Monday, November 05, 2007
Monday 22st October 2007
Started work on a dangerous project this morning: taking Bec's fragile, forty second long pean to lost love and memory, Byker Bridge, and putting fifteen distorted, overdriven, high-gained, fragged guitars over it. In my head I know it will work. I might have to put everything through the bathroom too.
Saturday 20th October 2007
The deeper I get into this project, the closer I get to something that has been eluding me from the outset: how the overall feel of the record should be. The songs and voice are there, so all I should essentially have to do is press record. But the stuff that Bec and I have been discussing for each track have been much more ambitious... a sparse, barren landscape with an occasional splash of lush colour... at times dry and warm, a vintage aesthetic, with rough edges kept in the mix (albeit discreetly in the background)... interesting sounds. I'm still trying to nail down a definitive definition. St. James' Infirmary Revisted is the closest I've got to this sound so far: a combination of mellotron, sax and choral effects skirting the periphery of the song itself, with hours spent paring down anything unnecessary. Agonising whether I'm over cooking it, drowning things out. Reminds me of doing Sinead and Ode. All it needs now is the percussion, for which I am going to have to find some chains. Heavy, slave ship ones.
Friday 19th October 2007
Recorded bass saxophone and some other deep wind instruments, the names of which have slipped my mind. Becca played a blinder, despite the Macintosh having a fit of the headstaggers. Bec said computers could pick up on anxiety, that it was all in the airwaves. Got two definitive takes on SJIR. To hell with editing, I'll leave them both in panned hard left and right. The Optimist's Song was harder to nail: but the sketches are there. I cursed the crashed G4 and felt more like an amateur than I ever have. It's one thing to mess up with friends, when you can joke and say "do it again" like The Berzerker does, quite another when you have a session musician doing take after take while Logic eats it all. Give me reel to reel and fag ash on the tape heads any day. Formica lacquered consoles. Asbestos pop shields. Clarinet on
the Piaf cover of Hymne a l'amour is spot on, though I think the My Bloody Valentine interpretation of Jaques Brel's Ne Me Quitte Pas will remain the foreign language track for the LP. Loose talk of Becca joining Bec live. It's going to be an all-girl set up. One final thing: when recording the bass sax I put one of the ambient microphones up the chimney. This came after hours spent pouring over the internet's advice on the recording the instrument, and then becoming angry at the feeling that I had to follow some stuck up engineer's pious sermon on high frequency absorbtion ratios. So I stuck the thing up the brick lined chimney on the far side of the room. Worked a treat.
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