Going into the forest to record guitar-based music was accompanied by a somewhat romantic notion: after all it's a wooden instrument, it was made from a raw material that has been alive and growing in a place like that for decades, and now it's being brought to live again in a different way.
However, there's also a dark side to it: as much as I love the dark, reddish brown mahogany wood that my guitar's neck and body are made of, the smooth rosewood that my flute and the back of my ukulele are cut from, there's a somewhat unpleasant aftertaste to all this, knowing that one should better keep one's hands off tropical woods for it's never quite clear where exactly they come from, under what circumstances they were being cut and so on...
| |
Now I don't want to be a moralizer, but in a way I guess I owe something to nature anyway. This is why of the price for each Raw Timber CD, 10 euros will be donated to support a project of the German environmental organisation 'Rettet den Regenwald e.V.' that opposes the wood mafia in Sumatra. That's not where my guitar body comes from and they plant mangroves, not tone woods, but they still can use a little help.
Whether you intend to buy a CD or not, if you understand German, you can find out more about their projects over here. If you don't understand German, but would like to know more, you can also contact me via look (at) entertainment for the braindead (dot) com.
-- Well, the project was successful! Here's the document that confirms that I didn't spend the 500 euros it raised on anything else.
|