Yukon Folk/Pop Visionary Matthew Lien Releases 25th Album Full Circle in Immersive Binaural Format
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 which, built in 1668, is 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, Paul Stephens, who is the bassist on many of Lien’s albums and tours.
“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.
Seven years in the making, Full Circle is your most ambitious project yet. What inspired you to take on such an expansive and immersive musical journey?
My inspiration to take on this project seemed a natural evolution of my longstanding interest in immersive sound — I’ve always been passionate about pushing the boundaries and transforming the listening experience into something more believable and all-encompassing.
My first experiences with binaural sound, and then building DIY binaural microphones, made it clear that this would be a worthy pursuit.
During my early stages of experimenting, I’d heard of one binaural microphone that was said to rule them all, but it was also prohibitively expensive for me at the time. As fate would have it, I searched online just once for the legendary Neumann KU-100 selling for less than $8,000 (USD) and found a music store that was liquidating its discounted stock which included a brand new KU-100.
Destiny was smiling upon me.
With a loan from my father, I purchased the microphone hoping it would live up to its reputation, which it did in spades. That mic became the tool I needed to break through the perceived binaural boundaries.
Your fascination with binaural sound began with a DIY microphone. What was it about that experience that convinced you to embrace this format for your music?
My first experience listening to a binaural recording was with a DIY microphone my engineer Michael Harris had brought to the studio one day. The experience seemed at first unremarkable, until I opened my eyes. Literally.
With eyes closed, it was so lifelike and realistic that forgot I was listening on headphones. I thought I’d been hearing my engineer walking around the control room jangling his keys. No big deal.
When I opened my eyes, I realized I’d been hearing a pre-recorded auditory hallucination. My engineer had never moved during my listening, and he was certainly not where I’d heard him to be at the end of the recording, telling me to open my eyes. This totally freaked me out.
It was a completely convincing immersive experience, and I soon contemplated the myriad possibilities of how binaural recording could envelop a listener.
Like my engineer before me, the experience caused me to experiment with DIY binaural microphones. I scoured wig shops and hearing aid clinics for dummy heads and silicone ear molds, hoping to achieve ever-better results.
Having exhausted the DIY approach, my next exploration was with an audio research device known as the KEMAR microphone which included a torso beneath its dummy head. This yielded excellent results but I felt it sounded too clinical.
These adventures yielded lots of learning and insight, but it was clear, the microphone I needed in my ever-deepening rabbit hole was the Neumann KU-100.
You mentioned that reverb posed a significant challenge when working with binaural recordings. How did your breakthrough with convolution reverb revolutionize your approach?
Early on, I discovered instances where music producers and recording artists had attempted binaural productions but had come up short, with one renowned Australian producer declaring the binaural format entirely incompatible with popular music production.
But in all those cases, the music had been recorded live with the ensemble playing in a reverberant space, apparently under the assumption that instruments and natural reverb needed to be recorded simultaneously. It was as if they’d traveled back in time to the “gather ’round the horn” days when musicians would stand closer or farther from a horn to attain the best live mix on a wax cylinder.
Indeed, my own listening tests confirmed that artificial reverb (a ubiquitous studio effect) degraded the immersive quality of a binaural recording, but multi-tracking with clearly possible.
This led me to wonder if convolution reverb — where a sweep tone is broadcast through a loudspeaker into a reverberant space and recorded simultaneously and is then extracted from the recording with software — could be accomplished with a binaural microphone instead of the usual stereo and multi-channel microphone arrays, resulting in a binaural impulse response. It scrambled my brain to contemplate it, so the only way to confirm was to attempt.
It turns out that this, in itself, was not particularly groundbreaking as others had created impulse responses using binaural recording technology. For example, Arjen at Audio Ease (the makers of the Altiverb software I rely on for impulse response capturing) had been exploring this for some time.
When I confirmed for myself that binaural impulse responses preserved the immersive quality of the underlying binaural recordings — and in fact enhanced them — I wondered if impulse responses should be captured from more locations around the mic, since instruments were going to be recorded all around the microphone. It seemed insufficient to capture impulse responses only from the front, as was commonplace.
I began broadcasting sweep tones by moving the loudspeaker 45° around the microphone for each impulse response. This gave me a set of eight directional impulse responses for each space, allowing me to select the impulse response from a desired space that aligned with the location of any studio-recorded instrument.
Once this proved effective, I began recording two types of impulse responses — some with primarily late reflections (big cathedrals, caverns ,and caves), and others with primarily early reflections (small rooms and theaters) because early reflections enhance our brain’s ability to locate sound. This allowed me to blend near- and late-reflection impulse responses resulting in a highly convincing immersive experience.
Another challenge that had thwarted others attempting binaural pop music production, was the drum kit. It’s not a pleasant experience to hear a drummer playing in the corner of a room. This is why several microphones are used to record the various elements of a drum kit for discreet processing.
How then, could a drum kit be recorded with a single binaural microphone?
The solution was to record the drum performance in three passes. One pass would be for kick, snare, and hi-hat because these could all tolerate similar compression, E,Q and reverb. The second pass would be for toms which require uniquely tailored processing. The third pass would be for cymbals, again for unique treatment.
In practice, this worked brilliantly. It also allowed for a more spatially dramatic recording because, for example, the selection of toms could be expanded — to include Rototoms, if desired — since the drummer was free to play tom fills separately from the groove. Likewise, cymbals could be positioned more liberally.
Of equal importance, the binaural microphone could be re-positioned for each of the three passes — first positioning the kick below the chin; then building an arc of toms perceptually spanning from the lower left, up over the forehead and down the lower right; and finally placing a variety of cymbals above the microphone — all combining for a totally immersive drum recording.
To answer the original question, it is the total sum of these experiments underpinned by equal measures of curiosity, creativity, and perseverance, that is my revolutionary approach. This is what I call Full Circle Sound.
With so many musicians, engineers, and recording spaces involved, what was the most rewarding part of bringing this ambitious project to life?
With seven years of locations and techniques and musicians and instruments and natural environments and acoustic spaces to look back on, l can honestly say the greatest reward is releasing the album. It’s not only rewarding for myself to listen back, knowing (and hearing) that I gave it my all artistically and technically, it’s also immeasurably rewarding when people hear the album and share their experiences.
It’s also something of a relief to have emerged from the rabbit hole and rediscovered the freedom of working in typical stereo and multi-channel formats again.
That said, even as I type this, the binaural head stands beside me gazing into a grand piano, patiently awaiting the next recording.