Glacial: Spare Parks Eats Bandwidth

Spare Parks includes Mike and Evan from Casket Architects, Jay, Greg and Nick from Robots and Empire, and Paul from Dissolve, Devil May Care, and elsewhere. We're barely ever in the same room, but we managed to record some songs recently. We're working on recordings now as well, using computer technology as a substitute for proximity. This is the way we recorded these two songs:

One Saturday we all arrived at our practice house--dogs barked, wine poured down our throats, laughter ensued. We managed to record drums with a 4-track and two middle-of-the-road Shure microphones. Jay laid down the drum tracks for "Resurrection Man" and Greg for "Miserable Life". Greg's hand was hurt so he couldn't play bass and the drums hurt him a lot. That same day, Mike and I recorded some guitars and discovered the need for some more guitars. Evan laid down some keyboards but he didn't like all of it. I put a weak tremolo scratch guitar on "Miserable Life" for Jay to play bass to, and play he did. One take! That's all we did that day.

Some days later, Paul recorded theremin and Casio keyboard for "Miserable Life" and another song recorded much earlier, "People In Your Brain". Paul waved his arms around and touched little keys. He did it all quickly. It was a nice time.

Another night, I drove to Mike's apartment in Beacon. It had cool artwork everywhere, and really neat furniture. Mike recorded acoustic and electric guitars on both songs that later I altered with distortion and flanger and other things. We ate Red Baron pizza, which is a fine frozen alternative. When I left, Mike watched Transformers 2 with some company.

Over the following fortnight, I received via email some more theremin from Paul for "Resurrection Man" which he managed to record while his child enjoyed an afternoon nap. Also during this time, or shortly after, Evan sent me keyboard tracks for the same song. I recorded my vocals in my apartment, ignoring my neighbors' complaints. Things were really adding up.

Then, over some weeknight wine, Paul recorded vocals on the tracks. He used a couple megaphones and also his voice. That weekend, Greg, Jay, and I recorded gang vocals. We also recorded gang vocals for a union song called "Striking for the Right" that Jay used for a project.

After weeks of enduring my pestering, Greg finally put down his bass for "Resurrection Man," and we were finally done tracking. I left my crappy scratch guitars because they sounded good in context. This is my usual excuse for poor playing.

These are the songs, "Miserable Life" then "Resurrection Man":

This is a picture of Jesse's dog, Baxter. It is his birthday today: