Rake’s Guitarist Matthew Swinnerton & Producer Chris Zane’s ‘Lost’ on Planet Roc

The second of our two part profile on East-Berlin’s Planet Roc Studios in the Funkhaus.
Here in Pt. II, Chris Zane and Matthew Swinnerton discuss recording The Rakes new album there.
Read Pt. I Here.

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.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 16:10. It is filed under In The Studio With..., THITH Zine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.