I was like WHAAAAAAAAAAAAT? Serioulsy? And then we gave it away to the pressing plant...
(special thanks to the great people from GINTONIC for making this happen! you guys seriously rock!)
 … After one year of hard work and 3 masterings by 3 different engineers the new mainStream album 'Have No Fear' is finished! release date: january-14th, 2012!
The artwork was again created by marvelous Fabio Viassone who has already been in charge of our previous album the beauty in the mundane!
Production by famous Guy Sternberg & the mainStream!
Mixed by Guy Sternberg, fantastic Fabrizio Chiapello & The mainStream.
The final mastering was taken care of by famous german techno-dj Robert Babicz who mastered the album together with Joh using his Studer tape machine and creating a sound that you might remember from a time when loudness was not so important… Yeah you heard me: we decided not to partake in the loudness war, maybe if you listen to this album using iTunes playlist the songs are not as loud as other records you fancy but on the contrary dynamics are still there - in other words: no distortion!

ok, here's the STORY OF THE ALBUM...

In 2010 we spent 14 days in a castle in northern Italy (Castello di Rivara) rehearsing the songs up to 9 hours each day! Nights were cold and sometimes we had to cuddle up in order to survive!
Our producer Guy Sternberg also came down to Italy for a few days to work out the right structure of the songs. 2 weeks later we met in Berlin and basically tracked the whole album at Lowswing Studio within 14 days!
Beginning of december the tracking of the album was finished!
except ... it wasn't!
Vocals were not on point! So I made a loan and bought a Neumann u87 - top of the notch condenser microphone and a russian tube preamp - we rented a house out in the woods of northern Germany and after Federico again arrived from Italy we basically re-recorded vocals for all 14 tracks between december 2010 and january 2011!
in february Guy Sternberg spent another two weeks in his Lowswing Studio in Berlin mixing the entire album analog on his vintage Neve desk, absolutely NO 'total recall' which means: one song a day & at the end of the session we would come to the studio, listen to the final mix and approve or change minor things - the next day the faders would go down and Guy would move on to the next song with no chance to change anything in the old mix!
End of february the album was finally mixed and ready to be mastered!
To do that job (which is one of the most difficult in the whole process) in april 2011 we decided to work again with Sascha "Busy" Bühren of True Busyness Mastering (berlin) - also known as Germany n°1 mastering engineer having mastered records by bands such as Seed, Peter Fox, Nena, Silbermond, Mando Diao, Beatsteaks etc.
Busy already mastered our second album the 'Beauty In The Mundane' and did a terrific job!
End of april - the album was mastered and finished!
except ... it wasn't!
or to be correct ... we weren't feeling it!
As Leonard Cohen once said: "sometimes you have to record a song up to 11 times and then the 12th version is finally the right one", I fear it was a little bit like that...
twist of fate: on may-14th I injured my knee very badly playing soccer, a torn ACL for the 4th time in my life - had surgery - woke up in pain and there it was:
all that anesthetic medication and that mix of painkillers caused yet another song to pop up in my head: MR LOWMAX (which will now be the first single of the album); from then on I felt like something was missing on the album, somehow I felt like it needed to be more personal...
so I went into my studio and did some test mixes myself...
and over the next months we basically re-recorded half of the album again, sometimes building up on the original demos that just had more "mojo" going than the versions we recorded in berlin!
Later on in august I interrupted my physiotherapy even though I wasn't even halfway through it to take a trip down to Italy where a befriended engineer by the name of Fabrizio Chiapello offered to mix the new songs at his Transeuropa Studio (Torino) without charging us a single penny!
So we did… what a GREAT guy! We can't thank him enough!
That week the whole city of Torino was like a ghost town because at +40° Celsius people are either in Sardinia, Elba or Sicily and that was the strangest thing ever! Us being stuck in the basement of Transeuropa Studio sweating our asses off, knowing that everybody else was having their "gelato" on the beach checkin' out beautiful girls, was quite a sacrifice!
Well - finally we finished mixing the rest of the songs and because our clothing sponsor Gin Tonic (who financed the original production in Berlin and didn't really know about what was going on at this point) kept asking about the finished product, we then went ahead and had Scott Hull ( John Mayer / Bob Dylan) of Masterdisc Yew york master the album again - and for the first time it felt right… i mean it really DID! What a relief!
except … it didn't!
a few weeks later it turned out to be not so satisfying at all... what a waste of money we didn't have!
Turns out Scott Hull even after the second revision did not manage to preserve the natural sound of these mixes that we wanted so badly. Also another downer that same week, a native english speaking friend of mine who had heard the Scott Hull master told me that my lyrics weren't always on point… especially that one verse on 'Cosmic Scenery' wasn't ok to use at all - so I sent this out to HollyDish in Canada ( a female MC we produced an album with in 2010 / release: february,14th 2012) to record a rap part over the second verse which turned out to be awesome!
Now we were finally happy with the mixes, sound, arrangement and attitude of the songs so we decided to go for one last round of mastering, this time with Robert Babicz whom I had previously seen a mastering tutorial of on the internet and who really impressed me with his philosophy of really feeling the music first and then decide how it needs to be treated. So I finally sold my beloved Neumann u87 and drove all the way to Cologne to meet with Robert and overnight we mastered the album again - taking advantage of his vintage STUDER tape machine that made the biggest difference I have ever heard from a piece of gear - I mean the way this thing glued everything together (especially the low-end frequencies) was beyond my wildest dreams!
So in the end here we are with a final result of an album that benefited strongly from the love & suffering of all of us!

Hope this story will help you to understand the music!
Joh

HAVE NO FEAR & LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN!!!