ANNIE KNITTING. KEYBOARDS WAITING.

We’ve been going about recording this album in a more nomadic fashion than we’re used to. First we did pre-production at our practice space and at Annie’s home studio in Greenpoint, but she has cats so I couldn’t spend that much time there without having an asthma attack. Then we did a few days of tracking at a studio called ‘Salt flats’ in Dumbo, which was, incidentally, down the hallway from our old Boggs practice space, Ah, memories. We did a bunch of tracking at Amber Studio in Manhattan and at Erika’s house, before moving to L.A to do ever-more tracking (mainly vocals) at Thom’s studio. After L.A., Annie, Erika, and I took a two-week break, giving Thom time to do plenty of re-amping, comping, and finessing-in-general. He flew back to NYC for Thanksgiving because his wife’s family is here, and so we took that opportunity to set up a studio at his mother-in-law’s house on the Upper West Side. But we didn’t want to overstay our welcome there, so we moved to Erika’s house about a week ago, and have been hanging out here in her living room ever since. She baked a pumpkin pie this morning that we’ve all been thoroughly enjoying. She also makes good coffee. That’s pretty much all we require of a studio.

We’re going to be here until December 22nd, after that we’ll take a two-week holiday break then start up again in L.A at Thom’s house. We’ll be there for a just few days before moving on to an undetermined location to do mixing. We’ve got a mastering date set for January 20th at Golden in Ventura, so that’s our deadline, but we still have four songs to record, so that’s a bit stressful. Two of those songs were written a while ago, but we never got around to tracking them, and the other two were written during our November break. Hopefully no one will have any new songs pop into their heads until February.

We’re all thrilled about how things are going though. Thom is an amazing gear-head synth-geek genius, so we feel truly lucky to have found him, although we didn’t really find him, Bjorn (the B in P.B.J) actually suggested Thom for us, so we’re indebted to him for that tip. None of us could imagine making this particular album with anyone else. We were looking for someone who had the ability to find a way of expanding our sound while continuing to honor our imposed limitations of being an all-keyboard band. We still don’t have guitars, we still don’t have a live drummer, but Thom has managed to help us make yet another entirely keyboard-driven album without it ever sounding tedious. At least, I don’t think it sounds tedious! Our keyboard sounds came from a long list of vintage synths that we either owned or borrowed from friends, our beats are all from vintage drum machines again. I don’t think that there is a track on the whole album that hasn’t been tweaked in some way through re-amping, pedals, or whatever else it is Thom is doing when we’re not looking. A magician never reveals his secrets. We also spend a lot of time listening to Suicide, which seems to have become more of an influence on this album than we ever imagined it would be, but there is something about Suicide’s powerful simplicity that resonates with the kind of aesthetic we’re going for, which is a much different aesthetic than our last album.

With ‘The Bird of Music’, we struggled with trying to reconcile our desire to hear a sense of space with our greater desire for everything to sound lush and layered, and when that confusion was coupled with our inability to effectively articulate what we wanted, the consequence was finding ourselves with an only half-achieved goal. It was our own fault though, we’re still learning as we go along obviously, and the forming of a cohesive idea about who we are, what we’re trying to say, and how we want to sound never fully jelled until we went out on the road for two years and were exposed to the world. Not that we were sheltered or something, but both of our past records were conceived and produced from within this little world that we created where any whimsical fancy of ours was explored and included. Like, we wrote a song about horse races, about calculators, teenage Mexican boys, etc. And its not like we don’t think those songs are great, but we were kind of stylistically all over the place. We’d have some emotionally evocative song like ‘Through the Backyards’ on the same record as ‘The Disco Song.’ And for me, our live shows always felt almost schizophrenic because at one point we’d be playing a song like ‘Lark,’ which has all these gothic moments, and then play an 808-laden dance song about media politics the next minute.

ERIKA ON FORTUNE COOKIE BREAK

This album is much more introspective, but I mean introspective as a group as opposed to individually. The three of us have become so close these past few years from constantly being together that we’ve become more similar people as a result. It would be impossible at this point to not write songs which all complement one another’s because we’re all coming from the same place emotionally, and since we’ve all shared the same experiences, we naturally are expressing similar things in our music. It’s also become impossible for us to hide what our songs are about from one another. All new lyrics are always met with an interrogation starting with ‘that’s about so and so!’ with knowing smiles, finger-pointing, and blushing. In the past, I felt slightly embarrassed about recording our music and publicizing it before because I wasn’t sure if I felt comfortable with opening up our private world to people who would judge us, but this is even worse! This new album is like our shared diary, so we’re very protective of it, and are being very careful with it.
I just asked Thom to describe this album in five words and he says:
‘pulses, gust-of-wind, gossamer, rustling leaves, minimal’
That was not what I expected to hear! Also not five words.
But I like that description. I think its kind of hilarious that what I would have described as ‘loud’ and/or ‘powerful’ he would describe as ‘gossamer.’ Shit. I guess we don’t really know how to rock.

Another big difference for me with making this album is that for the first time I’ve been able to put forth 100% of my effort into doing just music. During this point in the process with TBOM, I was still trying to juggle my astronomy studies with my music, which was stressful for me. Consequently, I feel that both suffered from my inability to choose one. This time, I’ve decided to dedicate all of my time to the album, and put science aside for the time being. But I still feel a deep longing for it-studying science gives me a much different feeling of excitement than getting to play music does–I guess because its much more challenging for me than writing music–although the high that I get from suddenly understanding a physics formula is actually quite similar to the high that I get from writing a song. Both produce a sense of accomplishment. But I miss my friends at Columbia, I miss being in class and going to lectures…at the same time, I also realize that reaching the goal of this album turning out how I want it to requires that I be nothing less than fully present, and fully participating. I can’t be daydreaming about life on other planets if I want the album to sound good. I know this because there are so many decisions that were made on TBOM that I don’t remember being present for, and I know that I would have been more thoughtful about those decisions if I hadn’t been so freaked out about finals. Being able to do nothing but concentrate on our album has been good for me, and good for the album, but alas, bad for research.

We’ve been watching a lot of Youtube videos at the end of each night. Thom is a big fan of Juana Molina and Imogen Heap and after watching their videos I’ve started to obsess about doing more on stage now, despite the fact that this album doesn’t call for real-time sampling or vocoders. But I’m smitten by these talented one-woman-bands and secretly fantasize about what we would sound like if we all did as much. Imagine a band of three Juana Molinas!

Besides even that, I’m just smitten by musicians who are actually good at their instruments. I’m not even trying to be funny or cynical or something, its just that there is a lot of amateurish stuff out there, and I know I’m personally guilty of contributing to that. I saw Marnie Stern recently and though I’m not a huge fan of her music, I left the show being so impressed with her undeniable talent at playing guitar. I want to be like that, better at playing my keyboard, better at programming drum machines, better at doing more on stage, better at singing and though that seems like a pretty obvious thing for a musician to want to do, for me, its not. Up until we started touring all the time, I’ve regarded being in this band as a kind of highly involved excurricular activity or as an after-work lady’s club, one that gradually took over my life until suddenly I found myself managing my own record label and writing ‘musician’ in as my profession on my landing cards. But five years later, I think the imposter syndrome is finally wearing off, which probably means that the album will tank.
I’m ok with that too though. I’ve finally made something I’m proud of that isn’t lasagna.
xxH

HEATHER D’ANGELO’s band, AU REVOIR SIMONE, followed the 2006 release of the ‘Verses Of Comfort, Assurance & Salvation ‘ E.P. with a debut full-length,The Bird Of Music’ in 2007 for which they toured extensively throughout Europe, North America and Japan. A student at Columbia University, Heather also keeps a science blog called ‘Hello, Poindexter’.
ARS
HELLOPOINDEXTER.COM

Chris-I think what makes recording at a place like Planet Roc so unique is all of the things that happen once you get past the obvious. Once you get past simply being in a unique city like Berlin, once you get past being in a place that itself feels virtually removed from the city, once you get past working in a place that’s so rundown and old and get beyond its rich and dark history, another layer of details, subconscious details, start to reveal themselves.

Matthew-One of the main reasons for opting to record in Berlin as opposed to London was that we were keen to really immerse ourselves in the process of making an album away from the distractions and comforts of home. Here, even the studio is situated in an outlying district of the city. The long tram ride takes you from the lively student area of Freidrichshain past an imposing power station to the sprawling former DDR radio complex where Planet Roc is located. Berlin is a city with an abundance of space and this is also true of the studio itself. You can wander from the live room down corridors, into dusty boiler rooms and alcoves, past doors perhaps unopened for a decade or more.

Chris-The place is mental. And it’s mental in a real way, not a way where you WANT it to be crazy, the place just is nuts. Period. We got a tour of the whole complex from a groundskeeper who was here from the beginning. He’s very old, very tall, and very creepy. speaks not a word of English.

Matthew-In a particularly adventurous mood we ventured into the outlying administrative buildings. Here the sense of a world abandoned is intense, floor upon floor, room upon room left empty, the floor strewn with wires and broken glass.

Chris-I guess when the wall came down the people there just literally stood up and left. There are tons of documents and stuff all over the place. I took some. I also found records/receipts/purchase orders for microphones going all the way back to 1955. Crazy.

Chris-The place is old, and not just old in the physical sense, it has the never-ending reminder of what once was there in every inch of the place. The most consuming thing for me though, is how just so little of the place is actually ‘operational’. Pretty much it’s just the one or two buildings that are being used and the rest are still completely defunct, destroyed, and abandoned. And as a result of this, you get this crazy situation where nature meets technology or an ancient technology, I suppose. Overgrown lawns, wandering tree branches, they all have infiltrated these old structures, and even threaten the ones in use. All in all it’s very creepy. The best pop culture metaphor I can use is the TV show ‘LOST’. Kinda mysterious sci-fi weirdness that oozes with a sense of ‘what was’ here, but is now being repurposed.

Matthew-Ten minutes spent in these modern ruins has you yearning for the warmth of the control room.

Chris-All of this sensory overload no doubt makes its way into the music, and the best part is that it does so without much effort. You’re just ‘in it’ so there is no need to really find inspiration at Planet Roc. I was just telling the band last night how great it was that it just came together without much thought about it, where as, if we had recorded in New York, or London, we probably would have had to have made a more conscious point of trying to get the vibes right.

Matthew-The atmosphere is good. The sense of camaraderie high and the appearance now and then of a mysterious figure in dark glasses and trilby (the ghost of a former Stasi spy with a Ray Charles fetish?) ensure that we get suitably hyped up for each performance.

Chris-The studio itself is amazing. The spaces are huge, and the acoustics are unlike anywhere else I’ve ever been. Its not just the sheer size–or lack there of–of some of the rooms, its’ the classic German approach to doing nothing 75%. The sound of these rooms, just are correct. For example, the largest room: It boasts 35 foot ceilings, it’s very big; but it sounds so controlled. That’s because throughout the Funkhaus, where they built these large rooms, they built another on top. They literally mirrored the rooms above so there is a 35 foot ‘resonating chamber’ above the live room.

It leads to the inevitable interesting drum sound, whether it’s the massive live room or recording kick drum, snare drum and cymbals one at a time in the dungeon, or the reality-bending, ‘dead room’. There are also all these East-German microphones. One in particular was known for being Hitler’s mic of choice for public speaking. It’s a huge tube microphone, with a small little capsule on the top. The staff has a piece of tape on it labeled “Hitler bottle”.  You literally, just aren’t going to get something like that anywhere else. These were standard issue at the Funkhaus during its heyday, and lo and behold, they still sound absolutely amazing.

Matthew-We wanted to capture as much as possible the feeling of a band playing together live in a room. We set up in the main room huddled around the drum kit at the bottom of some extravagant stairs, once used to capture atmospherics for the radio plays recorded here. Every day we approach a new song and by the end of each day we have vocals and the main body of the performance done. It’s a new method for us but is the best way of keeping the excitement up and allowing us all to focus. The inherent edginess of a place like planet roc manifests itself in some way in each performance.

Chris-Whether it’s the history, the scale, or even just the odd lighting combined with the horrific design aesthetic of the 1950′s, there is a constant undercurrent that tells you try more, or maybe just try less; and let it be what it is, putting faith in the studio to let it stand on its own.

Chris Zane-Is an always hard working, over worked, sometimes neurotic, often irritated, producer and engineer and one of the funniest people we’ve ever met. Recently, he’s worked on or produced The Walkmen, White Rabbits, Shy Child, Asobi Seksu and Harlem Shakes.

Matthew Swinnerton and The Rakes are well-read, well-traveled, well-dressed and have released two well-received albums of art-infused rangy post-punk for which they have toured relentlessly with the likes of Franz Ferdinand and the Klaxons.
The Rakes.
Download the Rakes at Other Music Here.