By Grey Larsen

Paddy and I had been playing together for about four years by the time we started working in earnest on our second CD, which came eventually to be called Dark of the Moon. The project remained untitled for quite a while. Later, the working title became Child of My Heart, also the name of a traditional jig on the CD, and remained so until quite a late stage. That tune is one of my favorites, very tender, mysterious and deep.

By the time we finished recording, Paddy had decided to make a major change in his life. Over several years he had become more and more passionate about traditional Greek music, and now he had reached a point where he needed to put his whole musical self into only that. He made plans to move to Greece.

The CD project then became, in a business sense, mine alone. Now I was on the fence between two title ideas, Child of My Heart and Dark of the Moon. Finally, I decided that Dark of the Moon evoked more specific and vivid visual images for me. Those images led to the cover graphics you see fleshed out now. Barbara Mendelsohn did a fabulous job designing the graphics, and we collaborated a great deal while she worked. Dozens of .pdf files flew back and forth over the internet between Oregon and Indiana. At one point Barbara suggested that we both be credited with the design, but I declined.

In October and November of 2002 Paddy and I were touring on the US west coast. We spent a couple of relaxing days in beautiful Ashland, Oregon, staying with Barbara and her husband Kevin Carr. (I loved watching the Ashland Halloween parade, a wonderful, creative community event.) At Barbara and Kevin's I spent many hours browsing through images on the internet, and found the photos that you now see on the cover.

I recorded and mixed the CD in my home in Bloomington, Indiana, between June and October 2002. (For those interested in the technical details, I'll elaborate at the end of this writing.) In earlier years I had recorded and mixed The Green House and The Orange Tree at home as well.

The recording sessions were very domestic of course, and there were interruptions - due to low flying aircraft, neighbors' lawn mowers, my cats, Rita or Eleanor, scratching at the door to come in or go out.

Homemade sound-absorbing devices made the house look rather bizarre - pillows, quilts, blankets and curtains stacked up and tacked up all over, and my homemade sound-absorbtion panels of ductboard covered with muslin leaning against the walls.

But it was just a few steps to the front porch, or to the kitchen where Paddy prepared delicious Greek vegan dinners. I do love working at home, despite the downsides. And I do love Paddy's cooking.

Of course we needed to get out of the house too. We'd mosey around the corner for a meal at Lulu's Grill, bike downtown for some great Tibetan or Thai food at Little Tibet or Siam House, chill out at the neighborhood full moon party, or play crooked Indiana fiddle tunes with my 75-year-old neighbor, Joe Dawson. Joe calls Paddy "Uncle Paddy" and me "Ace".

We recorded "live" as much as possible. By that I mean we played together at the same time - as in real life - instead of recording one instrument at a time, layering sound upon sound. Of course we did do some overdubbing - when you hear more than two instruments playing at once, you've found those places.

But as much as possible, we played live. We felt it very important to capture the natural, spontaneous energy of playing together in real time, responding to each other's music in every moment. We both love the duet playing best, and there is quite a lot of it on Dark of the Moon. For example, track 9: The Day I Met Tom Moylan, Josie McDermott's, and The Collier's Reel. This mercurial arrangement covers a lot of territory, with its shifting moods, colors, and tempos. We love it that we could create all that with just one guitar and one concertina.

Some Technical Details

I recorded and mixed Dark of the Moon on a Pro Tools HD hard disc recording system and a Macintosh G4 computer, running at a 96k sampling rate. Mark Hood mastered it on the same system.

I have mastered over 100 CDs, but I don't master my own projects. I am too much inside of them to be able to step back as much as a mastering engineer needs to. When I master, I love coming to a project completely fresh, never having heard it before and knowing very little about how the recording was done. That's how Mark Hood, my engineering mentor, stepped into mastering this CD.

Microphones: a Neumann U87, a pair of Neumann KM 184s, an AKG 414-EB, and an AKG 414-BULS.
Preamps: Oram, Class A.
Processing: Plug-ins from Waves, Bomb Factory, and Digidesign