!!!
Mar 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Kristi Kates
Sacramento, Brooklyn and Nashville were the cities to be in during the recording of !!!'s latest album. Anyone wandering into the right place at the right time might've lucked upon a floating snippet of new !!! tunes without knowing it, as the band spent months careening in and out of three different studios to piece together what has become Myth Takes (Warp, 2007).
With bandmates living on opposite coasts, song ideas were developed in several different ways. “Either something will start out as a jam, and we'll all craft it into a song,” !!! guitarist Mario Andreoni explains, “or one of us will have a very specific idea, and we'll ask the others for contributions.” The musicians used both e-mail and such file-sharing services as YouSendIt to send their sounds zipping back and forth across the country before hitting the studio. They tried out an overseas online collaboration as well. “We did this thing on the Internet where you send a sound file to some place in Berlin,” bassist Justin Vandervolgen chimes in. “They play it through a special reverb chamber and then send it back to you. It's very weird and cool.”
Not all long-distance band relationships work out, but !!! is dedicated enough to make it happen. “Since we live apart, it just became the method that we work in,” Andreoni says. “We did a lot on our own for about six months, then recorded the album in chunks. There was so much logistical stuff to figure out that if we weren't as serious as we are, it wouldn't have worked.”
After doing preproduction ideas remotely, the eight-member band agreed to meet up in their various home-base cities. In Sacramento, the band tracked at renowned budget studio The Hangar, which offers more than 100 microphones — including some from Neumann, Earthworks and Wunder Audio. “The Hangar is an amazing place,” Andreoni enthuses. “Geoff Daking makes great custom boards that aren't commonly used, and there's one at The Hangar, so we recorded straight to Pro Tools from their Daking console.”
In Brooklyn, !!! recorded and mixed at The Brothers facility, working in Apple Logic with bassist Vandervolgen as engineer. And in Nashville, the octet experienced its most down-home setup, temporarily installing a makeshift Pro Tools studio in the basement of a rented house. But for matter-of-fact Vandervolgen, the equipment wasn't key. “For the most part, studio equipment is accessible to most people,” he explains. “We use the same tools everyone else does. Recording, for us, has more to do with songwriting. On this album, we made a conscious effort to write real songs as opposed to jams with vocals.”
Certain gear does inspire song ideas for !!!, though. “Tyler [Pope, guitar/keyboards] and I are both into really odd effects,” Andreoni says with a laugh, “Old Neutron stuff, old delays, [Roland] Space Echoes — we used 'em all.” On “A New Name,” they tweaked Vandervolgen's outboard equipment to approximate a distinctive Leslie speaker sound, running his bass through a Lexicon effects unit, pushing up the tremolo and setting the auto-pan feature in time with the song's tempo while running one side of the EQ hot on the treble and the other side heavy on the bass. “That's how we got that cool spinning effect,” Vandervolgen explains. Meanwhile, “Must Be the Moon” features Pope using alternate guitar tunings, a tremolo effect and a plethora of noisy feedback. And “Sweet Life” makes the most of reverb and delay. “We're getting more into experimenting with noises,” Andreoni says, “and it really fell together when we started playing the songs live.”
There will be plenty of opportunity for !!! to hone those songs over the next year, as the band already started touring Europe in February and is scheduled to continue through June. “The album has a really nice overall feel to it,” Vandervolgen says, “so now it's all about focusing on the songs.”
But Andreoni can't help but concentrate on the busy time ahead. “This year's going to be absolutely insane,” he says. “It's daunting, but we're totally looking forward to it.”
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