Update: Starflyer 59's Jason Martin mixes Jim McTurnan's new solo record

Just received five new tracks from former Cat-A-Tac frontman Jim McTurnan's forthcoming solo effort, the Give Up Suffering EP, which was mixed and mastered by Jason Martin from Starflyer 59. If you tuned in to Mile Hi-Fidelity this past Wednesday, you head the title track from the new record, which we premiered on the show. In case you missed it, McTurnan gave us his blessing to post that song, along with the other tracks from the record (as well as the original blog item) after the jump. Enjoy!

[Original blog item, posted on 2.21.09]
Just received word that the former Cat-A-Tac frontman Jim McTurnan has tapped Starflyer 59's Jim Martin to mix and master his forthcoming solo record. According to McTurnan it was as simple as just sending the guy an e-mail, letting him know he was a fan of his work and asking him if he would be interested in working together. Funny thing is, prior to linking up with Martin, McTurnan had actually been talking to another well know producer who's mixed on a number of high profile releases about mixing his new album -- only in that case, the producer is the one who reached out.

"He contacted Cat-A-Tac last summer sort of right as the band was on its dying gasp, and said that he was a fan and would be interested in mixing our next record if we were making one," McTurnan recalls. "And so I was pretty stoked about that; it got the wheels turning in my head - having somebody else mix, because I hate the mixing part.

"I love going in and having the instant gratification of laying down all the parts," he goes on. "Then it's fun and quick, but the mixing bit just takes forever. And if I do it myself, I know from the Cat-A-Tac stuff, the first time we went in with Bryan, we wasted a ton of money just sitting there doing stuff that we ended up not liking, because we were trying to bark orders to him. We would've done better if we just handed him half the money and just said, 'Mix our record.'"

With that in mind, McTurnan was understandably excited about having somebody else turn the knobs. An as it happened, Matt Fecher championed Jason Martin's mixing ability, encouraging McTurnan to listen to a record by a Los Angeles band called Gliss. Subsequently, he liked what he heard ("You should check that band out," he says, "and listen to the song, 'Gimme the Hit.' It's amazing"), and was even more enthused about the prospects of working with Martin when he saw his rates. 

"It's going to cost less for me to have him mix it," McTurnan points out, "than for me to try to do it myself."

So that prompted McTurnan to an e-mail to him expressing interested in working together, noting that he was a fan of his work, to which Martin promptly responded. And so now the plan is to head into Bryan Feuchtinger's Uneven Studios this weekend with his new band - John Fate from the Pseudo Dates on drums and Fell frontman Josh Wambeke on bass, with whom he's been rehearsing with for the past couple of months -- for a full day of tracking, returning next weekend to finish up guitar overdubs, vocals and any other incidentials. McTurnan and company will be recording everything dry and then shipping the raw files off to Martin, who will then spend the month of March mixing and mastering the recordings. Once he's finished, McTurnan says, the disc, tentatively titled Give Up Suffering, will most likely be issued locally sometime this later this summer. Ultimately, though, he intends to land a booking agent, establish some distribution and pursue publishing and licensing deals while he shops the recordings around.

"My goal is to get a team together," he concludes, "to sort of pull some strings that we couldn't pull with Cat-A-Tac."