Another year and another new album I've worked on sees the light of day. Sabbapath, To The Seventh Sunset is available now as a free download on J-Dub Records website. 18 songs are strung together to sound like a psychedelic Shabbos service, complete with droning harmonies, flutes, harmoniums, strum sticks and autoharps. The music is other-worldly, sung almost entirely in Hebrew, in a psych-folk amalgamation of musical heritage centered around the trippy musings of an unknown Rabbi, who declares we are all guided by an "unseen dimension" in our lives.
The creator of the album is my good friend Rob Markoff, whom I have musically collaborated with for the past 15 years. He came up with the concept from an old dusty album he discovered at a vintage record store entitled, "Sing Out It's Shabbos," made by a Jewish youth group in Englishtown, New Jersey. The discovery made him nostalgic of his own '70's synagogue experience, but he was disappointed in the music itself. It did, however, inspire Rob to make his own album.
With the help of myself and our mutual friend Kevin, he recorded the whole thing on his cassette 8-track, a vintage machine itself, to get a low-fi throwback sound from another era. He layered on much of the instrumentation with help from myself and (mostly) Kevin on the vocal tracks. He then handed the masters to me, on which I overdubbed percussion, harmonium, pianos and miscellaneous electric guitars through my own 8-track cassette recorder. Once complete, I mixed the whole album at my home-studio and Rob and I assembled the track order.....ready for mastering.
That was 2 years ago. The rest of the process; mastering, finding a label, etc, dragged on for what seemed an eternity. We thought the album would never come out. But come out it did, and you can download it for free and see what you think. If you're Jewish, you'll recognize the songs, but not the style they've been interpreted with. If you're not, like me, you'll just think they sound like they're from another world....a culture far, far away.
You can download the album HERE.
1 comment:
Hello,
I am programme manager of the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow (Poland)and I am obsessed with the Sabbapath - To the seventh sunset. I can see you are one of the creators of that enterprise - i am sending my big applause. I wonder if the project is possible to be seen on the concert or this is just the studio thing. Please, let me know how you see this issue.
With my bet wishes
Kornelia Binicewicz
office@jewishfestival.pl
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