School's In For Sound

The debut album from Melbourne folk/poet singer-songwriter Charles Baby, The End Of The Terror Lights, who's last release was 2010's Has Quiet Choruses EP, is the culmination of a year of recording with producer Greg J Walker, whose CV includes producing and collaborating with Clare Bowditch, CW Stoneking and Dan Kelly among others, at his studio The General Store in Jumbunna and two abandoned school halls in Victoria's South Gippsland, at Walker's suggestion. “He'd done that with an album [2011's Some Were Meant For Sea] by an artist called Tiny Ruins [NZ singer-songwriter Hollie Fullbrook], who I'm a really big fan of,” Baby explains. “That's part of the reason I went to him and we sort of went down that avenue. We were really big on the idea of getting a performance out of a song and I was really trying to avoid a sterile studio environment where you get a click track and you play over the top and you end up with something that sounds very neat but sometimes you lose some of the natural sound and some of the emotion that comes with that. So the ambience of those halls might contribute to a more warts and all sort of sound but it has a bit more integrity to it, I think.

A screen composer, performer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, arranger and sound engineer, Walker first came to prominence through his musical alter ego, Machine Translation, releasing seven albums over a decade and progressing from a bedroom home studio to, now, a high-end studio built into a 100-year-old house surrounded by pastures. “It's pretty ramshackle,” Baby continues. “It's exactly what I would want from a studio because it's pretty haphazard; there are instruments all around the place and it has a natural sort of sound. We did everything in there; I mean, we did all the vocals and guitar in the halls, but every other thing, from drums, small violin things and everything else we did in The General Store.

“We took his desk out to the school halls. We had an issue first in finding the right hall because the hall he used for Tiny Ruins was a much smaller hall and she [Fullbrook] has a real whisper and I have a real sort of booming voice, so we needed a bigger hall that would accommodate that sort of sound, and we had some real issues dividing the guitar from the voice, because my voice would always bleed into the guitar mic, so we had to build a physical barrier, when I was singing, with mats and things like that between my head and the guitar.

“We had some real close mics that we mixed with mics that were right up the back of the room. I was trying to get a sort of really intimate sound out of the vocals, so it sounds like I'm singing really close, but then we mixed that with the mics from the back so that you still get that big 'hallness'. So I'd bang out two versions of a song and we'd move on. I was confident enough in playing the songs that we could just play them pretty simply and let the room do the rest, almost.”

The time taken in the recording process was an inevitable consequence of Walker's incredibly busy schedule that saw him producing music for ABC TV series, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, working on Paul Kelly's latest album, last year's Spring And Fall, and two other records, so Baby's sessions were squeezed in whenever there were a few days clear. “In the end that was probably a better way to do it,” Baby admits, “because sometimes I go and layer stuff myself at home and he'd do his bit and come back and meet in the middle. For example, the single [A Happy Affair (With A Terrible Consequence)] is a banjo song – my voice was bleeding into the banjo, so I just recorded it with a muted guitar, and I went away and did my version and he did his, and we both disagreed on what the other one had done – I put a banjo in and some whistles and he put in like a drum beat and some bass, and we ended up taking his rhythm section and my melody section and came up with something we were both really happy with.”

Before the sessions began, Baby gave Walker not only the songs he was to record but also a list of songs by other artists he'd been listening to whose sound he felt indicated the direction he wanted to take with The End Of The Terror Lights. The song they both kept coming back to as the best sonic reference was one on the 2002 Beck album, Sea Change, recorded over two months at Ocean Way Studios in LA with producer Nigel Godrich.

“It's a really simple sort of folk song but it's got all these crazy things going on in the background that we both really loved, these backwards guitar notes and sounds like that, and we were conscious of that when we were making the record,” he reckons. “We finished it and got it back and it really sounds absolutely nothing like that! I don't know how that happened. I think part of that is because we recorded in the halls so it has this really natural sort of ambience, and then whenever we went to do anything that was really electronic, we both of us sort of reared against it, maybe because it was a bit too much of a contrast. When we were layering we tended to do more vocal layers or string instruments rather than, say, keyboards or computer effects.”