the best and how they were going to fit together, without having a structural point of reference to start with or aim towards. Sound on Sound acknowledged that it involved "a gigantic editing challenge, and the risk of not seeing the wood for the trees anymore." It was not possible to have Khan and the Western musicians in the room at the same time due to logistical reasons, so Brook improvised bedtracks with guitarist Robert Ahwai, percussionist James Pinker and Brook himself on infinite guitar, bass, keyboards and drum programming. He selected what he considered to be the best parts of these 24-track analogue recordings, and sampled and looped them on a Roland S770, triggered from his Atari/Notator sequencing system. These loops were then mixed to two tracks of another 24-track reel. A 24-track reel has a running time of 28 minutes, which meant that Brook had 21 tracks, with one having been sacrificed to SMPTE code, and each 28 minutes long, available for overdubs. Khan improvised three or four takes to each of the nine tracks, resulting in many hours of unedited material. Brook encountered another problem; whilst the two-track mixdown of looped backing track sounded too "loopy", the original bedtracks of Brook, Ahwai and Pinker sounded too rough and inconsistent to really work well with the vocals. Transferring sections of the vocals to the bedtrack 24-track did not work for that reason, so Brook decided to sample sections of the original bedtracks and transfer them to the 24-track vocal reel, and then overdub other instruments onto that. However, this was a problem because Brook had no idea what structure he was working towards. Brook said that "the best bits of the vocals were spread out all over the tape, and it was very hard to hear things in context or in proper sequence." What they then did was transfer sections of what they called the original master to the vocal master, and then do a mock-up, synchronised mix to DAT of the different sections that they liked, stopping the DAT every time they moved to the next section. They would then listen to the DAT mix to see if things worked in sequence. Brook noted that "it was a very slow process, because you could never let the multitrack tape run and say: “oh, this sounds good”, or “that transition doesn’t sound right.” However, because Brook had to