New York, NY (May 9, 2022)—Austin’s …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead’s latest album release, the band’s eleventh, was mastered by Scott Sedillo and KamranV at Bernie Grundman Mastering and encoded to play in both stereo and Regular Matrix quadraphonic sound.
The new album, XI: Bleed Here Now, due out July 15, 2022, was produced by Trail’s own Conrad Keely and Jason Reece alongside Charles Godfrey, who also produced 2020’s X: The Godless Void and Other Stories.
Trail of Dead was supposed to spend 2020 touring with its newly assembled five-piece live lineup in support of X and celebrating its career 25 anniversary but was sidelined by the pandemic. Instead, reportedly looking to recapture the Golden Age of rock and give the listener a more immersive experience, the band connected with KamranV, who has been working with spatial sound since the early 2000s and introduced them to QUARK (Quadraphonic Universally Accessible Resource Kit), a no-cost downloadable quadraphonic sound plug-in.
Grundman Cuts Quad Disc Live
The plan to mix in quad led to broader recording decisions, for example, setting up the mics with the idea they could mix them into four channels when tracking Tosca String Quartet for the live string arrangements on the opening theme, “Our Epic Attempts,” and the string performance on “Millennium Actress,” which also features the band’s old friend Amanda Palmer. When doing the vocals for “Growing Divide,” the band brought in Spoon’s Britt Daniel. According to Keely, “We thought how cool it would be to have our friend Britt Daniel come in to sing one of the harmonies, so that we could have four different voices separated out between two stereo mixes.”
“Art has a role to play in the upcoming decade(s): it needs to point humanity towards solutions. Our hope is that by expanding the ways we listen and hear, we expand our own inner (my parents would say spiritual) potential for the problem-solving to come,” Keely states.
As with all Trail albums, Keely created the album art, this time inspired by Jeremiah Chiu’s design for Suzanne Ciani’s 2018 LIVE quadraphonic LP, the first quadraphonic vinyl release in more than 30 years, which was made available through KamranV’s company, Cykik.
