In Oaxaca Cathedral there s an organ made in 1690 in Spanish style, and outside the city there s a little town called Talachochahuaya with a fabulous church and an organ made in 1650. In this trip we had to deal with hurricanes, earthquakes, and in the cathedral at Oaxaca we also ran across crickets, which in a church with five and a half seconds of reverb can make a lot of noise. So every night we went to the grocery store and found the Raid right next to the DDT and went around and squirted the crickets. Then the organ blower was too loud, so we had to ask everyone we could find to bring coats, and we covered the whole mechanism with coats and blankets. Now, we don t try to disguise all of an organ s natural sounds.
Organs are mechanical devices, and they make noise.
There are wooden parts that click, and the bellows make noise, and this is all part of how the instrument works. So a totally noise-free recording would be unnatural. But a lot of the noises we were dealing with didn t come from the instrument. The clerestory windows didn t have any glass in them, so in terms of noise it was almost like being outside. This church is in the central square, right in the middle of the city, and we happened to be recording on the Day of the Dead, so people were reveling all night long.