The crackly, old-timey string flourish that begins “Night After Night” (Track 8) is one of my very favorite moments on the album. At this point in the piece the listener is deep within the twists and turns of Alex’s mysterious narrative, and has traversed so many sound worlds and stylistic shifts that reality has begun to blur...
Typically when we’ve approached recording music as a classical string quartet we have found ourselves striving for organicism in the recording/mixing/mastering process, and a natural quality in the “sound” of the recording. Basically, we endeavor to recreate the concert experience with as much fidelity as we can, while polishing some rough corners and creating a delicate balance within the mix that helps each part of the composition shine. For “Behind The Wallpaper” we decided to take a different tack - one that would stretch us, and which we hoped would serve the concepts behind Alex’s compositions and the storytelling of the song cycle. Leaving behind any attachment to “realism” opened many new doors, through which we were shepherded by our brilliant recording team: producer Bill Brittelle and audio engineer Zach Hanson. As we embarked on the mixing and editing process, we allowed ourselves to lean into a purposeful distortion or altering of the materials we came away from the recording studio with. The engineering of the album went from being a subtle and sublimated ‘tool’, to an instrument in its own right. Together with Zach, Bill and Alex we dove into experimenting with filtering, layering, and processing of our sound in a way that would help transport the listener immediately into distinct environments and draw on sonic associations to make that type of auditory teleportation as immediate and as arresting as possible.
‘Night After Night’ feels like a very important moment in the song cycle, both in its place in the narrative, and also as an example of the stylistic “switching” that helps cement the far-flung and untethered aesthetics of the music. This song has always been especially fun for us to perform, I think in part because it is the most explicit nod to “classical” playing in the cycle. “Non vib(rato) & poco sul pont(icello) – try to sound like a viol consort” is the musical directive given by Alex in the score, and there is something humorous and freeing about tapping into a baroque-influenced style of playing - one that is so quintessential to our associations with string playing - and then instantly subverting it. That type of playfulness and subversion is something Alex and Spektral share, and I love that Behind The Wallpaper is an album that will transport the listener through many worlds while keeping them guessing as to what they might hear next - staticky victrola sounds, bird calls, robot voices, creaking wood, rustling leaves, crashing waves, etc., etc…
– Theo Espy
“Night After Night” is the eighth track on our new record Behind the Wallpaper, composed by Alex Temple and featuring Julia Holter (vocals), out on New Amsterdam Records March 3rd, 2023.