Late last year I started gathering together all the sounds/songs/sketches I’ve been collecting/writing/making over the last few years and arranged ten of them into an Emphemetry album that I’ve had in my head to make for about six years. Me and Jim (Cork, from The Little Explorer and Crash of Rhinos) started recording it properly at dub:rek in December. It was fecking cold. Dub:rek is situated on the third floor of an old dairy warehouse, where the brickwork is designed to keep the cold in rather than out.
This record is all about Derby at night. About wandering around when no-one or not many people are even awake let alone outside. I do and have done this a lot, and this record is what goes through my head when I’m there. It’s pretty quiet music, and dub:rek has loads of bands practicing all the time…so we made this record really late at night, or really early in the morning…basically any time when no-one else would be around. One day, it was -7 degrees outside, and probably colder inside, and we did a live take of a song in the big live room, and you could hear me shivering between lines.
We got most things done, but took the rest of the recording to Robbie at the Snug Recording Company because it was too cold at dub:rek to perform one of the last songs. My fingers wouldn’t work. Everything got taped on one Sunday afternoon there, and then we got drunk on Polish lager.
Speaking of booze, I was drunk in a museum last summer, and spotted that one of the violinists in the string quartet playing there was my old music teacher. I got it together enough to get her phone number, then they went and I finished off the free vine. Basically, I’d had a few sessions playing with Harry Cooper on violin, and wanted some strings on the album but knew of no-one and had no money. Luckily, Strictly4Strings play because they love to, not to get paid, so I ended up visiting them a few times with a score. The song I wanted them to play on has some strange and subtle time signature changes, and my musical notation is, to a professional, nonsensical bollocks. Violinist Karen Eveson was gold and invited me to her gaff in Long Eaton for a couple of evenings of getting the score to sound right, in time, on the beat, with all the necessary flourishes.
The night before I was supposed to be in Berlin with the finished album for mixing, I got the four of them to pop up to my new studio on the top floor of a mill next to a weir, and recorded the piece in two takes, before heading back to dub:rek, gone midnight, to record the guitars and edit it all together.
Basically, this record has been carried around all over the city for most of this winter just gone, and mostly at night…which wasn’t deliberate or pre-planned. It was just…necessary. I struggle to find superlatives that do enough justice to my thanks to Jim, Robbie, Sarah, Karen, Pete, Gary, George (who came to the mill on a Saturday afternoon to play flugelhorn), Claire (who popped up on a Sunday morning to play violin), and Harry (for helping me to understand what a violin could sound like on my recordings).
The mixing was done by Nils Frahm at Durton Studio in Berlin, and that was a whole other experience entirely…
