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So, this story all starts with the New York combo Space Needle, formerly just a duo of Jud Ehrbar and Jeff Gatland who recorded some spacey yet catchy stuff on a 4 track and managed to get it (Voyager) released on the aggressive little Zero Hour records. When it came time to tour, Jud recruited old friend Anders Parker, who was living in Portland, Oregon, at the time, to come play guitar, drums, etc. for the band. Anders brought with him a just-finished cassette of his solo work, under the moniker Varnaline. Zero Hour decided to put out Varnaline's Man of Sin as a CD and so Anders, to tour, needed a band. He grabbed his brother John Parker to play bass and Jud to drum. In the meantime, Jud recorded some really wacky stuff at home under the name Reservoir, that sounds like Eno's On Land meets gritty synth-pop. It just came out on Zero hour, too. Out of all this activity, some really interesting home made recordings have seen the light of day. Both Space Needle and Varnaline have really nice singles that have come out recently too, and new albums in the works. I caught them before a show at Portland's Satyricon in the middle of Varnaline's U.S. tour, and we chatted about recording, of course. Obviously, Jeff from Space Needle wasn't present, so Anders and Jud do the yakking.
Varnaline
So lets talk about Varnaline first. Did you record that on an 8 track cassette or a 4 track cassette?
A: Actually, its the first 4 track that went on the street. An old Tascam 144. An ancient machine. I bought it for $50 off someone 'cause one of the channels was busted. I would use it once a year. I recorded some of my older bands occasionally. It sorta gained inertia as I went along and the last few years I really started to understand what was going on with it.
Any noise reduction on it?
A: You know, I don't think there is. It's really funny, 'cause when the tape is moving you can hear creaking, so on certain songs, at the very end of the fade out, you can hear eerreek, eerreek from the machine just because the mechanism is so loud.
How did you get all that stuff onto 4 tracks?
A: For the stuff that sounds pretty layered, I would do 4 tracks and fly it down to my cassette deck and tape that back to 2 tracks stereo on the 4 track. Some of the songs were 6 tracks, basically.
I thought it was an 8 track, given the layers.
A: Yeah. I experimented a lot with stuff but that was the best thing that came out.
Did you mix that anywhere else, or did you mix it at home?
A: All the mixes are basically first mixes. It was always the first mix that was there. You're in that space where it just happens. All I did was when I went to make the tape, I took the original mixes that I'd done off the cassette and mixed those down to a portable DAT player that somebody let me borrow. Then I did some EQ. When it went to CD, I went to the mastering studio at Zero Hour and did a final EQ and mastering compression.
On the new single ["Party Now" & "Iron Horse"] was that recorded on the same kind of setup?
A: Yeah, basically. I got a new 4 track about a year ago. On "Party Now", if you listen to the sound, there's this ominous death-rattle to it. I taped the PZM mic to the door of my room and John's bass was making the whole room and the door vibrate. So, if you listen to it you can hear the mic vibrate.
So that was recorded with a full band?
A: "Party Now" was done live and "Iron Horse" was just John and I. He played keyboards and bass and I played drums and the guitars.
So, where did you record the single?
A: It was recorded at my folk's house in New York.
Could you make a bit of racket there?
A: Yeah. We could turn up. All the stuff on the Varnaline album was done mostly at conversation level. I couldn't turn it up. I had this friend who lived across from me, it was this U shaped apartment building, and she told me she could hear everything! In the summertime she said, "Oh, I listened to you all day, it was great."
Have you got a whole, new album ready to go?
A: We're gonna record a new album in May after we get off the tour. We're gonna record at a 16 track studio this time.
Big jump!
A: Exactly.
Are you gonna record with Adam Lasus [at Studio Red]?
A: Yeah. We did the Space Needle album there on 8 track and it's kinda the same attitude...whatever goes. Any idea is open to use. He had one thing where he would use a [recording] Walkman, run a line out of it, and just put it by the drums, and it sounded amazing. It totally overdrives the Walkman. He's just got that anything-goes attitude, which is great.
He's probably not really expensive.
A: It's pretty reasonable. He works with this guy, Jason [Cox], they're like a demented co-producing team... they're pretty crazy.
Back to the home stuff; you were talking about the PZM mics. What were they picking up?
A: Just for the room. We did the basic tracks live, bass drums and guitar. One mic on the guitar, direct out of the bass, one mic on the drums, and then the PZM to get the sound of the room.
Mix those all together and run them to one track of the 4 track?
A: Pretty much.
On the stuff you did earlier, the Varnaline album, how did you do the drums?
A: It was all brushes, actually. The one mic that I got was this pretty cool Tascam condenser mic that has a screw-on head for omni and unidirectional. I used that for the drums and some of the vocals. I'd have a snare drum, a bass drum, a high hat and a ride cymbal and I'd stick it right over the snare drum, kind of between the snare drum and the high hat. Sometimes, I'd put something in the bass drum, like this shitty kind of Audio Technica mic that I use for all the guitar miking.
You'd throw that in the kick drum?
A: Yeah, but sometimes I didn't even need it. I had a wood floor so it would come through the mic stand. Other times I'd put the stand on a pillow, so you wouldn't hear the vibration through it.
You don't see that in pro studios! A lot of the sounds, like the drum sounds, are about to crack up on that. Are you pushing the inputs on that?
A: Totally. I would drive it really hard. I knew on some of the songs I would do more than 4 tracks. I knew if it wasn't really hot I'd get all sorts of tape hiss. I wanted to make it really hot, especially between the 4 track and cassette and then back to the 4 track and then mixing down again there was so much possibility of losing the signal. For me, the one rule of 4 track is to drive everything really hard.
When you did that where you mixed 4 tracks down to stereo and than added 2 more, what was on those tracks? Vocals?
A: Usually on all those songs I would use one mic, that condenser mic, and do acoustic guitar and vocals at the same time. Instead of doing the vocals last I would do them first. Except for "The Hammer Goes Down," the vocals came later on that, but usually on the 5th or 6th track would come a backing vocal or another guitar or something like that.
So, on a lot of the songs you would record you just playing the song and would build around it with other instruments.
A: Yeah, exactly. Half the songs, maybe over half the songs, were originally done with acoustic [guitar] and voice over the first track. I would do it to one track, I didn't separate the two. I have a hard time singing after-the-fact, to kind of get a vibe or whatever.
Reservoir
Did you do the Reservoir album at home?
J: Yeah, at my apartment on 4 track. All direct [into the tape deck] except for the first song which was a PZM [mic] on my guitar amp. Other than that everything was direct.
You were able to be pretty quiet, then!
J: Yeah! In fact, a lot of those I did at night when my girlfriend was sleeping.
Headphones?
J: Yeah! I had to be pretty quiet. A lot of that stuff... I'd just gotten my new drum machine. The first time I ever put it to tape was one of those songs. I was also pretty much the first time I used that keyboard at my apartment. They're just really early, messing around things, and they happen to be the best. With that kind of stuff I find that if you really think about it too much and plan it out they just suck.
It's funny, 'cause what you're playing with there could make a really shitty new age record but instead it's all overdriven and avoids all that.
J: Yeah, hopefully! I went with all first takes and I'd like to think there's something that isn't really boring about it.
I think Eno had a quote, something about new age music lacking any undercurrent of danger or edge to it.
J: Or it's all too planned out.
A: I like on that first song, where you hear the amp click on!
J: The horrible thing is that when we mastered it, the guy who mastered it cut that part out. I was there for the whole thing, and we were, "Alright, excellent." And then he went back later and thought, "Oh, that must be a mistake" and cut that out. We printed it, I got it and I was just, "AAARRRGGHH." I called him up but, whatever. He didn't know. They get to redo it.
A: We've heard so many stories of getting stuff back and channels being switched, left being the right and right being left. People cutting things out or cutting things off 'cause they thought it was wrong, which you can understand 'cause with special stuff like Space Needle and Reservoir, how are they supposed to know what's supposed to be there and what's not. To me, it's like, "Jeez, it's a big part of the song and it's cut off."
J: I don't think you can really expect someone who's mastering a lot of albums to care or catch it. On weirder sounding stuff, they're not gonna know.
Space Needle
Is there a new Space needle album done? [to Anders] Did you get to play on it?
A: Yep. It was 8 track in the basement of Studio Red. A couple of songs are 4 track.
Are there more guitars and stuff on it than the previous one?
A: Yeah...it's kinda weird. It's all over the place. There's some stuff that's more representative of us as a three piece and there's stuff that's kinda like...not at all! We had this violin player come and play on a couple of tracks. There's a couple of pop songs that Jud did on 4 track.
With Space Needle, do you create in the studio?
A: We try to keep it as live and as off-the-cuff as possible. We kind of had an idea of what we wanted, we'd been playing all these new songs after I joined the band. By the second day it just kinda gained it's own momentum and went it's own way.
J: I think it was good that we went in with that.
A: Yeah, exactly. Start out live and lets get all the effects and everyone layer their part. We got pretty much everything that we wanted to get done as far as what we'd been performing live and this other stuff kinda sprung out of it. It turned out really cool.
Were you editing a lot of stuff together?
J: We really tried to stay away from studio trickery. It would be the logical thing to do, considering the sounds, so we really tried to avoid it and it ended up that weird things happened on their own. There's a couple of tracks where the keyboard's just total white noise and we didn't know it was doing that. We were playing live and it was kinda loud and then we go in to listen to it and it was ridiculous. It takes over the track! It sounds like we meant to do it.
A: It also comes down to the mix. It's one of those things you can alter.
J: I didn't realize it was like that !
The concept changes when you listen to the song.
A: It's great. It's a lot of fun.
You did the new album on 8 track?
J: Yeah.
You did some of Voyager on 8 track too, didn't you?
J: Umm. Not really. We did the whole thing on 4 track and then we went to mix it through a board to make it sound real good and it didn't come out that good. We ended up recording two live to DAT things there. But it was really all 4 track. I think one mix that we used had more.
I tried to figure out where it might be taped at a different session.
J: The middle of the last song, "Scientific Mapp", that we ended up remixing.
A: But that was on the 4 track.
J: Yeah. We didn't change anything at all, just added some panning to it.
How did you get into recording your stuff?
J: The thing that got me into recording...the first things I did were on a rap mixer. You'd do a tape and then run the tape back to one channel and go back to another tape deck. Primitive 4 track. When we put the stuff in the phono inputs it made this great sound. Really great distortion. We used it live and I played bass trough that. The whole last song on Voyager I remixed through that. It's a great distortion. I still don't own a 4 track. Jeff [Gatland-the other Space Needle] bought one and I borrowed it for the last year and a half. I just gave it back to him so right now I'm basically without stuff.
Are you thinking of buying anything?
J: I'm talking of possibly getting an ADAT. I've got to learn a little more about it. It seems to be the direction I want to head. I definitely want to make better sounds than the Reservoir stuff.
Do you have a DAT player?
J: I got one. I'm definitely still learning all these things. There's a lot to learn.
But each of you have taken good advantage of what you had in front of you.
A: I bought a compressor! One of those DBX stereo compressors. I still don't feel like I really understand what it does.
I've had one for a year and I always wonder if it's really doing any good.
A: That's one thing about recording really hot to the tape is it naturally compresses everything.
Varnaline, Reservoir and Space Needle can all be contacted through:
Zero Hour Records
1600 Broadway #701
New York, NY 10019
Telephone # 212-957-1277
