In April of 1994 Ma Ja Le began doing a series of performances at various coffee shops in Milwaukee, WI. The idea was to simply get together on stage and through improvisation, create compelling instrumental music which focused on texture and atmosphere as well as melody.

One of the important concepts of the group was the idea of "deep listening" where everyone in the band would be listening to each other intently and responding musically to what each other was doing. A kind of hyper sensitive reacting to the creation of sound. This is different than just playing ones musical part and hope it all comes off well.

Paul Vnuk Jr and Christopher Short had been working on the local scene with various rock bands and had found their penchant for long instrumental explorations tedious to the other musicians in the band who thought the idea of instrumental interludes / jamming was too out of fashion and wanted to tunes more well suited to drinking beer. Heck, to be fair, this was the era of Nirvana and Pearl Jam's Ten album.

The first cafe to open it's doors to the newly formed group was Actwerks Cafe which was on 2611 E Hampshire St, Milwaukee, WI 53211. Unfortunately the cafe didn't survive, however at that time there were no Starbucks in Milwaukee yet, and Fuel Cafe and Alterra were just ideas being dreamt up. Interesting to note, the Actwerks cafe, was first of its kind in what would become a boom industry in the city during the next two decades. It was a great place to perform and Ma Ja Le played there regularly.

Another place of regular residency for the group was the Lava Java cafe, which was located on 722 E Burliegh St in Milwaukee. This proved fortunate for the group as it was located two doors down from one of Milwaukee's new age bookstores, Dark Star.

Dark Star books and music was owned by Stu Daniels who had also been a promoter and DJ. Stu graciously accepted copies of Dreams in the Orchards of Saturn for sale within the store, and took an interest in the band. This proved fortunate as through Stu the band was introduced to Steve Roach, Robert Rich and Vidna Obmana (aka Dirk Serries), all three very well respected and international recording artists in the electronic music genre. Later, the introduction to Steve Roach would lead to him producing their second album Imaginarium.

Dreams in the Orchards of Saturn (DITOOS) was culled from the first four live performances of the group, which consisted of Paul Vnuk Jr on Keyboards and Percussion, Christopher Short on Guitar, Flutes and Synthesizer, Steve Miscovi on Percussion and Lannette Newson on drums. There is no overdubbing the recordings were done on a two track DAT and were originally presented as recorded without any EQ or compression. As this is essentially a live recording at various points you can hear the squeaky door of the cafe opening and people talking all which adds to the music in an interesting way.

Back in those days hard disc recording was still out of reach for most independent musicians so in a massive 12 hour session the DAT tapes were transferred to digital and a CD master created.

Fast forward to 2014. Technology continues to race ahead, the internet allows for both on demand streaming as well as high definition download of music. What was once a novelty, has become commonplace, and some of the early digital albums have sonically faded along with that novelty.

Since their early days, Ma Ja Le have become known for their hi fidelity recordings and excellent sound design work which included work done for Sony/Sonic Foundry's ACID software as ACID loop libraries.

Compared to their other albums Imaginarium and Seed, DITOOS sort of sounded like the odd one out. All the elements were there, but was kind of like a faded photograph. It was decided to gently bring DITOOS up to the quality of the other two recordings.

This remaster simply adds a bit of that polish, mainly equalization and compression to bring this music forward into the now. We hope this change will help to give a fresh appreciation for this work.