The Making Of: A Symbol Like A Cloud
Day 1: 8 Track, Off Track
8 Track, Off Track:
For as long as I’ve been aware of records like Guided By Voices ‘Bee Thousand’ and Pavements ‘Slanted And Enchanted’ I’ve wanted to make a lo-fi record. We’d just finished recording our previous album, I Thought Thunderbolt. Working with Josh Whitehead in the studio had been a dream, but the lead-up to going in the studio had been a slog. The current incarnation of the band had been playing for almost 2 years, and it still didn’t feel like it was gelling as a unit creatively, the music I was imagining wasn’t what I heard when we played. That said, I was mostly pleased with the outcome of Thunderbolt, and mostly relieved when shortly after the recording, our then drummer Dave, quit the band. He’s a nice guy, and had always committed 100%, but when it came to building songs we usually didn’t agree on how the bands music should sound.
Throughout the pre-production of Thunderbolt, I’d been creating demos using Garageband, they were sounding better and better as my skill with the program improved, to the point that Josh (engineer) was happy to use one of the recordings on the final cut of the album (The Golden Age Of Entitlement).
I love the process of writing and recording music, and then following it through to that final stage where you get it back from being mastered and hear it for the first time, but I didn’t want to go through the same experience the band had just come out of. Armed with the confidence that I may be able to pull off producing the bands next album, my dream lofi album, the final push of inspiration came from the American band Car Seat Headrest. Lofi champions themselves, they had built an underground following from a series of great self-recorded, self-released records, and showed that people still wanted hear rock’n’roll in it’s most DIY form, some 25 odd years after my beloved GBV released their masterpieces.
I have a Tascam 4 track that I used for the bands first demos, it’s in good shape, but I knew if I wanted to track the band doing live takes I’d need more channels. I found a second-hand Tascam 8 track on gumtree for $300, not everything on it worked, but it was bargain so I took a chance. The tape deck wouldn’t turn initially, but I pulled the whole lot apart, and re-assembled it, for some reason it worked after that, I don’t know why.
Getting the 8 track running marked the beginning of the recording for our second album, A Symbol Like A Cloud. An album that would take us over a year to complete, it would be recorded in numerous makeshift studios throughout our partially renovated house in Ashwood, an inner suburb of Melbourne (we finished the album before the house).
The first song we started recording on our new 8 track (in makeshift studio 1) was Ballad Of The Boy Racer. Like a lot of the songs on this album, it started with me writing a guitar rhythm, laying a lead guitar melody over the top, Marie would do bass, Lukey or I would do drums, then finally vocals and other weirdness. We were in the process of having Marie lay down the bass when the 8 track started to shit itself, channels were dropping intermittently, volume was fluctuating, channels stopped recording. I was lucky to get it working well enough to get what we had already recorded off the 8 track, and into a Garageband file (in makeshift studio # 2).
The 8 track was abandoned, and sold on to someone who wanted to restore it. Having barely managed to recover my first attempt at recording our new album, I decided to do away with the classic charm of tape, and embrace the 21st century, with the safe recording technology it offered.
Ballad Of The Racer is the opening track on A Symbol Like A Cloud, and the bands boldest attempt at lo-fi perfection.
Mount Cleverest was also put to tape originally, but I re-recorded it as the original couldn’t be recovered from the haunted 8 track.
- TV
Lyrics
Ballad Of The Boyracer –
Slight interjection when the mystery eraser,
Comes into to contact with aliens lazer,
No chance that the memory escapes ya,
A giant drag for the young boyracer,
Come on you must believe,
When you see spaceships through the trees,
In time you’ll come to find we have to leave old worlds behind,
It’s true, they’ll know it soon,
They bring death from above,
All played out with peace and love,
Boy racer rise above become our saviour,
And victory for you, they’ll know it soon,
Terror screams through the night for the invasion strike,
But he’ll know what to do,
Forget your tractor beam command your social scene,
Pitch fork army unite, take the fight,
Until their tenticals don’t move,
Cricket bat, or the knife, send them fleeing to the moon,
They’ll know it soon…
Mount Cleverest –
On the way to mount cleverest,
Wind and swagger never rest,
March on the citadel,
Add rock to rock so well,
Tried, denied, a citadel too far,
In a place to where you sped,
Tortured by the things you read,
Confucius must have had the life,
In a gunfight with a knife,
Tried, denied,
Tried, for a citadel too far…