Godo Yorke | Live Gig Mixing

This performance of Isis, the Goddess comes off of Godo Yorke’s live version of her album ‘IN SILENCE, IN SIRENS’. While the studio version thrives on intimate sounds, the “Godo Yorke Orchestra” live arrangements are a whole different thing. Not only do they embrace the band as an energy source — replacing drum machines for live drums and synths for a hefty lineup of musicians — their sound aesthetic was itself oriented towards maximizing the warmth that live instrumentation allows.

The track attempts to bring you into a space of safety and intimacy that underlines the bittersweet lyrics. My goal with the mix was to reenforce that feeling and allow the sound to morph along the track. To bring out the warmth in the tracks and take the focus away from the static, non-changing, slightly sterile timbre that frequently comes up in live recordings. Naturally, that took an enormous amount of cleaning and editing, since live sound is about efficiency and compromise, rather than the detail. Therefore I see the result as what can be achieved when a mix engineer puts their creativity towards interpreting the feeling of being in the audience. Listening to a live gig is everchanging, all senses captured by music, movement and drama, so it only makes sense that a live recording should try to chase that.