A solo double bass album is no small challenge – in more than one respect. First off, of course, is the musician, who has to rely on his own skills and inspiration all by himself. Dieter Ilg can draw on a huge repertoire of technical virtuosity, and the fact that he is his only dialogue partner on stage does not scare him: “The essential part of life consists of self-talk.” If these are run with so much wit and circle around such interesting topics, it would simply be unforgivable to withhold them from the public. The disc is also a challenge for the producers. Because this is about great music and not about great deals with a mass-produced, all-purpose product.

The technical challenges were lots of fun. Since there are naturally few sounds in a solo bass that could mask any band or amplifier noise in the mid-high range, technical purism was the top priority: The signals of two stereo microphones were transferred to a quarter inch tape, a so-called session tape, through a mixer with the sound control switched off. The pieces were then cut out of their environment and glued together in the correct order. The copying of the songs from the session tapes would have only worsened the distance between them. And we have also renounced dynamics processing or filtering out hard-to-reproduce frequencies. Although the record would have sounded reasonably passable on mediocre systems as well, it considerably diminished the enjoyment of a high-quality reproduction chain. Therefore, the music was played without any mastering from the tape directly into the cutting system. After a direct cut, this is the shortest path from the instrument to the cutting stylus: cut directly from the session tapes.

Our search for purism didn’t stop there however – after several conversations with Dieter Ilg we ultimately settled for nine cuts separated by only one single edit. After that I made the direct-to-DSD256 transfer of the analog mastertape. It’s almost impossible to get any closer to the musical spectacle: You get to hear exactly what the artist was playing into the microphone! 

– Dirk Sommer