It’s nearly Easter - it seems like an apposite time for this spoken word piece, with an underscore, from 2018.

For most of the time we lived in Sydney we went to Ashfield Baptist Church.

Most churches will have special services or other gatherings on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Resurrection Sunday. But Saturday, the traditional Sabbath, isn’t usually celebrated in any special way.

In 2018, some of the crew at ABC decided it would be good to have a creative thread running through the whole weekend, including Saturday.

It was Lydia who found this script by Deborah Fielding and suggested we record it as a reflective spoken word piece. The original, ambitious, intent was a video, but that became too hard to organise.

The cast is Elise, Anj, Roger, myself, and one other person – whose voice I can’t identify from the recording. We recorded it in just a handful of takes in the church hall, and I did post production and composed the underscore with Logic as my weapon of choice.

There was a lot of traffic noise on the original recordings. Logic’s noise reduction plugin and some surgical EQ cleaned that up a lot. The underscore helps to mask some of the background noise as well.

Listening to this recording again after quite a few years, I’m still pleased with the clarity and quality of the recording and mix – the noise reduction for the traffic noise works well. The underscore has a slightly haunting, unsettled sound which seems to suit Easter Saturday as the ‘day between’.

Hope you enjoy it!