Singing the off-grid song

Synth-pop and music-technology icon Thomas Dolby will shortly embark on a new album project, recorded totally off the grid — that is, using only renewable energy sources. On it, he plans to use eSession to record remotely with a host of musicians in various locales.

ESession is an offline service, where files are worked on independently and sent back and forth. Dolby prefers that to real-time online collaboration, which can have latency issues.

“I don’t think we’ll ever get around those latency issues,” Dolby told an interviewer. “Certainly not in this Internet generation. But as far as collaboration goes, a couple of things are key: the first is that there’s really no substitute to two or more people sitting in the room, running the track, listening to it, and having a shared experience. All the best producers I know have an ability to

become the audience and then respond to that by saying, “We need a bit more of this and a bit more of that.” I’m not even talking about jamming; I’m talking about the process of production in layers. Once you’ve had that experience and you have established a rapport, it’s just fine to work remotely. I think live phone calls or videoconferencing are really helpful as well.

So it’s beneficial to be able to see and hear each other when you’re working, but not to try to send the audio back and forth in real time.

“Personally, I’ve got broadband access, and I get fairly good quality out of Skype videoconferencing, which is free to another computer. Or iChat, same deal, [with] iSight on a Mac. I think it’s great to have that open, and I think if someone is just showing you a part, that’s very sufficient. But I think that as soon as you get something you like, you should revert to the high-res [file-sharing] process.