how to pan tracks in Reaper" I don't know, but I ended up duplicating that guitar as well, panning both mono tracks hard left and right, and using the VOLUME ENVELOPES to move it around. Yes, that is as painful as it sounds. I spent way too much time doing that before learning how to properly pan a track, but I had done all the hard work by then. At least I know now!

I don't have the project in front of me but I think I EQed and compressed the bass guitar a bit, brought it higher in the mix for sure (I love it's tone), along with giving the drums a slight EQ and limiter treatment. Other then that though, I think I covered most everything I did to this track, and I'm super proud of how it came out, especially considering this isn't the kind of music I make, so my experience mixing it is null. At least Ryu was happy with it, and I'm so happy to finally collaborate with him on something! I can't wait to mix something for him again in the future.