Love Flows Like A River is an album from vocalist Jacintha that is sung entirely in Mandarin.  It is from the Harmony Records label and comes to NativeDSD through our partnership with Groove Note Records.

The album features beautifully recorded contemporary arrangements of several Mandarin favorites and evergreens as well as a couple of Jazz tunes. This is an album exploring the theme of love, with its ebb & flow, rise & fall, twists & turns & with many changing currents, just like a river.

Our goal is to produce a truly high-quality audiophile recording for the Asian & Mandarin language markets. We feel this album from Jacintha is a great introduction for the Harmony Records label. Jacintha is already very well known in the audiophile market and was very excited to be involved in this project.

The concept for this album evolved over several months in early 2004.  As we spent more time with Jacintha selecting the songs & working on arrangements, it seemed clear that the heart of the album would be a collection of sad & very well known, much-beloved love songs ñ not only the 6 great Chinese (but equally famous) songs: Moon River, Bengawan Solo and River Of No Return.

By the time we were ready to go into the studio in early 2005, it was clear that we had gone beyond the “Jacintha sings famous Chinese songs” concept. This was now an album exploring the theme of love, with its ebb & flow, rise & fall, twists & turns & with many changing currents, just like a river.

The album was recorded over 4 days at Audioplex Recording Studio in Tampines. The recording engineer Michael C. Ross flew in from Los Angeles on Tuesday the 15th of February & we spent most of Wednesday afternoon and evening setting up the studio for the session.  This included tweaking amd aligning the Studer 24 track analog tape recording machine. Vintage tube mikes by well-known names like AKG, Telefunken & Neumann were used during the session. The vocal mike on Jacintha was a legendary U-49 (tube). The entire session was recorded all-analog through a classic Neve Analog Mixing Board.

The multitrack analog masters were flown from Singapore to Los Angeles in March 2005.  All of the mixing for the 8 vocal tracks was done by Michael Ross at LA-FX out in Burbank. The final tracking and mixing session for the instrumental track, I Have An Affair, was done at the world-famous Oceanway Recording Studios in Hollywood in May 2005.  It features Anthony Wilson (of the Diana Krall Quartet) on acoustic guitar.

Our faith in recording engineer Michael C. Ross has been well rewarded. Several of the musicians & studio staff commented that the sound of this session was the best they had ever heard at Audioplex. We believe that you, the listener, will agree 100% once you have listened to this album. He recorded in Singapore on multi-track analog 2 inch tape and mixed in LA at LA-FX onto 1/2 inch analog tape at 30 ips.