Album Notes

Here you have a cover of Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald". It was recorded by Kurt Harland Larson of Information Society and Steven Seibold of Hate Dept.. It was recorded in a small town in eastern Indiana over the Fourth Of July weekend in 2011.


Larson on "Witch of November":
The idea for making this recording came to me like most songs I have recorded: I found myself intensely imagining what it would sound like, becoming very emotional in the process. Immediately afterwards I felt miserable and guilty at the thought of not ever making the recording, so then I felt like I had to. As David Tibet puts it, "raped by a vision".

The song was always a favorite of my father's, and by exposure, mine. I grew up in Minnesota. Among large metropolitan areas, Minneapolis is as far away as you can get from the nearest ocean anywhere in the entire western hemisphere. Lake Superior, the largest lake in the world (by area) was essentially the ocean to us. It had waves, seagulls, harbours, ships; everything that makes an ocean experience for someone who never really saw the sea until he was 23 years old. Therefore when the 729-foot ore-carrying ship Edmund Fitzgerald sank on November 10th, 1975, people in the Great Lakes region took it rather personally. This, I surmise, was why Lightfoot chose to create the ballad. It is also why the song resonated with me so strongly over the years.

This song has been covered exactly 473,891 times. Well maybe a bit less. The point is, we saw no purpose in simply re-creating the original, and besides, that was not what I was hearing in my head. We set about to transform the song into something that matched the feeling of my vision for it, hopefully bringing this epic work to a whole new audience who by time and genre were kept apart from it until now.

I think the original was a story told from the point of view of the people who had to try to endure the tragedy after it had happened. I decided I wanted to tell the story from the point of view of the storm, hence my title: The Witch Of November. As such, it is meant to be an hysterical, over-dramatized rendition; the voice of an awesome force appalled by its own power.

Lightfoot's song was recorded as a fairly traditional sea chantey. I immediately knew that this would not work for me for three main reasons: First, it simply wouldn't allow for the depth of drama I wished to project. Second, what would be the point of simply copying Lightfoot's performance? It really needs no improvement and I couldn't pull off that style convincingly anyway. Finally, my experience of the song as I heard my version in my head was much too different. When Steven and I spoke about how we would approach the recording, we immediately discussed the ways in which our version would distance itself from the original.

I feel this sort of personalization of songs and stories by the people who perform them is a necessary part of art. Lightfoot, for example, changed "The Pride of the American Flag" (A common nickname for the Edmund Fitzgerald) to "The pride of the American side" in his lyrics. Similarly, I felt the style in which we were performing the song was not compatible with the linguistic idiom of the original. In some cases I pronounced or phrased things in a more straightforward way than Lightfoot's original, which seems to me to be done in the vernacular of the maritime community. The irregular gaps between the verse lines were done by feel; whenever I felt a pause was needed, we put one in.


RECORDING:
This recording was made at Steven's house in rural Indiana. We spent about a week on it over the 4th-Of-July weekend in 2011. I love working with Steven and it was overall a very enjoyable time for me. (Despite the beastly heat) I will especially cherish my memory of skating with lighting and fireflies all around me on roads going through corn fields...

Logic was our sequencer. The bass guitar part was played by Steven. Most other things were sequenced SFX and synths. Mixing and mastering was done by Steven with some minimal input from me.

SOUND DESIGN:

The most interesting part of the sound design for me was the radio chatter we included. Most of it is taken from the actual conversation between the captain of the Arthur M. Anderson and the Group Soo Coast Guard station. If you have the Lyrics document, you will see all the text of the lines used. These lines were selected for effect, from many different places around the recording, and are not in any order. Some of the lines were recorded by Steven and are dramatizations of lines from text transcripts, or of my imagining of what persons aboard the Fitzgerald could have said. For example, near the line "He said 'Fellas, it's been good to know you", you will hear a recording of Steven saying "It's uh... It's been good to know you guys". This is entirely from my imagination and should not be taken as an attempt to assert anything about what was actually said.

The bell which sounds 29 times at the end of the song owes it eerie sound to a particular trick of sound design I performed on it: Most bells have only two or three fundamental frequencies, with a suite of upper harmonics (multiples) of each. I made two copies of the bell sound and filtered each so that one of the harmonic series' was mostly removed. I then detuned one bell about 20 cents down and one 20 cents up, then merged the two back together. The result is the sound of a bell which is physically impossible.

The other sound of note is the soaring guitar chords in-between some of the verses. I had Steven play the six different notes on a guitar, holding each note for a fairly long time. I then spent some time using the amazing "Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch" audio-processing software to produce the final sounds. ( http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch ) I was quite pleased with the results.