Markus DRAVS

Engineer / Mixer/ Producer

A Note By Brian Eno (taken from the album sleeve note from "WAH-WAH" by JAMES) I asked Markus Dravs to come down and occupy one of the studios. I wanted him to look at the improvisations and see what he could make of them while we carried on with the 'song' record. We'd select a promising section from an improvisation and he'd investigate it. Using bits of processing equipment and treatment techniques evolved in my studio, he'd evolve new sound-landscapes located at the outer edges of aural culture. We were initially too busy in the other studio to bother him much, which left him free to work with the material in much the same spirit as it was originally performed - by improvising at the console. As the days passed and there became less work to do on the 'song' record, people spent more time in the wild studio, emerging from the jungle of interconnected equipment in the early hours. We worked very long days, but there was always enough going on to prevent any loss of momentum. Things happened very quickly. My mixes from the jams were all done in a single afternoon: I was trying to get a little of each jam onto DAT because there was so much new work flying around that it was hard to remember it all. I made fifty-five mixes that day and never mixed anything twice. I wasn't expecting that we would use these mixes in the end, but it turned out that this fast, impulsive way of working was right in the spirit of the performances, and the results often make a cinematic, impressionistic counterpoint to the elaborate post-industrial drama of Markus' mixes. They set each other off well: the combination feels like being at the edge of somewhere - where industry merges with landscape, metal with space, corrupted machinery with unsettled weather patterns, data-noise with insect chatter. Brian Eno, June 1993

Technical information

Markus has a studio situated in house (Merseyside/England). Equipped with an Amek Hendrix (40channels), MacG5 (Protools/Logic) and various outboard/keyboards, Markus uses this for editing, mixing and additional production work. (see pictures)