The Oblivion recorders.

Recording the music at Oblivion was not exactly a high tech affair, like at many start-up labels. Back in the day, there was nothing like no Garage Band. In fact, until Tom Pomposello’s album, our last, the most tracks we’d ever utilized —the most I’d ever recorded on— totaled exactly two. Even for the early 1970s, when 16 tracks had become the state of the art, that was pretty retrograde. 

I was the company’s primary engineer. A joke, given that as of the taping of “Live in New York” I’d spend maybe a total of 20 hours recording, and my entire experience in a commercial studio was one half hour, and that was as an 16 year old amateur rocker being recorded. But, recording music was one of the cooler aspirations I had (never a good enough musician to even impress myself), and the minute I hit college radio I started teaching myself every trick my head could figure out. Starting out with an avant-garde jazz quintet in the announcer’s booth (maybe 10’x10’) I pushed the limited resources (old 1- and 2-track Ampex recorders, a few microphones, and a portable six input stereo mixer) to their limits, and then some. But, once one of my sessions was pressed into an obscure, artist owned record in Germany, there were some folks who thought I knew what I was doing.

Our first album was recorded and on one monaural, Nagra track, and edited on an Ampex. On the second release on we went retrograde, lo-fi/DIY with a Panasonic cassette machine. On the next three we graduated to Ampex and Scully stereo 2-tracks (through a custom designed radio board for WKCR), editing them on a couple of Teac prosumer 2-tracks Tom Pomposello wanted us to buy. By the end, we’d actually made a couple of sessions on Ampex four and eight tracks. Progress.