Independent scenes were popping up all over the US and UK in the '80s and '90s. Labels like Touch & Go and Merge started in spare bedrooms. Simple Machines went so far as to give away their Mechanic's Guide, which demystified the process of recording and distributing your own music. The DIY spirit was everywhere, eventually even giving birth to magazines like Tape Op. Northern Europe, however, was another story. What we take for granted simply didn't exist in countries like Denmark. In a rules-based society, traditionally rooted in Jante Law (the idea that there is a pattern of group behavior), it was utterly revolutionary for Jesper "Yebo" Reginal to start the Crunchy Frog label, in 1994, pre-Internet, with no owner's manual. With the signing of The Raveonettes, the subsequent release of their acclaimed Whip It On, and a follow up with the massive international dance hit, "Move Your Feet," by Junior Senior, things went to the next level. As a monster drummer, Yebo's impressive CV includes time with Tothe International, Junior Senior, Heavy Trash (with Jon Spencer), Danish legends Psyched Up Janis and, along with Tambourine Studio's Per Sunding, he's been "putting the 'urf' back in 'surf,' since 1999" in the instrumental supergroup Tremolo Beer Gut. The label recently hosted a 20-year anniversary party, selling out Copenhagen's Pumpehuset. Nearly 1000 people gathered to celebrate, drinking bespoke Mikkeller beer, and Charles Smith wine, made specially for the event, as bands played until the sun came up, proving Crunchy Frog is his greatest accomplishment.
When did you start the label?
In '94, with my bandmates in THAU, which consisted of three guys named Jesper, and my brother Ulrik. I'm the only one who still has an active role. "Crunchy Frog," is a Monty Python reference. Originally we just wanted to put out our own records, and it just grew from there. My wife, Jessica [Tolf Vulpius] has been there pretty much since the beginning, as a consultant, doing booking, and many other things. First unpaid, then extremely underpaid, then as an employee, like the rest of us.
Crunchy Frog's studio is called Kondi Frost — what does that does that mean?
"Kondi" means your physical condition; your cardio fitness. "Frost" means frost. In Danish it sounds kind of poetic. When we signed the band Superheroes, Thomas Troelsen [singer, now a well-known international pop song writer] was just 15, so his parents had to sign the contract. His mother had a strong northern Jutland country accent. Thomas said she'd always call us "those nice guys from Kondi Frost." She was thinking "crunchy frog," but she was saying "kondi frost," because those are Danish words. We thought, "Man, that's a much better name for the label!" and wished we could change to it. So when we started to do in-house recording we thought it would seem unprofessional [to the public] that we were actually just recording here at the office. So we put "Recorded at Kondi Frost" on the first big thing we got credit for.
Plus there's a great "cold and Nordic" naming tradition with places like Polar [ABBA's studio in Stockholm].
Yeah, and it's also got the energetic thing. It sounds like a sports drink.
How did the studio start?
We had been going to other studios, like Tambourine. It was great, because they had all of that Neve equipment, everything just sounded good, and we still learned to work the knobs. The engineer there was working 14-hour days, so eventually we told him he was crazy, to get some sleep, and we'd try it ourselves. In 2002, we had just released records by Junior Senior and The Raveonettes. We had a Christmas party with them, and Superheroes — who were even bigger than those bands at that time — The Tremolo Beer Gut, and The Mopeds. We actually made something like $5,000. We didn't know how to divide it up though. More people came to see Superheroes, but Junior Senior were big too. Should we divide it evenly? By the number of band members? That might be weird. At the end of the day, since nobody would get that much, we asked if we could just buy some recording equipment and editing stuff, which would make production less expensive for everyone. Everybody thought it sounded better than just getting 300 kroner [$52]. We hadn't thought about starting a studio, and didn't want to run one, but now we had this money, and an extra storage room. Having been schooled on top gear at Tambourine, we had a lot to think about, but we decided we could at least do some vocals, guitar overdubs, and editing. At the beginning of 2003 we were up and running. We got the Pro Tools system, which we still use.
What version of Pro Tools is it?
It's old! Version 5.3.1. When a newer version was coming out, the Pro Tools experts in Copenhagen, at Cyber Farm, said, "Frankly, that old system works better! It never crashes." And it never does! We use it for tracking because it works great. These days my brother [Ulrik] and I have laptops, running Pro Tools 10, good plug-ins, Mboxes, and a home studio setting where we can edit in the box. That first location really had decent acoustics, and was well-damped by our inventory. Being surrounded by a lot of records is a nice environment to record in.
Eventually you moved [the Copenhagen neighborhood of] Vesterbro?
...in 2009. The main room was smaller, and not as nice as the other one we had, where we were able to set up drums and record everything in the same room. But in the new space, we had all these extra rooms — for better isolation — and we set up a [dedicated control room]. Also, the smaller mix room had an odd, unexpected advantage. Sometimes it's terrible to be working with a whole band, all pitching in with ideas of how their instruments should be a little bit louder or more prominent, or having different opinions. Most bands don't really agree on the finer details. We couldn't fit many people in that room, so it became necessary to have those talks in advance, before mixing. When we moved there, we bought more equipment, and enough Shure mics to properly track drums. We eventually had 16 channels, but only four good-sounding ones.
The Focusrites?
Yeah, I love how they sound.
How did you track drums with so few "good" channels?
On many Tambourine recordings, they were going for a retro sound. You can hear it on the early Cardigans and Eggstone records. Lots of those recordings only used four mics. We'd start by just mic'ing up the kit, moving things a little farther away and seeing how it sounded. Or maybe we'd cut some cardboard, to shield something off, to get a closer sound — solving problems like that is fun. We could fit a drum kit very tightly in the larger of the two small rooms to get a really tight sound, but we actually did nothing to change the acoustics in there. We'd use office dividers we [use as gobos]. We bought them cheap and put feet on them. Sometimes bleed was our friend though. Certainly with the band I play drums in, The Tremolo Beer Gut. I like reading about legendary recordings and finding out how they did so much with so little. [Tambourine's] Tove mixed a song for Junior Senior called "Itch You Can't Scratch." It's different [from the rest of the album]. He only used one mic on the drums, and it sounds fuckin' great, you know? That's what's nice about the way that they do things at Tambourine. They really appreciate all the analog stuff, but they don't have any rules.
Sure, whatever works!
When The Tremolo Beer Gut recorded there in '99, they probably hadn't used the tape machine in a year, so we decided to. We mixed it the old way: four people around the desk. Having to remember to mute in the right sequence creates mixes you probably would have corrected if you were in Pro Tools, because it wasn't quite right. But with that style of music and recording, if you listen to the old records that you really dig, there's always something that's a bit too loud, or way too loud, and that's something that you really love about it.
The happy accidents.
Of course we had a perfect take of one of our songs that we accidentally erased. So now we're like, "Now that we've got all the tracking done, let's just put it into Pro Tools and make a safety copy."
Like many studios, it's seems like Kondi Frost was started out of economy.
We had a feeling that there were many things we could just do in our own space, not only with recording, but also with artwork. I'm heavily involved with all of the creative stuff. I've got very specific ideas of how I want things to look. At first, I wasn't able to do [Adobe] Photoshop, but I was sitting next to guys doing it all the time, and picked it up. "Oh, you're doing that? Okay, that's how you do that!" Now we're doing most of the artwork in-house, unless the band has other ideas. If somebody else can do it, we can probably do it too, maybe even better! If we haven't got the capability here, we'll buy another machine, or rent ten more preamps. We also had to acknowledge, at times, that there were things we couldn't do, like build a real nice drum room. Some things just sound better when they are tracked at Tambourine or Gula.
Plus having a piano, a Hammond or something like that. Then you can do things like guitars at Kondi.
For big, loud guitars a place like Gula is nice. We'll record through a Matamp and then use the Echolette as a kind of preamp, and get this very hot, direct-injection-into-the-board kind of sound, but put a 421 on the cabinet as well. Mixing those two signals is just like dynamite! But yeah, we can easily do guitars in-house. When we moved to the last location, it was nice to have so many office rooms. We could close the door and actually listen to what we were recording. We couldn't do that in the first space.
How did you communicate with each other?
Talkback to the cans. Otherwise just yelling out, "Can I do another one?" We had a hole in the wall and the snake on the other side that could reach outside, to the yard, the kitchen, or offices — anywhere we felt like tracking — but we mostly used the carpeted storage rooms. We'd record at night, and on weekends. When we had [a deadline] with Thee Attacks' record, we had to track some guitars during the day, while people were working next door, in other offices — not good. There were certainly some low-end problems in that space too.
Why did you leave that space and move out here to [the Copenhagen neighborhood of] Amager?
It's a typical gentrification story. Our lease ran out. We were located right next to Kødbyen [Copenhagen's Meat Packing District], which is extremely hip right now. It's full of cool bars and fancy places to eat and be seen. Our landlord decided he wanted to build something else where our complex was. Since the building was going to be destroyed, on our last night there we did what any reasonable people would do: trash the dump. We had a combined release party for The Malpractice's album MASS, and a demolition party, billing it as "MASSdestruction." While rock bands were playing, people chugged beers, knocked down walls, after painting them with graffiti — and yes, grown adults still favor penises as motifs. We're at the age where many of us have kids now, so proud parents were watching their children smash walls with hammers. Here, in the new office, we have a huge basement. Lars Top from the band Sort Sol is building a "real" studio down there, with floating rooms, so we'll be able to track, in-house, in a proper controlled environment soon. He is a collector of vintage gear and mics, has a Mellotron and all kinds of cool outboard stuff. Actually, when he came into Kondi Frost, and saw our two racked Neve preamps and the LA-4 he said, "I built and soldered that rack!" He sold it at some point to [Copenhagen's] Sun Studio, which is where we got it.
Have you only recorded Crunchy Frog releases?
When we were at the last location, friends started needing a place to record. I said, "Okay, I'll tell you how it works, and then you can have some weekend time," and laid down some rules. I mean, our space is a record label office, filled with contracts and money... well not filled with money. [laughs] Bands always have girlfriends, or mates, coming over to have a beer, and all of a sudden the place is filled with strangers, so we can't have this arrangement with just anybody.
It's okay for this to be for your bands only, though. It's like, "When you deal with Crunchy Frog, we also provide a fun and inexpensive way to do your record."
Yeah, it's part of the deal for our bands. I've mixed some releases that weren't ours. A Danish band called El Ray, and a Scottish band called Fangs that is on a French label that we've licensed some stuff to. Not a lot of people know how much stuff we do in-house. Of course we released it and there are credits on the records, but we haven't recorded for anybody else, because that would mean spending time on...
...things that don't really benefit the label.
We've done some work at Kondi Frost for almost every one of our releases. For the second Junior Senior album, we did editing and vocals and some dubs. For all of the Powersolo records, except one, they've had some drums and guitar tracked elsewhere, but everything else has been done in here. Thee Attacks' last record was tracked in London, at Toe Rag, then we did everything else here. We even retracked most of the bass and guitars. Some Tremolo Beer Gut remixes and covers versions have been recorded here, and then we took it to Tambourine, put it all on 2-inch tape, did some dubbing, and mixed it there. The first two Snake And Jet's Amazing Bullit Band records were recorded elsewhere, one in New York, then dubbed and mixed here. I also like to do some unexpected stuff to see if we can squeeze something special out of the terroir we're in, to use a totally Nordic cuisine expression. For example, Kim, from Powersolo, has a side project called Kim and the Cinders. For that we decided to take all this stuff, including the computer and it's big, old [CRT] monitors, some old Neve preamps we hired from Tambourine, and went to an old house in the deep woods of Sweden. They had to use a generator for power. They just recorded in, around, and outside of that house, often while it was raining, standing under trees, hoping not to get electrocuted. They buried a mic to see what that sounded like, hung a mic in a tree, used a huge stack of logs as a reverb tank — things like that. Using an entire forest as a reverb tank actually does work! For one song the whole studio was set up in a Volvo, and the band was crammed into a trailer, recording a whole song while they were driving through the woods, getting tossed around. The intern who shot and edited most of the footage for a documentary about the session was used for the human Leslie. He had to swing a mic the entire time they were doing a take, and ended up with bloody hands. Then we brought the recordings back to Kondi.
[note: DIY recordists will love the documentary, which has subtitles]
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZEkijkXy54
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8lnpnRrM4A ]
When do you function as a producer for your bands?
I guess most of my producing goes on not in the recording, but the pre and post. Working on the songs, arrangements and lyrics, and then being creative when doing overdubs and mixing. The actual tracking of the band is all about performance and energy. It's just a matter of not getting in the way of getting good stuff on tape that will not have to be "fixed" in the mix. Then we experiment more on the overdubs. I always come up with a lot of extra parts that I think brings out something special that was almost already there anyway. Discrete parts that just blend into the main guitar for instance. Listening to The Smiths, and reading interviews with Johnny Marr, have really formed my ideas in that respect. Shiny Darkly's Little Earth album is a good example. "This Frail Creature" is a pretty obvious homage to Marr, even though the song sounds more like The Cure. There are some acoustic guitar parts, some reverse guitar, and a 12-string electric blending into the main guitars, on that track. I usually end up doing some dubs or backing vocals myself to illustrate my points, and they often stay in there if they work. Bands joke that I play tambourine on all Crunchy albums and I guess it's half-true. You can mix it real low and it still makes a difference. It's like adding a pinch of salt to a dish. I have no formal training, but watched a lot of great people do their thing, read a bit, and then just started using my ears. I don't need expensive gear to record. Great gear makes it easier, and certainly helps but, to quote [hip-hop group] Atmosphere, if a studio gives you lemons, you paint that shit gold. You make it work to your advantage and work to do something fresh.
