Hey there, friends, it’s been a minute.
Presenting our last Chicago show, rolling up the carpets in our studio, and gifting away our gear all feels very much like a goodbye. But the job is far from over. The part you haven’t seen is the flurry of work in preparing our final recordings for release next season.
We are currently deep in the mixing phase of Alex Temple’s Behind the Wallpaper, which we recorded with vocalist Julia Holter this spring at Electrical Audio in Chicago. For those of you that haven’t had the pleasure of staring at your pores under a microscope for days at a time (i.e. recording an album), mixing is the bit where we bump this or that voice into greater or lesser prominence, add effects to make us sound like we’re playing underwater or aboard an alien spacecraft, and/or decide on our proximity to your ears: tickling your brain, in another room altogether, or somewhere in between.
After our tour to Iceland, we drove up to beautiful Eau Claire, Wisconsin with Alex to meet our sonic necromancers: producer Bill Britelle (New Amsterdam Records) and mixing engineer Zach Hanson. Despite Theo and Doyle getting grounded with Covid, we managed to sprinkle magic fairy dust on all but a few of the 10 tracks, and we’ve been cracking on the rest from afar ever since.
We have to tell you, Behind the Wallpaper is going to be a very, very special record. It’s not a pop album nor a classical album. It’s an album that will seduce and disturb and surprise you at every turn.
Thanks to Alex’s keen eye and Clara’s quick shutter finger, we are able to give you a peek into this mixing process. Thank you for continuing to support one of the most consequential, musically adventurous records we’ve ever made!
