Winter Harvest Preparations

Listening to Winter People's debut album, A Year At Sea, filled my mind with visions of a lush, pretty, mountainous terrain. Okay, I was actually driving through Victoria's scenic Yarra Valley at the time and basically just looking out the window, but the music is so apt! This is real music. Broad, layered harmonies and authentic fretted instruments played honestly by talented musicians. It's a gorgeous mix of digital ambience and organic acoustic, embellished by some shoe-gazing fuzz. For Dylan Baskind however, there was never any grand plan as to a sonic picture for the album. “For me it doesn't matter what the overall aesthetic of an album is,” Dylan says. “Each song is a self-contained unit to stand on its own two feet. It's the same way I feel about modern art, you don't need a piece of paper to explain the artwork. The song should work separate from its companion. For each song, I had a very clear picture of how it should sound, but not necessarily for the album as a whole.”

Acutely aware of time and budget, the band were fastidious in their preparation for the recording, laying down the tracks first in Baskind's bedroom studio. “The tracks were really complicated but having said that, we demoed out everything. Every piece of instrumentation on the album was played out. We basically recorded the album twice. We recorded it in my bedroom and got all the levels right. I mixed so that I could see if it was all going to work, then we went in and recorded it. We had a very clear idea of how it was supposed to be and a lot of the fiddling got done outside of the studio.”

Once inside the studio, instrumental parts were recorded in isolation. Recording together as a band was never going to be an option. “I think the producer's quote was something like, 'Holy smoke. I have never seen so many tracks in my whole life.' The orchestration was very rich. We had mini orchestras and like 20 guitar parts so playing together was never going to be possible, so we recorded separately. We also had a very limited amount of time to do it in with a very limited budget to work with. That was the way we could be most likely to get everything done.”

Winter People's instrumental cache is a mix of the acoustic, electric and exotic and all are well represented in the final cut. “In the studio we had a multi-amp situation. Our workhorse guitars were Fender Strats, and Teles going through a Deluxe amp. I really do like the Deluxe. It is fantastically raw and can also do a beautifully clean sound. We had that going next to a clean cabinet which we just put in to try to mess with the sound a bit to have this other track. A lot of credit to [producer] Tim Whitten too. I can't even imagine how many tracks we would have had if he didn't do this… he mixed down all that stuff in the studio. He made that call on the sound and mixed it down, one track, one room mic. If we hadn't stemmed down that stuff, it would have been untenable. The Strat and Tele have this whole different sound and I guess I never really appreciated that until I got into recording. The Strat has this... not compressed but there is something modern about it. It has like a singing tail when you hit a high note. The Tele has a whole different feel.” Pedals were used too but blended in rather than being at the forefront of the mix. “Yeah, a lot of them on everything, hidden away,” Baskind explains. “A bit of delay. No wah, I am anti-wah!”

Anyone who has viewed the YouTube clip of the band's second single, Gallons, would have spied a curious looking acoustic instrument being played, a mutation of a ukulele and a lute. It's actually a charango, a South American instrument. Add two violins and five vocalists in the band, it's no wonder A Year At Sea is such a rich life pageant. It's that very sound Winter People will be seeking to bring to life on the Harvest Festival tour but Dylan certainly isn't concerned about reproducing it note for note. “In the future if we had more capacity, we could try something to recreate it more accurately. I think the songs on the album are the songs as they are supposed to be heard. What we do live is a cover version. They are approximations of what I consider the songs to be.

“At Harvest I will enjoy it [playing outdoors] because the whole crowd aesthetic is a different kettle of fish. Generally though, I like being indoors. I actually want to listen to music as opposed to having a social experience. If I am going to see someone play music, I want to be indoors, seated. That's my ideal situation.”