III.
DAY 3
Fabian and Luke woke up early to begin working on something new. Frustrated by the work of the days before, they wanted something catchier and more upbeat. Inspired by SBTRKT’s use of marimba in his pieces, they created an upbeat disco beat using a loop of marimba chords, and percussion sampled from the field recordings.
After rerecording the guitar for the dream pop song, Fabian and Luke took a walk through the countryside as they waited for everyone else to wake up, recording more sounds to add to our field recording library as they went, and discussing how cheesy the new song was sounding.
Luke started thinking about how to make the song sound less like a golf instructional commercial, and brought up the idea of using the varispeed function in Logic to slow the song down to give it more of a ｖａｐｏｒｗａｖｅ feel. Fabian, having never heard of this function, was impressed that by lowering the speed and the pitch, the song went from disco to smooth groovy pop. Inspired by this, Bimpe added guitar leads, adding to the slickness of the song.
As it was going to get dark soon, despite the early hour, James and Fabian decided to go on a second trip to the shops, while Bimpe and Luke worked on lyrics. The walk home from the shop felt like we had meant to walk onto the set of Twin Peaks, but found ourselves on the set of Carrie instead. The dark rural pathway made us feel like we were being watched, but we were obsessed with its beauty.
Inspired by Old Street station on the London Underground, which has unusual entrances
leading down underneath a roundabout, the lyrics developed into a song about asking an ex-
friend for a second chance. Once James and Fabian returned, the group collectively wrote the
second verse, and took the line, “should I knock on your door?”, as a chance to record a sound
from the house itself-its front door. With a mic on the longest lead we could find, we recorded
Bimpe knocking on the huge wooden door.
We then moved on to recording sax parts, but as the only mic stand had already been set up upstairs for vocal recording, we used the handle from a suitcase as a stand, with a mic taped to it.
After some editing work, we cracked open the spirits. After a lion’s share of rum and cokes, we decided to record an intense, aggressive outro to Honey From the Hive, with Luke instructing everyone to go as crazy on their chosen instrument as possible. Bimpe played guitar through a pitch-shifter pedal, James played his granular synthesiser, Vlad used a software synth, and we routed Luke’s electric bass playing so that Fabian could ‘play’ the bass through the Organelle. After a few very intense takes, Luke went to bed while everyone else carried on the party.
The party got more and more intense, eventually waking Luke at 6:30am with the sound of arguing. As tempers had frayed so much over the course of a long night of drinking, we decided to do something constructive by recording a Russian rap for ‘Honey From the Hive’. Although the Russian rap was heavily changed in the mixing process, the image of Vlad scream-rapping at 7:30 am is something none of us will ever forget.