When I recently interviewed Emily A. Sprague for this issue of Tape Op, she mentioned having played on an LP by artist Hannah Pruzinsky who goes by h. pruz. I’m glad Emily turned me on to pruz, as their new album Red sky at morning that Emily played on is a really beautiful set of songs. It fits within the folk/singer/songwriter tradition, but expands beyond the genre in subtle and unexpected ways. As Emily said in her interview, “I recorded some Buchla Music Easel on [Red sky at morning] which is very beautiful, very acoustic music. She had asked, do you want to come up and play something? And I thought, yeah, I'm going to bring this really weird instrument to make it a bit more deviant, you know?“
There are drums and bass on the record, but they’re tucked in behind pruz’s voice and guitar, and are wholly supportive. They mostly sing in their lower register, so when on tracks like “Your Hands” where they move into their higher register at the end of the song it’s really powerful and striking. The record feels very cohesive and well sequenced, even when track 7 of 11, “if you cannot make it stop,” effectively mines MBV era shoegaze and changes the mood of the album for a few minutes.
I reached out to Hannah to find out more about recording the album and they told me, “Felix [Walworth – who also plays with Emily in Florist] and I spent the month of January this year in upstate New York at their yaya’s house, where we set up a home studio and recorded and mixed the entire record in that month. Everything started out analog, recording onto Felix’s [TASCAM] TSR-8 1/2-inch, 8-track tape machine which had a broken channel, so technically we were down to seven tracks), which ran into a Studer console for preliminary mixing. We added a few additional tracks on some songs digitally when we ran out of space on the tape. Felix engineered and mixed the record, and we produced everything together from songs I had written last year and demoed in our Queens apartment. It was a very intimate experience, most days just being the two of us up there until we would invite a friend or two to join us for a few days at a time to lay down different tracks. In general, we tried to track as many full takes as possible with synchronous playing when we could to try and preserve as much of the magic of a take as we could. That has always been of high value to us both.”
Felix played drums on the album and also plays guitars and keyboards across the tracks along with Hannah. Besides Emily, other guest musicians and vocalists played guitar and keyboards on the record, including Rick Spataro and Jonnie Baker (also both of Florist), Elijah Wolf, Helen Ballantine, Ceci Sturman, and James Chrisman, along with Al Carlson on saxophone. Mastering was done by Josh Bonati.
Photos below are by Hannah from the Red sky... session
