I started recording this album in October 2023. The first stop was in November, a couple of weeks later. After a while I gave up on it, and my relationship with the studio spiralled.
Two years went by. I did a lot of field recording, and a few improvised live sets.
At the end of 2025 I was exhausted, but I was feeling better. I went back to the 2 or 3 tracks I had recorded and tried to figure out what still made sense. I brought along a bunch of field recordings - plants, soil, and wind. I decided to sidestep the studio altogether, and record everything on a laptop.
Parenthetical gear intermission#
[Although I don’t like to talk about gear, I need to mention Jogging House’s sample and instrument packs. Apart from my field recordings, all the sounds in this album come from those packs - Sonic Beds, Some Drums, Tonal Drifts, Freeze & Move, and especially Bad Piano. I wouldn’t have finished the album if these wonderful things weren’t available - they made the laptop enjoyable, rather than bearable.
I composed for tape, and recorded to “tape”, that was the second element making this work for me. More specifically, tape loops. I used 4 looper tracks, each pre-loaded with a blank “tape”, all of them with different lengths. Added a delay based looper. David Briggs was kind enough to send me the Max version of their Praetereo Versio firmware, which went into yet another track. All of these were set as return tracks - there were considerably fewer main tracks: one instrument, one sample player, and an audio track for resampling.
Thanks to this, the recording workflow was fairly similar to using tape loops and multi-track recorders, and it was incredibly fun. What started almost as atonement for studio guilt ended up being one of the most joyful things I did in 2025, and saw me jaunting into the studio on most days.]
In more ways than one, the album is a response to depression and self-isolation. The melodies were all improvised and recorded live to (digital) tape. This made the whole thing very fluid and enjoyable for me, and forced me to make quick decisions. And trust myself.
It is available for listening and purchasing (digital and tape) on Evergreen Music.
Special thanks to Boris and David for the instruments, and to Adrian for his boundless energy.
Credits#
- Written and recorded by Pedro Figueiredo
- Mastered by Alex at quiet details studios
- Artwork design and production by Lynn Davy and Adrian Newton at Evergreen Music