“So I think it was the pendulum swinging,” Moore says. This notion dovetailed with the ethos that the members of Cowboy Junkies shared about making more naturalistic recordings of their alternative–edged country. I put it on and I thought, ‘Oh my God, why did we go away from that? Why aren’t we still doing this?’ That right there, that’s when I really got into the single mic recording.” “I got a Billie Holiday record from the German masters which were kept in proper climate–controlled vaults. Moore remembers experiencing something of an epiphany when it came to the idea of developing his single mic technique. I’m listening to these recordings from the ’50s with two or three mics and I’m going, ‘Man that’s real music.’” “I was angry that music had gotten into drum machines and MIDI,” he says. Today, the producer of The Trinity Session, Peter J Moore remembers that for him and the band, the album’s distinctively sparse, reverberating sound was a reaction against the MIDI–dominated musical styles of the ’80s. A slow–burning, atmospheric take on country music, at a time when most artists were relying heavily on programmed sounds, the Canadian four–piece’s second long–player was all the more remarkable given that it was recorded live at Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity around one microphone, namely a Calrec Soundfield. In 1987, swimming against the tide of MIDI–powered pop records, Cowboy Junkies went into a church to record an album into a single microphone in a single day.īack in 1988, with the release of an album, The Trinity Session, recorded almost entirely in a single day, Cowboy Junkies became arguably the first band to create the music sub–genre which would later become known as alt–country. Margo Timmins was positioned outside of the main circle, but is represented by the Klipsch Heresy monitor on the right–hand side. The musicians arranged around the single Calrec Soundfield mic.

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