David Thomas + 2 Pale Boys Live

On March 7^th, 1997, David Thomas and the Two Pale Boys came to Atlanta to perform at the Cotton Club. By that time, the Performance & Technology Research Laboratory had been in contact with Mr. Thomas for several weeks, involved in discussions centering around the nature of performance art. With their permission, we recorded the performance and produced this CD, among other things.

As in the Orbital concert, two sources were used: DAT recording from a pair of shotgun mics aimed at the Cotton Club main speakers, and a second DAT recording off a single stereo microphone mounted on a tripod. As it turns out, the shotgun mics did a fine job of picking up the low-end, but all but lost the mid- and high-range sound. The tripod-mounted mic, however, was tuned to capture the mids and highs. A final mix-down of the two resulted in full coverage of the performance.

SoundEdit 16 was used to digitize the recordings since no direct digital transfer was available from the DAT's. Deck II was then used to mix the tracks, adjusting for balance and normalization.

Relatively little editing was required to produce the CD -- a few songs had to be dropped in order to fit on a 74 minute CD. (These songs were chosen in part because they exhibited an annoying rattling sound that was caused by shaky wall panels in the club that periodically caught resonance.)

Other than perhaps needing to be run through a compressor, the recording came out relatively clean -- a nice momento from the performance.

The cover design for this CD was derived from photographs taken in the Western United States in the years between 1990 and 1997. They were specifically choosen to compliment the "lonely highway" and "stand by earthman" themes on the CD.