It's been a sad 13 years since the passing of Mark Linkous, the visionary behind the group Sparklehorse. In issue #12 of Tape Op, way back in 1999, writer Adam Selzer caught up with Mark after a move, and found him wiring up his personal studio, Static King. As Mark interestingly told Adam of his working methods, he was "in the context of a whole album, imagining the album is a galaxy and the songs are planets. Some of them don't orbit correctly and some of them are a little bit off axis."
After Mark passed, it took years for the dust to settle, but eventually Mark's brother, Matt Linkous, sister-in-law Melissa Moore Linkous, and a handful of friends and collaborators set out to archive Mark's recordings and assess the state of the album he was working on when he passed. With this release, Bird Machine, coming out this year, we all hopped on Zoom a couple of times to talk about Mark, his music, and the difficulty in finishing albums when the artist, brother, and friend is no longer with us.
ARCHIVING
Matt Linkous: Archiving was just something that had to be done. Mark recorded on so many different devices. Different types of cassette tapes, microcassette tapes, Hi8 tapes, [iZ Technology] RADAR, and 2-inch tape. There was quite a bit. Mark did a lot of work in his home studio all the time, from the moment he borrowed David Lowery's [Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker] 4-track all the way up until the last record that he was working on. He would record on anything, from cassette to RADAR. He wasn't stuck on one format.
Bryan Hoffa: He used a lot of microcassettes. Lots of skeletons of songs, like early ideas as he was working the song out. Matt had started talking to me quite a while ago, maybe 2014, about planting the idea of doing this archive work, although it wasn't greenlighted for a while. He wanted to see how my schedule was and if I would be up for it. It gave me some time to get gear together to be able to play some of the formats.
ML: There were Hi8 tapes and different songs in the same sections, where Mark would only record, like, 8 tracks on one. But we were working off the same takes that were 24 tracks. Do you remember that part?
BH: Yeah. There was quite a bit of that. On a few DTRS [digital tape recording session] tapes, there would be tracks 1 through 12 from one song, and then he found some clean tape to use for something different that would be overlapping. Creating a cue sheet, putting markers in, and making rough mixes was a bit of a challenge to work around that. We had to make sure that we heard everything. We didn't just want to go, "Oh, this is all part of that." We really wanted to pull out as much from the songs as we could. This project was something that Matt totally spearheaded. Matt and his wife, Melissa, had a big box of tapes and different media. It was fairly well-organized, because Melissa had a handwritten inventory of everything. She even numbered each tape and made a photocopy of it.
MML: He labeled his cassettes and his tapes.
Bryan, did you do all of the technical archiving work then? All the playback and capture?
BH: Exactly. I've been doing sound archiving for the last 14 years, working at a cultural institution. This was not part of that at all, but Matt knew that I did that kind of work. Richmond is a great community. I used to work at Richmond's Sound of Music [Tape Op #150], as did Alan, going back to the late '90s. I'd been around the Sparklehorse tapes at the studio for years. I moved them from one storage location to another several times! I did some session work with Mark in the late '90s. I have a small home studio, and I was coming up with a plan to play this all back. One of the main formats was RADAR. Mark started out in his home studio, Static King, out in the country in Virginia doing [Tascam] DA-88 – DTRS. As Mark progressed through the records, he started utilizing RADAR, because RADAR was a format that we were using at Sound of Music at the time. It sounded great and works basically like a tape machine. Around '99 we switched over from 2-inch primarily to RADAR. We had one of those early RADAR IIs, the Otari-branded ones. Mark's machine was a RADAR 24, the following generation. They had made some significant changes and it wasn't compatible with the RADAR that I had access to. We ended up finding one in Richmond at The Ward Recording Studio. Thomas "Rusty" Scott's a big RADAR guy and used to be at Sound of Music too. He's got the RADAR 23 and the new RADAR. After we finished the RADAR sessions there I started working on the rest of the media – like all the DTRS, DAT, cassettes, and CD-R ripping – here at my house.
Were there any analog reels?
BH: There were very few, which I was surprised about. Some of those 2-inch tapes probably exist somewhere. Mark was so involved in the sessions that he did – in terms of taking it home and working on it some more – that when he would go to Tarbox Road Studios, or somewhere else to record, he was getting dumps of everything to his multitrack to be able to take it home. We had multitracks for a lot of the It's a Wonderful Life album, but just through the RADAR and DTRS. Not first-generation reels.
Mark had an adventurous sense of recording.
ML: Oh yeah.
Keeping track of that kind of session gets confusing.
BH: I'm a big believer in metadata. Describing everything as fully as you can. Obviously, the tracks are the most important thing, but if you only do transfers and go, "Let's run these off and give you a hard drive," then you have so much less context.
Yeah. I always scan and take photos of everything, because even a couple of words on the back of a tape case can be really informative.
BH: It could actually change the whole plan, as far as what you're going to do and how it relates to some other tapes. I did a pretty extensive spreadsheet with each format in a separate tab of the spreadsheet, as well as links to the image files (the scans) from there. I wanted Matt to have the next best thing to sitting in a room with all the machines at his disposal, with the actual tapes, to be able to recreate that in his house.
Were you doing rough mixes if it was an unreleased track?
BH: I wasn't doing rough mixes as I went along. I gave Matt everything, and then he digested what was all there. When he and Alan made a plan to mix, Matt and I met over Zoom and did some listening of songs that he and I had flagged. It was pretty effective way to nail it down. From that point, I think there were about 105 tracks. They weren't all songs, but some snippets of things as well that I ended up making rough mixes of so they could listen to and decide which subset of that to work with.
Right. I never counted how many rough mixes I did for Elliott Smith's archive!
BH: I only remember the number because right before this talk I pulled up a Word document I had and was like, "Oh, it was a lot!"
ML: It was!
The other factor with that is trying to collate that against the released music. Did you do a lot of that, Matt?
ML: Yeah. Bryan helped too. It was a mutual effort; but you're right, there was so much material. Mark would record different versions of the same song. It would be in different periods sometimes. We were like, "Where'd this come from?"
BH: Some of those versions of songs were the coolest. Hearing a totally different, rock version of a song that has a different arrangement; it's like a totally different song with the same words. Matt knows the material really well. I'd be like, "I think this is unreleased." In a couple of cases, Matt really had to dig to see if it was released.
ML: Yeah, we're looking at it like an archaeological dig.
EXPLORATION
ML: After we got the bulk of what Bryan had archived, we wanted to hear what was going on. Alan and I went into a studio here in Richmond called Montrose Recording that actually has Mark's '68 Flickinger console. It's been completely restored and sounds amazing. It's run by Adrian Olsen, and his dad, Bruce Olsen, ran that studio for years. Bryan came too. Alan really dug in, and we started doing mixes.
Alan Weatherhead: From the very last music he did to pre-Sparklehorse. Career spanning music from everywhere. Like Bryan was saying, some of it was mysterious as to when it was done. You could hear, "Oh, he's got that keyboard now, so it must have been after this date." I think we got pretty close to probably figuring out when most of it was done.
ML: There was a lot of music to dig through. Mark did keep pretty good notes on certain things. We went into the studio and did this giant marathon. Alan was doing serious overtime.
How many songs?
AW: It's hard to say. We worked on a bunch of stuff initially, and then eventually focused exclusively on the Bird Machine material.
Alan, had you mixed with Mark?
AW: Yeah. Mark and I started working together in 2000 on It's a Wonderful Life. That record had been pretty much recorded and finished. Then, we went back and recorded another song at Sound of Music for it. I played with him in the touring version of Sparklehorse for that record cycle. It was an intense year and a half. That was one of the only periods where Mark was producing for other people. We did a Daniel Johnston record [Fear Yourself], a record for Mary Timony [The Golden Dove], as well as a bunch with David Lowery [including Cracker's Greenland], and various other sessions.
BH: A Camp [A Camp] was a good one.
AW: Yeah. That was the first thing we worked on and, I believe, one of the first things Mark produced for another artist. It was a project featuring Nina Persson [The Cardigans] working with Nathan Larson [Shudder to Think] and a Swedish songwriter named Niclas Frisk. We went into it very nervous that we could be let go at any time, but it turned out to be a great experience. Amazing people! Between touring, and until Mark moved from Virginia, for that year and a half we did a lot of sessions. Later, I went down to western North Carolina and worked on the Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain record with him. We mixed some songs and finished some of the recordings for that.
It's always nice when you've had the experience of sitting at the console and being in the studio with the person before versus when you don't have them there. Did you remember some of his working methods or things he would say?
AW: Oh, yeah. I would say we know Mark's taste pretty well. It's just trying to stay true to that. For anything recorded at Static King, we always referenced Mark's rough mixes – if we had them – for panning, arrangement, and content. If something was unfinished, we tried to respectfully finish it in the spirit it was created. We fell back on various things he liked to do, like certain kinds of distortion, or which sounds needed to be clean. His preferences. Over the course of doing this, I remembered a lot of things we used to do that I hadn't tried in a while. Like, taking a stereo source and compressing it completely differently on each side of the stereo field. Techniques that I don't know if I've ever used on anything other than Mark's music. The further we got into it, the more those ideas seemed to pop into my head. They often helped us figure out, "What should we do here?"
ML: A lot of thought went into that. We were looking at enhancing what was there.
AW: Mixing with Mark, there was never a set notion of "how it's going to be" in the end. It was the journey and the discovery. Those fleeting moments of electrical chaos, batteries dying, and "found sounds" were usually culled from larger blocks of audio. It's hard to describe, but there's a thing that happens when those more disparate elements fall into place. They start to communicate with each other. There will be moments when that happens and you have to find where they are. There's usually enough content that they're in there somewhere, but you've got to find them.
