Download Includes 20-page PDF with Full Color Photos by Peter Buranzon (backstage, onstage), Notes, Lyrics

In November 2005 Jane Siberry invited David Elias & XING (pronounced ‘crossing’) to open her show at the San Francisco Great American Music Hall on O’Farrell St. downtown SF. The trio with David Elias (acoustic guitar, vocals, harmonica), Charlie Natzke (acoustic guitar, vocals), and Chris Kee (upright bass, vocals) had recently published what, in 2005 and still nouveau, was simply called a “Webcast”. They partnered through the recently established Apple Music iTunes online downloads. A very innovative interactive graphic music player with mouse-click controls was created using the webcast studio tracks and hosted online. Those studio tracks were released in 2005 on a Sketti Sandwich Productions DIY CD as “David Elias & XING”. The full 14 song studio master of that single morning session, engineered by Charlie Natzke directly to 8 tracks as DSD64 on Sonoma, was later mixed for stereo as DSD Wide by David Elias and mastered by Gus Skinas, then released in June, 2016 as “Acoustic Trio: DSD Sessions”. The DSD studio master is online to download at davideliasmusic.com. The PCM Remaster is available to hear or download on Bandcamp.

The all acoustic 3-part harmony trio had been appearing all over the SF Bay Area, from SF and East Bay down the San Mateo Coastal Hwy 1 coast as far as Santa Cruz. Regular shows were played at nefariously infamous places like The San Gregorio General Store, a roots home to many original Bay Area musicians and host of the annual Greenpeace Festival for several decades.

Performing from the GAMH stage in San Francisco was a welcomed opportunity to celebrate XING’s dedicated work at delivering pure acoustic sounds to live audiences. This trio would evolve to become David Elias & The CasualTees, a larger acoustic and electric band who captured audiences with their energetic soulful and always spontaneous renditions of Elias’s singer-songwriter styles, grafted from his roots in folk, bluegrass, country, rock/pop, R&B, celtic and other layers in between. They had the magnetic quality of simply having dangerously infectious fun onstage as they delivered spontaneous band inspired renditions of every song at every show. The first CasualTees were Charlie Natzke, Chris Kee, Peter Tucker, John Havard, Gary McArthur and Reid Dennis.

This is the second album release using the technique and tools developed by David Elias called Spectral Matching Mastering. Songs were mastered directly from the source DAT (16/44.1k) recordings captured off the GAMH soundboard during the show. The technique uses no 3rd party software/hardware/DAW/tools of any kind. It relies strictly on direct interaction with the open source ffmpeg and ffprobe bedrock tools for mastering.

The technique reverses the recording industry's stubborn habit of imposing steep brickwall filters on PCM masters as well as compression and other unnatural artifacts as far as the human ear and brain are concerned. The culprit behind the time distortions (smearing) and sound location confusion (pre-ringing echo) resuling in edgy D-i-G-iT-a-l sounding ear fatiguing results is the favortism given to the frequency domain at the expense of time distortion. Spectral Matching disowns rigid frequency perfection instead for the time domain using minimum phase linear filters and adhering much closer to the ambient nature of sound that reaches the human ear and brain.

As a result the original master/source is restored to the ambient air that existed when the recording was made, but typically gets masked, squashed, compressed with impulse echoes arriving before the pulse itself throughout.

All in all it makes for much more easy, natural, believeable listening. credits released July 12, 2026

All Songs by David Elias, ℗©2026, David Elias Music

David Elias: acoustic, vocal, harmonica

Charlie Natzke: acoustic, vocal

Chris Kee: upright bass, vocal