“Pat is writing all my poems for me.
It reaches a million people. That's all I wanted to say.
Pat has distilled the pain, glorified it in a reverb chamber.”
Leonard Cohen. The favorite game
The musicians all arrived together a few hours ago. They spent the morning trembling with barely concealed excitement and fear, under layers of jokes and private banter, mundane anecdotes, and conversations about things unrelated to the recording. Newspaper articles, gossip, or comments about the previous night to distract from the recording, or rather serious and analytical reminders of how to approach this or that song. In truth, recording an album is a strange thing. It consists of exalting a record of pain, love, enthusiasm, fleeting moments, dance, poetry, or the frivolous aspects of existence, transformed into song for the benefit of others. The musician, when those who run the studio find the right way to do it, will place his soul—whatever that may be—under a spotlight until it begins to smell strange, like something cooked that isn't actually eaten, or like something that is eaten but has to spend so much time in the oven that when it's taken out it's nothing more than a mass of coals and dripping grease, of elements twisted until they become unrecognizable, which can be broken like a dry reed. He may do it with anxiety, intensity, or ferocity, with the suffering of unattainable perfection, or with the greatest lightness and dispassion. But how strange and yet so natural is this persistent desire to capture and embellish, to the fullest extent possible, this unconscious creature struggling between life and death; this idea of a building that will never have a tangible physical form, that will remain in the universal realm of the abstract, but will ultimately become a public space for the rest of the world to inhabit, the embodiment of an emotion and sensation, or a combination thereof. Yet another form of transcendence and posterity, but a peculiar one, without a doubt.
By now, after the initial period of exploration, questions, and curiosity, the musicians seem accustomed to these rooms—part old-fashioned asylum ward, part futuristic living room, and part air traffic control booth—so plush, with their sofas and acoustic panels, their screens, and their rows and columns of unfamiliar buttons. What a strange place the recording studio is, were it not for the instruments, both the well-known and the more unusual ones, the collection of guitars, percussion, keyboards, and the recording and mixing console. There, a kind of ghost-hunting team tries to capture the intangible ectoplasm of the peculiar sound produced by a group of strangers who have arrived for a few days with their own rules for making and playing music. The sound engineer, tasked with recording only the most promising of the attempts, is not yet listening to the words the singer has repeated twenty times into each of the different microphones used to try and capture the best texture of his voice. A recording is a constant flow of lights that flicker on and outward to a point they shouldn't cross, of frequency meters, of screens where spectra are assimilated and transformed first by science and then by technology. It's a unique blend of engineering and psychology, music and technology, accepted human error, agreed-upon order, chance, and countless measurements.
Five minutes ago, the musicians who weren't bogged down trying to find their instrument's sound started talking about when they'd stop for lunch. They talked, and for days on end they'd talk, about the different sounds each instrument makes in every passage of every song, about volume, clarity, the interplay between the bass and drums, the distinctness of the two guitars, the scope of the backing vocals, reverb, chaos, distortion, and cryptic internal codes in nonverbal language. They'd talk, amidst laughter or grumbling, about good and bad takes. But even the most discreet among them knew they were there, tinkering with that echo chamber that is the recording studio, trying to transform the failed noise into a clear expression of the desert, the lame and capricious clatter into an effective and persistent rhythm that suddenly connects us to the frustrated path of the primitive, the clumsy imitation of birds and the wind that remains the howl of a wounded animal, a sweet or harsh sound emerging from a throat fitting together the words written down to be sung. How much turmoil can be hidden behind each recorded track, each guitar chord or drumbeat. How much pleasure too, sometimes, how much surrender.
Funded by the European Union through the Digital Kit program using Next Generation (EU) funds from the Recovery and Resilience Facility
