Hi, my name is Jonas. -
And I'm Stefan and we're back with more of the Musical Soundscapes series.
Jonas: Today we'd like to discuss the eighth and final album of the series,
entitled 'sea of dolphins'.
Stefan: In the episode on 'Songs of the Sea', I mentioned how I found it a little difficult
to get going on another album.
So you can imagine that by the time 'sea of dolphins' came along, it was even more
difficult to come along and between 'Songs of the Sea' and 'sea of dolphins' there are three,
if not four years, and I was very surprised when you called me up that one day saying
you want to do another album.
Jonas: Well I was addicted to the series.
Stefan: Addicted to the series! Because I thought, you know, the sales had gone down, because
Napster had appeared on the scene and people didn't really need to buy our CDs if they
wanted to listen to the music.
They could just freely download it from Napster or any of the other illegal file sharing sites.
And so I'd gone off into other avenues.
I branched out into film and TV, I was working on ring tones and user interfaces and what not,
even dabbled in computer games a bit, and so I thought, you know, do I really want
to spend another six months to create an album?
But I figured you probably toyed with this idea much more before you made that phone
call so maybe you'd like to talk a bit about what made you think it was a good idea to
continue.
Jonas: Well, seven is not always sort of a good number to end on.
Stefan: Seven is a magic number.
Jonas: I know some people say that and I just thought I'm an even keeled kind of guy and I thought
an even number 8, eight CDs series, multi platinum series, it just sounded round to me.
And Holborne Distributing had been dismantled in the process.
It was only a fraction of what it used to be, a very, very large distributing and publishing
house north of Toronto.
But they were still dealing with our product and were open to it, you know.
Duncan Swain was still involved in the picture and I think I brought it up with him and he
said 'why don't you?
We'll put it out.
We'll publish it and distribute it.', because it's been unusually successful, garnered
a lot of attention for them and for us. Stefan: OK.
Yeah, I know. As I said, I had gone into other things. I was in radio ji ngles and commercials and what
not, and because time was so limited, I actually ended up hiring a couple of guys
to help me with the arrangements.
I was still writing the songs, and they're still my pieces.
Actually there is one public domain piece on there that I had recorded for a film earlier
and I revamped it and changed it a little bit, but imagine a Musical Soundscapes, a track
on a Musical Soundscapes album that was not written by either you or me, I mean that was
unheard of.
But it worked well and it certainly helped the volume and the size of the album.
Yeah, we had fourteen tracks which was by far the most extensive track listing that
we had had in the Musical Soundscapes series.
My favorite track order, like back to back in the whole series, actually stems from this album.
It starts with track 2: 'Over the Blue Expanse', goes on to 3: 'Dance of the Dolphin', track 4:
'A Ripple in Time', and track 5: 'Water Romance'.
It's JK, Jonas, Stefan, Jonas, Stefan, piano and strings, guitar and percussion
piano and strings, and piano percussion.
Again, the wonderful diversity - they flow into one another, they're different styles,
different approaches, different orchestration, arrangement and it became - that was the signature
trademark of the eight CDs.
Stefan: You know that really well, this order.
I mean if you asked me, how much or how little I like this album, it would be a difficult
question, because this is the one that I actually know the least, because I mean of course,
it was recorded and...
Jonas: Well and four years had passed and we were also involved in all kinds of other projects.
I was doing a lot of teaching and performing and you were off in other production areas.
But I think that's just natural.
At the same time, when you listen to all of the albums together, this definitely carries
the trademark of the Musical Soundscapes series. Stefan: Definitely, yes it does.
In that sense, it was good that we did it.
It's funny to do a last album and realize that it is going to be the last album.
You think, is this my last piece, am I going to do one last, one more take?
Jonas: Am I going to die after that?
It's almost like the Mozart and the requiem they requested, and he wasn't able to finish
it and then he died.
Well, it wasn't that tragic with us.
But when we started out in 1990, coming up with the idea, how are we going to do, what
kind of series is this going to be?
We came up with the title 'Musical Soundscapes'.
At that time, 'soundscape' didn't exist, and certainly not 'Musical Soundscapes', as we did
with not 'Blue Pacific', but 'Pacific Blue' that was then also imitated by many other competitors.
And nowadays you see all kinds of scapes, soundscapes, whatever, people play with the words.
But back then, I think, we were trailblazers, definitely with the series, prompted a lot of other people
to start series. And we had no inkling that it would turn into a multi platinum
award winning series. Stefan: Definitely not.
It was good that you called me up to do 'let's do one more'.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this series, this video series on 'Musical Soundscapes'.
It was a good time for us.
Jonas: We learned a lot, a lot of experimenting, great trade-off.
Stefan: It was nice to reminisce about the good old times and digging out some old things.
Jonas: Memories and photos, yeah, exactly.
Anyway, thank you for listening in and we hope you enjoy the Musical Soundscapes series.
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