One notable thing about this and your previous records is that they've been done in unusual or out of the way locations as opposed to studios. How much does that contribute to your sound?
It's hard to say, as we thought we could have made the same record even if we'd stayed in Berlin, since we wrote a lot of these songs there. But the location had a lot of influence on us. We never really saw the point of studio recording, at least not for this album. You pay a lot of money to be in a studio, and we thought, What are we really getting?
You recorded in a house in Gardskagaviti, on the west coast of Iceland. What kind of gear did you bring over for that?
A lot of old guitar amps. We had a very small brown one called an Orpheus, we had a Watkins — I can't remember the model, but it was triangular, and very beautiful — and a Fender Twin that we used for a lot of things. They're responsible for a lot of how the album sounds.
We recorded so much through these guitar amps, and we also recorded quite a few things through these horns, like you find on a gramophone. And then we brought a lot of instruments and microphones.
How did you go about integrating the tracks you prepared in Pro Tools, in Berlin, with what was being played live at Gardskagaviti, to make them sit better together?
That mostly happened by taking things through speakers and amps. There was this one tiny plastic speaker in the kitchen we used. And just playing sounds through the room as well — playing the speakers at one end, and mic'ing them at the other end...
So you get this big room sound.
Yeah. Just experimenting like that, seeing where it's good to do it — there were a lot of these things. And by spending a lot of time on each song, that's how we made them sit. The first week of recording was just drums, because our drummer, Samuli Kosminen, could only come out then. But after that it was very different. Sometimes we'd be working on just one song for a day, and another day we might work on five or six songs, depending on what worked best. We're just having fun mostly — we don't want to be always doing the same things. It's so much fun to be doing different things every day.
Recording is weird like that. You're often working to a deadline, but you have to keep it exciting for yourself so you can come up with new ideas.
I like it though — there's something about the deadline that's kind of okay. It makes you actually finish the thing, because if we didn't have it we would just take forever. Orri really had a hard time working with the deadline. His motto is that good things always happen really slowly. I think we do things kind of slowly, but maybe too fast for him. [laughs] He really brought a lot to the album though, all this warm sound. That's why we wanted him to come.
Where did that warm sound come from? Did you record everything to tape?
