What came first, the chicken or the egg

With “Tokyo” finished, for now at least, and released into the universe, we turned our attention to the vast catalogue of songs that Kathrine already had lying around. We needed to start a new project immediately, and for years Kathrine had been writing lyrics and creating melodies on the guitar to go along with them.

That was the intention, but in the world of NEGATIVIUM, 3 x 3 does not necessarily equal 9.

“Come Back” was not even in excistence in any way shape or form. Not until Kathrine had a really bad day at work.

After a meeting that basically made her loose all faith in humanity, she retired to the quiet room to calm down. Now, we have to add that at her workplace they have a musicroom with lots of instruments.

Her mind racing towards the deepest pits of the human brain, she started to think about how could humanity be brought back to sanity. The lyrics came in an instant, and naturally, the plea, “Come Back” became the name of the song.

A simple tune, sad and longing, haunting, washed in reverb from the abyss of despair.

But, as it often is with simple things,they aren’t. The simplicity is often an illusion, masking the little details hiding within, the details that makes it work. Add the mediocre fingerpicking skills of Håkon, and it doesn’t get any easier.

“Come Back” turned out to be quite the challenge for us. The song passed the 6 minute mark, and recording it proved to be difficult. Kathrine needed the guitar to keep her on track, and Hakon needed the vocal to keep him on track. It all became a “chicken or egg first?”problem. When we played together all was grand, but trying to record seperately the plane crashed into a train. We only had one microphone, Håkon’s Aston Origin condenser mic, so that would pick up any sound in the vicinity. Leaving out the possibility of having one of us playing or singing in the background while the guitar or vocal were being recorded. With our limited equipment and recording possibilities the answer was to record it all in one take.

Easier said than done. With a song 6 minutes long, the chances of doing a mistake grows exponentially for every minute. Make the tiniest mistake and it was stop recording, delete, and restart..and restart we did, a lot! Add to the mix, pun intended, that it was such a transparent song made everything even worse. Basically it was like your driving test, it’s the one time in your life where you do everything right..and after that you do nothing right in traffic, run red lights and keep breaking the law. In general you become a terrible menace to society.

Of course, recording everything in one take leaves out any possibility to mix the seperate parts. But hey, we had to live with that. Make the most of it.

Time passed, as it constantly does, and we were getting nowhere with the song. Multiple attempts at recording the song ended in tears every time. One of the problems of course was finding a suitable recording space. Håkon’s apartment with bare surfaces and absolutely no sound dampening was useless, and Kathrine’s house, which in contrast to Håkons place, actually looked like a human being was living there, was also halfway useless.

But, ask the universe and it will answer. And the universe wanted NEGATIVIUM to succeed..that’s what we tell ourselves anyway.

Circumstances led to Kathrine having access to an empty factory in Bergen.

Factories, normally hideous looking, devoid of any architectural inspiration what-so-ever. Just bricks or concrete or worse stacked together for practicality, not poetry.

So it was with this factory building as well….On the outside

Inside however, it was a catedral, a glimmering cave of wonders…or at least reverb…and lots of it!

The place was perfect. Well, maybe not perfect-perfect, but we were satisfied. Only a few minor details worried us:

1. The sound from the cars driving past.
2. The constant low level hiss from the ventilation system.

But hey, even though we are called NEGATIVIUM we are surprisingly optimistic, so we thought, “it’s free, and the reverb is AMAZING”

Time to get to work.

As mentioned before, our recording gear was very limited, basically we had a microphone, and that’s about it.

But what we lacked in gear we made up for in creativity. The lack of a microphone stand we solved with a rope slung over a beam. An overturned cable reel became a desk(we found a real desk later, yeay!)

All well, we were ready to record.

And record we did, over and over again. Always ending up messing the song up and having to start over again. At least we got practise, so at least that’s something. The last recording we actually named “last attempt 21:30” in the daw. A little snippet of it can be heard here:

We had to call it a day. Tomorrow is a new day waiting for us to fail.

Some of the issues Håkon was having was the acoustic guitar. Besides of course, being a pretty mediocre guitarist. Making a mistake on the acoustic seemed to be much easier than when he played his Telecaster. Why? not sure. Set up, neck width, strings..or all of it at once.

The decision was made to switch to the Telecaster and leave the acoustic at home. Paired with a Roland Cube 20w we went for it again.

Everyone that has ever used a Cube amp will know that it has lots of clean sound, almost to much. But roll off a little on the guitar and you can dial in a really sweet sparkly clean sound.

We found a spot in the room we considered to be the sweetspot for the reverb, slung the rope across a beam and fastened the microphone. Positioned the guitar amp about 45 degrees to Kathrine, so if seen from the mic it formed a V. An important factor as well was to make sure Kathrine’s distance to the mic and the amp’s distance to the mic was dialed in so they matched in volume. There would be no chance of adjusting this in the “mix” so it had to be correct from the get go.

Sometimes miracles do happen, and this day we experienced one.

We made it through the song. 6 minutes and 08 seconds of pure concentration.

Finally, we had our demo!

What we also got was a couple of cars driving by and the ventilation system chiming in for good measure, at least we got these “special effects” for free..lol!

Mixing, or “mixing” was a pretty straight forward task. The hiss from the ventilation could not be removed without messing up or simply removing the guitar tone. The hiss had to stay. Vocals and guitar could not be separated, so nothing much to do there either. Add a little compression and some eq. Adding reverb? Nope. The reverb of the room was soo good that no other reverb was needed.

After all, this recording was mostly for ourself, to have as a demo, a physical evidence or conjuring of our idea.

One day in a not so distant future we will revisit “Come Back” and record it properly in a proper studio, hopefully without ventilation systems and cars.

But we will miss the reverb.

So here it is, we hope you like it.