Yukon musician and producer unveils latest album using a ground-breaking approach to recording to give listeners a truly immersive experience.
Instead of the music being in your head, your head is in the music.
Matthew Lien
From his early childhood to his middle years, one thing is clear: Yukoner Matthew Lien is a true creative force in music.
What began as a love of music, combined with a love of nature, has led the highly-awarded and internationally-celebrated artist through a long career that has spawned 25 albums, extensive overseas travel and has finally come full circle with his new album aptly named Full Circle.
Additionally, what makes the new album remarkable and groundbreaking is that it was recorded using binaural technology, which is both an old and familiar, yet newly-realized form of recording for Lien.
Lien has always used soundscapes in his work–not just as a way to engage listeners through his music, but also as a call to action about seeing the environment as something to be cherished and protected. This, he said, was passed down to him by his parents, who were both passionate environmentalists.
“[That] caused me to write music that celebrated, and, you know hopefully, tactfully, inspiration-ally raised the alarm about the need to preserve what wilderness we have left.”
In addition, a love for soundscapes and what Lien calls “spacial imaging” continued to grow within the music.
“I was implementing nature sounds into my recordings from my very first demo,” he said, adding that if he can capture the essence of a place and then add the sound of that place (to the music), it adds to the heart-felt quality and potential for reaching people deeply. In the end he began perceiving environmental sound as another instrument, he said.
From Wildlands shows at the Yukon Arts Centre in the late ’90s to the extensive travel involved in capturing the sounds of places all over Europe for the newest album, Lien has incorporated the technique into his music.
As far back as 1995, when he released his inaugural album Bleeding Wolves, the use of stereo specialization hardware (RSS system) to create an experience where sounds were coming from well outside the speaker area (also used by artists like Sting and Roger Waters), were at the forefront of his music, Lien said. That of course was a software algorithm and not true binaural recording.
Binaural recording effectively uses a highly sophisticated microphone shaped like a human head (in Lien’s case, colloquially referred to as Fritz) to record sound in a 3D fashion. The caveat to recording this way is that the effect of binaural recording is best experienced through headphones and not external speakers.
With the relatively new Neumann KU100 microphone, though, improvements to speaker playback using physical EQ, makes it a great microphone for speaker playback Lien said. Traditional stereo sound does not factor in the effect someone’s own head has on how they experience sound. Factors such as one ear being farther away from the source of the sound and even a person’s nose can change how they hear something.
About seven years ago, Lien started seeing the big shift to smartphones and digital music and the use of headphones. This is where binaural recording is meant to shine. Though Lien was quick to point out that earphone listening in stereo is not enough as it tends to centralize the sounds.
“If you think about it, listening to music on headphones, you’ll feel like things are either in the middle of your head or on your ears. If you listen a lot, it’s kind of a claustrophobic effect.”
But, he added, binaural is a very immediate effect.
“Instead of the music being in your head, your head is in the music.”
The end result is when the listener hears the music and the sounds it can feel like instruments, voices and nature noises are surrounding them. A sound may begin on one side of a person’s head, say, in their left ear, Lien explained, and that person’s brain will believe the sound has moved to the other ear or directly in front of them or has even moved away from them entirely.
The brain knows that the person is not actually sitting among a string quartet, but the organic effect of binaural recording can help the brain “believe” what sounds it’s processing and create a truly immersive experience.
While creating Full Circle, recording acoustic reverb, or spacial acoustics–as in caves and churches and caverns, was a central focal point in the recording process, Lien said.
In contrast to software algorithms that imitate spaces, he was focused on convolution reverb “where you actually go to an acoustically pleasing space and broadcast a test tone into that space, record the space with the test tone and then use software to extract the tone, leaving you with the residue–a fingerprint of the acoustic space that you can apply onto any instrument,” he said.
Lien added he discovered he could create impulse responses by capturing the sounds of a space (like acoustic reverb in a cathedral) with binaural technology and then applying it to something like his piano.
“It not only put the sound of the piano in that church, but with headphones on, I felt like the ceiling of my room had evaporated and the sound was blossoming all around me.”
Using a multi-tracking approach with the instruments and positioning speakers broadcasting the sweep tones in 15-degree intervals around the binaural microphone, allowed Lien to achieve noticeably different directional impulse responses that helped shore up the believability of the binaural instrument recordings when it was matched with the directional impulse response, he said.
He equated it to creating a chain with the best possible links so the experience is at its best from start to finish.
“Anything you can do to make that instrument recording more believably external for your brain, the better.”
The final result is music with fully-produced instrumentation that is fully controlled in a multi-tracked, layered approach, Lien said.
“And nobody has done that before. That’s what I call full circle sound.”
Full Circle is a mix of rock, folk, and pop and offers listeners a 10-track, true immersive experience that, according to Lien’s website is …curated from 40 years of songwriting, and recorded over seven years in six countries and 18 locations, with 52 musicians, eight engineers and four foley artists; and with binaural directional impulse responses (digital acoustic fingerprints) captured in 22 chapels, cathedrals, caves and caverns across North America, Europe and Asia–entirely in the native binaural format.
“It’s been a killer undertaking,” Lien said.
Tracks like “Chase the Clouds Away”, “I’m Gonna Pray” and “Cabin Coffee”, showcase the effects of binaural recording beautifully. “Just As It Should Be” gives the listener the feeling that someone has taken a guitar from its case and has just sat down beside them for a private performance.
Lien said the album features many Yukon artists and was also supported by industry heavy-hitters in the sound engineering and sound mastering worlds. Professionals like Elliott Scheiner, a multi-Grammy winning engineer who has worked with bands like Toto and Steely Dan to Tchad Blake, who produced the music of artists like Peter Gabriel, have endorsed the breakthrough approach to binaural recording Lien was able to achieve.
To experience Full Circle, listeners can find the new album on music platforms like Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal and matthewlien.com.
So sit back, and enjoy this latest offering by Lien and experience a new format of immersive music listening. Just remember your headphones.
Additionally, there is a very deep and emotional connection to I’m Gonna Pray, said Lien. The song was written as a tribute to the late Paul Stephens, who was a long-time Yukon bass player and a legend within the music community. Stephens, who passed away in 2022, worked on the recording with Lien and numerous Yukon musicians between March and July of that year. Stephens was able to record in the Yukon, B.C and California and was an integral part of his final recording.
“It was a really powerful Yukon music project,” Lien said.
