totally rad unconventional recording spaces for totally meaningful indie bands (besides a church)

129. Pete Doherty's gaff

129. Pete Doherty's guff

130. The Isle of Naboombu

131. The Tardis

111, 116, 117 are duplicates

― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, May 22, 2012 4:31 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

perhaps the most excellent "your mom" zing i've ever come across

132. the set of Two & a Half Men

133. the living room of the last house holding out in a gentrified neighborhood of condos

134. A battery chicken farm

hate on, haters, but I know a specific cave in the Agiofarago gorge in Crete where I totally want to record an album someday

― cosi fan whitford (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned),

was this the same cave serena-maneesh recorded their last album in?

I feel like I'm hearing more and more of these retarded "my recording setup is more authentic than yours" stories every day

Matmos to thread.

there was a good portlandia sketch about that this season.

was this the same cave serena-maneesh recorded their last album in?

turns out it was a difft cave

i'd like to hear an indie rock album that was recorded underwater.

135. Great Lake Swimmers -- The (self-titled) album was recorded over several months in an abandoned grain silo in Southern Ontario. Jim James also recorded his "At Dawn" vocals in a silo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oihxOcRh6wc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bLHg2c1a34

136. Fleet Foxes -- Blue Ridge Mountains at the Grand Palais
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1tbX_NJn98

137-40. Sigur Ros, Beruit, Bon Iver and Lambchop in some indiscriminate localles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3uQl-8ywKE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYwmDJigB1o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5Swa9CYgRk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ8sW_kovBs

141. Avett Bros in a Wyoming gondola:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlSZzKcoFp0

141. Tom Waits -- Mule Variations; some produced in a hen house.

Not indie; but props for Kitaro for recording and sampling all over creation.

I feel like I'm hearing more and more of these retarded "my recording setup is more authentic than yours" stories every day

http://ayup.co.uk/avina/twoyork.jpg

in 2013 the most authentic recording setup is in bed, on a macbook with garageband. the new lo-fi.

are these albums ever 100% authentic? I mean what if som eindie-folk act records an album in their great-grandfather's depression-era cabin in Maine, but when they go back and listen to the tape, they realize it sounds exactly like a studio recording, so they dub in some howling coyotes and creaking doors and crackling fireplaces to make it sound more rustic (and to justify the effort of hauling their gear into the woods)? in that case I think I would delete all of their albums from my hard drive and unsubscribe from their youtube channel regardless of what I thought of their music. I don't care if your intentions are pure: if you build your own banjolin and play the saw with a violin bow, you have no right to fuck with your audience's expectations, ever.

it broke my heart when I found out that only 3 of the 11 tracks on Movietone's The Sand and the Stars album were actually recorded on a beach, and some of the beachiest-sounding titles ("Ocean Song", "The Sand and the Stars") were recorded indoors. but at least they had the decency to include that information in the liner notes.

I even worry about more minor breaches of authenticity. part of the appeal of Mark Hollis's solo album is how immersive it is — you can hear the creaking of Mark's stool and the shuffle of footsteps on wooden floorboards, and it feels like you're right there with him in the studio. but what if even those mundane sounds were dubbed in from a sound effects disc? I don't care if the man is a legend; that would be the instant death of his credibility, as far as this listener is concerned.

the Mule Variations "hen house" is actually a room that used to be a henhouse but was in use as a storage room when he got to the studio. He liked the way it sounded. I've recorded in it, people call it "the Waits room" now.

looking fwd to the first album recorded inside a loaf of artisanal seed bread

the Mule Variations "hen house" is actually a room that used to be a henhouse but was in use as a storage room when he got to the studio. He liked the way it sounded. I've recorded in it, people call it "the Waits room" now.

so it wasn't one of these?

http://i46.tinypic.com/206le0x.jpg

I used to think Tom Waits was the realest motherfucker alive. but now? *sigh*

Supposedly once a chicken coop:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-T7JTbUqCCJ8/UJ6By4DMDXI/AAAAAAAAAyQ/9CgRBl2_Ue8/s1600/3trackshack.jpg

xp some next-level chicken housing there

I'm ok with Link Wray, but AnCo are a bunch of hucksters, apparently:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campfire_Songs_(album)

The album comprises five individual songs played back to back and recorded in one take. Although it was the middle of November and thus very cold, the recording was made outside on a screen porch in Maryland, using three Sony MiniDisc players with Sony ECM-MS907 microphones placed strategically around the band. Ambient sound from the surrounding area was also captured and added later.

I really need to start a blacklist of artists who pull this shit.

aw, i love that album. i don't know if they are "hucksters" really, even then they weren't considered lo-fi purists.

this really doesn't seem like any sort of dastardly artifice to me. i guess there are levels at which records that somehow super-foregrounded the mythical genesis of their record might be deflated by revelations about them being made in a studio but it just seems like both of those things - surrounding your record w/a certain narrative/context, or importing ambient sound for atmosphere & affiliation - are legitimate parts of a group's toolkit. it's like cinema. it's okay that it wasn't filmed in an actual remote village. it's okay that it never really happened. i think there are probably more ~problematic dynamics~ involved in like shitty mercury rev records that apply effects to a piano track than there are w/somebody making a collage & putting a name on it.

while we are here sometimes it is nice to go to bat for a cool record & anyone who likes sorta field recorded nice group records might enjoy this tenniscoats record, temporacha, on room 40, which they recorded just kinda out & about & which is very gentle & musical but also subject to the ebbs and flows of traffic and nearby ambient activity. i think there is maybe a better school of unshowy "naturalism" in some japanese stuff - cf reiko kudo records where the song stops when the phone rings or dishwasher starts, katsura yamauchi lps where he records intermittent sax motifs separated by the noise of water flowing.

http://room40.org/store/image/cache/data/tenniscoats-temporacha-450x450.jpg

http://blog-imgs-31-origin.fc2.com/h/y/d/hydrargentum/rokuon02.jpg

btw movietone fans might be deflated to know that a bunch of the non beach songs on their records are recorded in a library, iirc, fwiw.

lol. libraries are best known for being the opposite of the beach.

aw, i love that album. i don't know if they are "hucksters" really, even then they weren't considered lo-fi purists.

If you record an album in your backyard and title it CAMPFIRE SONGS, it had better be as pure as it gets, no matter what the rest of your discography sounds like.

Virginia Astley didn't really record From Gardens Where We Feel Secure in one take on a lazy summer's day:

http://www.virginiaastley.com/discography/albums/html/gardens_03.html

The sound effects used on the album were recorded at various times between April and June 1982 at locations in and around Moulsford, Oxfordshire.

so that makes...

AnCo
Movietone
Tom Waits
Aerosmith
Virginia Astley
PAT FINN

If you have any more artists to add to my least, feel free to implicate them itt. I already have some major suspicions about Deep Listening Band, but I don't want to be too hasty here.

*my list

If you record an album in your backyard and title it CAMPFIRE SONGS, it had better be as pure as it gets, no matter what the rest of your discography sounds like.

― first geir, it's alright (hongro hongro go faster faster) (unregistered), Sunday, April 14, 2013 4:10 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is like the homely & bucolic equivalent of I LIKE MY RAPPERS PACKING HEAT right

i remember relating some recording mythos to a guy at a party in college -- i think it was about the crystal castles guy recording in icelandic churches -- and he became very hostile, saying "so? so what? does that make it sound better somehow? what is the point of that?" one of the worst conversations of all time.

what if it turned out that ... bon iver wasn't really heartbroken

shocking cctv footage reveals modern comforts of bon iver's "mountain hideaway"

he had netflix streaming

there were two whole days when he was just having a nice vacation

something sad to me about people buying campfire songs & then being disappointed that they cannot actually smell sausages cooking while they listen to it

DEAR ANIMAL COLLECTIVE
I RECENTLY PURCHASED YOUR CAMPFIRE SONGS ALBUM AND WAS VERY DISAPPOINTED TO FI

the French village in which it was recorded has no "Main Street" at all. That would mean "Hand Street" over there anyway. FRAUDS

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51JA6YQJ4YL.jpg

faulting all these stupid hat & vest bands for being inauthentic about their retro authenticity kitsch is just as dopey, imo. i imagine that most of their fans just like the songs, not so much the idea that they're really real about the appalachian folk tradition or w/e. it's musical steempunk.

stones a key text supporting the CONCEIT RULES/AUTHENTICITY DROOLS thesis

i recently wrote about that in the lumineers thread!

although my thesis was a bit different. i distinguished between different kinds of inauthenticity, and how some are better than others. it's a fraught issue, and a key one, i think, that people who think a lot about music get tripped up on. The Lumineers i'm sure there is a thread about the issue of authenticity somewhere in the archives...

At the time of recording [Tales from Topographic Oceans], heavy metal group Black Sabbath were producing their album Sabbath Bloody Sabbath in the studio next door. Singer Ozzy Osbourne recalled that placed in the Yes studio was a model cow with electronic udders and a small barn to give the room an "earthy" feel.

i forget, did the beach boys record all of their music on a beach?

not impressed unless they did it all whilst surfing

lol.

didn't the boredoms record that piano bit at the start of seadrum on the beach

via wiki
Parts of the album was pieced together from previously recorded material, some of which included guitarist Yamamoto, who was no longer in the band. As its name implies, parts of the album were recorded by the ocean, and some audio was recorded directly underwater.[6]