2026 October 11
I grew up on classical music because that’s what my parents played. If your family came from Europe, that was pretty normal. What wasn’t normal, at least not to me, was how my father listened.
At concerts he would lean toward me and point out how the same piece could change under a different orchestra or a different conductor. The melody stayed, the score stayed, and yet the feeling moved. Years later I learned he had sat beside his own father and heard the same lesson. At home we would play recordings one after another, ranging from comparisons of Beethoven’s Ninth to comparisons of a half-forgotten string quartet, just to catch the small choices that shifted everything. I can still see him pausing a phrase, replaying it, asking me whether I heard the difference. I did. I still do.
That’s why I handed the same tracks from the Echoes of Nyx song “Fate of Kindness” to two mixers and asked them to build the song twice, once in Dolby Atmos and once in high-definition stereo. I gave them almost nothing. No map, no preferred balance, no note about what I hoped they would protect. At their level there is no single correct mix. There’s only a reading.
I thought I was prepared. I had lived with the song in my head and on a rough mix for so long that I believed I knew its shape. Then I played the two finished versions back-to-back, and the ground shifted under me. One mix opened the room; the other drew the voice closer, as if the singer had stepped out of the speakers and into the space beside me. A line I had written as quiet suddenly carried weight. A texture I had treated as background became the thing I could not stop following. I sat there startled, almost protective, hearing my own piece as if someone else had written it and then, a moment later, recognizing it more clearly than I had before.
The shock was real. So was the familiarity. This was the old living-room lesson, only now the interpreters were Sefi Carmel and Rob Burrell, and the score was mine. My father had taught me that music does not stay still once it leaves the person who made it. Hearing that truth applied to my own song was more moving than I expected.
Special thanks to Sefi Carmel and Rob Burrell, both extraordinarily talented mixers.
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