Located in a small farmhouse high above the sleepy village of Dulan (
Along with being one of the most unique and isolated places in Taiwan, the recording studio might also be one of the last bastions of a previous era. It's packed with dated analog recording equipment that Ezell has managed to beg, borrow and buy.
Regardless of the vintage equipment and its rustic setting, the studio bears all the marks of a professional endeavor and it's something that Ezell is proud of. Constructing the studio from an uninhabited farmhouse was no easy task.
PHOTO: GAVIN PHIPPS, TAIPEI TIMES
"I knew I wanted to put together a studio, but with no training in recording I had no idea that it would work," he said. "I borrowed some gear, was fortunate enough to have picked up other stuff from a TV station and a radio station after they went digital and bought the rest. And then I spent a long time reading everything I could possibly find about analog recording."
It may not be state-of-the-art but Ezell's studio suits his atmospheric pastoral music. There's something delightfully rustic and laid back about the room in which the Californian creates his hybrid brand of what he dubs "organic folk music" and in which he produced his latest album, Ocean Hieroglyphics (
Born in San Diego, Ezell first arrived in Taiwan 10 years after he took a leave of absence from the University of Washington, at which he was a student in a Master's program in Comparative Literature. Having developed an interest in classical Chinese literature and poetry while at university he decided that the only way to increase his knowledge of Oriental literature was to learn Chinese. Shortly after arriving in Taiwan, however, Ezell realized that Taipei wasn't for him.
"I was here to learn Chinese and within a week had figured that, man, living in Taipei is not for me. So, I took my books and moved to the mountains near Hualien, where I began writing music and poetry," he said.
Moving back to Taipei in the late 1990s, Ezell took the stage name Sasquatch and began gigging up and down the country and playing at many of the popular outdoor festivals. After building a name for himself and befriending many of Taipei's indie artists and producers, Ezell set about cutting his first album, 2000's Sasquatch.
Even though the album didn't become a hit, selling only 500 copies, the lessons he learnt during the recording and marketing stages were invaluable.
"I knew that nobody was going to release an album of original music in English, in Taiwan. But I had all these songs so I thought, well, shit, I don't care if nobody wants to release it I'm going to do it myself."
"Obviously I would have liked it to have been picked up by a company, but, hey, in doing the project I got to realize the limitations of and learnt quite a bit about the recording process."
While his self-released debut was a predominantly folksy affair, his latest recording is purely instrumental. Released by popular local label, Wind Records (
The result may be serene but the recording process gave Ezell more headaches and proved more complicated than he initially expected. Even with the lessons learnt during his previous recording, Ezell still found the three months he spent in the studio to be both frustrating and laborious.
"I knew what I wanted to create and I knew how to go about it, but I found that while it's great to create something new, playing the same tunes over and over was too much," he said. "I'd pick up a guitar and it felt like dead wood. It was like I was in a fog."
With the deadline fast approaching and Ezell's patience wearing thin, it was to be a visit to a friend's house and an introduction to an instrument known as a mbira one evening that proved to be the solution to his recording woes. After toying with the African thumb piano, however, Ezell was once again, "infused with creative energy."
This burst of creative energy enabled Ezell to complete the project on time. Mastered in Taipei by Chen Guan-yu (
The album comprises 12 tracks. Along with various types of guitar, Ezell employs a harmonica, Chinese flute, bamboo percussion, djembe (African hand drum), banjo, acoustic bass and jew's harp. Ocean Hieroglyphics is a diverse anthology of musical sounds and one that evokes a sense of space and the natural environment within the listener.
There's a meandering pace to all of the tunes, yet Ocean Hieroglyphics is far from repetitive or lifeless. Ezell's employment of such a vast array of instrumentation, along with the spontaneity of the material, ensures freshness. Just as the listener expects Ezell to go in one direction a slight of hand and the appearance of a sudden, seemingly random hook or riff takes them in the other.
Although Ezell recorded sounds of nature for the album by placing microphones on his porch -- on a couple of tunes these sounds are evident -- he opted to avoid the trappings of many a Wind release and reproduce nature verbatim.
Initially setting out to follow Wind's long tradition of filling albums with ambient sounds of nature in order to enhance their recordings, Ezell soon dropped this idea, feeling that such sounds were distracting.
"I did record birds and the ocean, but there was a feeling of falsity or contrivance about it all," he said. "I wanted the music to evoke the theme of the song and be able to envision the natural world through the music. I wanted the sounds of nature to be inherent in the music itself."
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