3 Years ago, when the band had just split up, leaving Emily MacLaren on her own, pretty much about to pack it in, Michel Esteban invited her to come to his house in the South of France to try to set up a studio and record songs for a future release on ZE Records.

The idea behind this recording was based on a frustration about what seemed to be standard production for most modern albums. A production where every instrument sounds punchy and powerful, where there is a bland democracy in the mix which renders everything clear and equally present, no mistakes or even happy accidents (which is, in fact, what people love in music, for example, Bowie correcting his bassist in the Gean Genie to, "get back on it...").
Emily : " Some of my favourite records have organs that sound like guitars and vice versa, or guitars that sound as if they were playing in the next room (some of this, as on early Studio One singles, was out of necessity due to tiny studios which displaced pianos or horn sections to the back garden), or underwater (as in the recordings of Joe Meek), or by handicapped children (as in The Shaggs)... "

So, even though we were recording everything onto computer, the idea was to stay away -as much as possible- from using it to clean up any live takes, quantize drums, or add sound effects. Instead, we just placed microphones all over the room - which, in a 500-year-old villa, was incredably vast and reflective -, in the piano, in cardboard boxes (the first take for the album, before we had any equipment in the studio, ...

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