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Eye Music's MONTREUX 1988 live album will see its streaming release in January 2023!
First, a bit of backstory about who and what Eye Music is/was...
In late 1986, Toronto-based violinist Oliver Schroer placed a "musicians wanted" ad in the city's alternative/entertainment weekly NOW Magazine. Don Ross and his late wife Kelly McGowan had just started dating at the time. They were both musicians, looking for opportunities. Kelly spotted Oliver's ad and urged Don to call the person who posted it. The ad read:
"New age celtic crossover/vulcan swing/space grass! 2 hot string players lkg for guitar bass percussion for orig high impact acoustic/electric band. Call Oliver 927-xxxx."
Kelly urged Don to call, which he did! Oliver and Don met a couple of days later and had a chat at Oliver's apartment and listened to each other's music for a few minutes on their respective indie cassette albums. A few days later, Oliver called Don back to let him know that he'd really like to start a band with him and that he'd also met with an amazing young percussionist named Mark Duggan. The three met in January 1987 for a get-together/rehearsal and knew right away that they could make a cool sound that no one else was making. The all-acoustic blend of guitar, violin and marimba was not one that got heard every day. Mark was also adept at tabla, vibraphone, and every other imaginable percussion instrument. The trio played a few festivals that summer (primarily the more adventurous folk festivals). At a couple of those events, Oliver and Don got to hear the playing of bassist/multi-instrumentalist David Woodhead, and they in turn invited him to join the band.
Before David joined the group, Oliver, Mark and Don had made a demo recording on a Portastudio (the then-ubiquitous 4-track cassette-based mini-studio that was the extent of most indie musicians' recording budget at the time). Oliver took it upon himself to mail copies to festivals all over the world and see what that kind of seed-planting might make happen. At a Christmas party at Don & Kelly's place in Toronto's Chinatown in 1987, Oliver showed up, with his answering machine under his arm, and placed it on the table. He got the attention of the party-goers and pressed play. Then started a message from a man with voice like syrup and an oddly hard-to-place mid-European accent:
"Hello, this is Robert Trunz calling on behalf of the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. I'm calling about your beautiful group, Eye Music, and would like to invite you to play at our festival in July 1988."
No one in the room could believe their ears. Already in late 1987, the jazz festival in Montreux had a legendary reputation, and an invitation to play there felt like a kind of approbation even the band members couldn't believe. The members embarked on a whole lot of fundraising and managed to get themselves over to Switzerland.
The festival also offered the optional service of having bands recorded live at their sets at the festival. The band pooled resources and had the show recorded on 2-inch 24-track tape. The band did eventually go into a studio in Toronto and mix a couple of the tunes, but the budget was never really there to exploit the recording fully.
Bands are hard to keep together. Less than two months after performing in Montreux, Don ended up winning the US National Fingerpick Guitar Championship in Kansas and was offered a solo recording contract with Duke Street Records as a result of the media attention that got him. Since a solo career was what Don had been dreaming of, he took the deal and a few months later announced his departure from the band.
There were attempts to keep Eye Music going, but the band eventually dissolved in 1989.
Through all these years, the members of Eye Music have known that what they had for a short time was really cool and unique. Don reunited the band in 1990 for one track, "Wall of Glass," on his second eponymous Duke Street CD, and the various members have collaborated on projects and played live together in various combinations. But there was never an official reunion of the project. Of the five people who made the trip to Montreux (including Kelly who performed occasionally as a guest vocalist with the band), two have since passed at young ages of cancer: Kelly in 2001 and Oliver in 2008.
In the summer of 2022, Don started to ruminate about that 24-track recording. Having set himself up with a great project studio at his home on Prince Edward Island, and having learned how to mix in the immersive Dolby Atmos format, Don thought it would be a great thing to have the tape professionally transferred to digital. After asking around, Don found out the Number 9 Audio Group in Toronto did a great job on transfers. Fortunately, David had taken good care of the two reels of 2-inch tape on the shelves of his studio in Toronto, and the transfer went extremely well. It's no mean feat, as a tape that old could easily suffer from separation of the mylar and ferrous oxide layers of the tape and be destroyed during playback. That means that the tape must be baked in an oven at low temperature for a week in order to be playable maybe once. Don was flabbergasted to hear that the transferred recording sounded like it had been made hours before, as opposed to close to 35 years before! The only drawbacks were that, in 1988, the state of the art when it came to acoustic instrument pickup technology was not great, so there were going to be some pretty large hills to climb to transform the recorded sounds of the acoustic guitar and the violin into something respectable. Thank goodness for things like impulse response plugins in the world of digital recording! Don was able to make huge strides with the sonics. While the guitar still doesn't sound 100% natural, the improvement is still staggering.
It's been a labour of love, and the three surviving members of Eye Music have put a lot of effort to bring this music to the world. They even plan to reunite soon, with a new violinist, and play some live shows, hopefully later in 2023 and into 2024.