Recording, and re-recording, the next Bit Graves album

We wrote this essay about six months before the release of the album Murmur.



Like everyone else, we had no idea what to do at the beginning of 2020 as we came to terms with the onset of the pandemic. Even though we are an experimental synthesizer group, we did not lock ourselves in a rotting cabin and record a "quarantine session". We also did not hibernate. Our habits became as inconsistent and unpredictable as everything else in the world at that time.





As public health norms changed, we attempted various rehearsal formats, including a few where we streamed live drone signal to each other from our respective apartments, and some where we just sat far apart from each other in a large room. Sporadic live shows produced our most lucid moments, sometimes as part of a twitch stream, and twice in the back yards of friends. The depths of winter produced a brief and feverish chapter where we only watched The Fall and recorded jams on a Kurzweil K2000.



Our inspiration to put together a record didn't return until we returned to perform a “normal” show at the Good Shepherd Center (Chapel Performance Space) in March 2022. Our music has always drawn on the energy of live shows to ripen it— especially at this particular venue— and this show helped us notice our own excitement about some of our new music.





Returning to Nels Motel with Ben Marx, we brought six compositions at various stages of maturity. Compared to the previous album, we deliberately left some parts under-rehearsed, hoping to capture a few moments that were still raw, and placing increased trust in Ben to tell us what was or wasn't working. During the session, we occasionally made ad-hoc changes to our norns patches as the sound evolved.



In the universe of synthesizer bands, Bit Graves functions as more of a chamber ensemble than an in-the-box production. We rely on live cues from each other to synchronize our musical ideas. To capture this, we added a room mic during the studio session. You can hear us breathe, tap, and physically engage with our instruments.





As for our hardware, things have remained similar for the last couple years, and our signal path closely resembled that of the last record. However, there were some updates: Matt began using a sequencer to automate his note changes (of which there are few in our genre) in order to focus on making timbral adjustments. He also started using a Roland Juno module (JU-06A) in addition to our bread-and-butter KORG MS-20 Mini. It runs through the KORG's external input and filter, sometimes discernible as a solo voice, and other times little more than a blended harmonic.



We've experimented with several different synths over the years and we usually don't stick with them. The Kurzweil, for example, never made the cut. In fact, when Matt's house was robbed on Thanksgiving in 2021, many of our past experiments vanished overnight. (Insurance replaced some, but you can't pick up modded gear at Best Buy.) For us, it is a moment of great importance, or maybe blasphemy, to introduce the Juno.







Rather than a quarantine record, this album became a celebration of a space outside our homes. At Ben Marx's suggestion, after we finished tracking at Nels, we returned to the Good Shepherd Center. We re-amped most of the record into the Chapel Performance Space, the same space that inspired us in March, and a room for which many of our compositions were explicitly written. Ben conjured a pair of 1970's microphones, originally used to record choirs at Bastyr University, and assembled a Blumlein pair to capture the sound.







The final mix incorporates not just our synthesizers and effects, and not just the ancient mixing board at Nels, but also our breath, our physical motion, the deep solera reverb created by the walls of the Chapel, and even the distant sound of kids playing at the farmers market outside during the re-amp. It's a record that captures us being physically together, for now.



We're done recording, but work remains to get it mastered, make some artwork, and product some kind of physical release. We'll be excited to share it with you when it's ready.



Update: You can now check out the album Murmur.



35mm photography by Matt Collins, half of Bit Graves. iPhone photography by Ben Roth, the other half.