Recording Bit Graves at Nels Motel

During the final three days of 2019, we recorded Bit Graves material for an LP at Nels Motel, Seattle.



Update: You can listen to the completed album on our Bandcamp.



We wound up here after befriending Ben Marx / tov, who engineered live sound for us at some of our shows earlier in the year. He liked what we were doing and invited us to come record with him at Nels, a small commercial studio where he works.





We showed up at the studio's unmarked front door with various bags of wires, cases of gear, some pretzel chips, and about forty minutes of semi-improvisational music we had curated from the past year's worth of compositions.



Entering the process, we were unsure what to expect. Bit Graves mostly makes drone sounds with synthesizers and code, and these sounds are designed to be performed live. We knew it might be a challenge to effectively capture them.





To create the sounds on this album, we pipe various analog signals, both dronelike and percussive, into a tiny dedicated sound computer called a norns, where we manipulate those signals live with SuperCollider code. The result is passed through some effects pedals (which are also manipulated live in some of our material) before finally reaching the audience.



The final cocktail of noise sounds good on a stage, but doesn't leave much room for adjustment in a studio setting. Unlike a traditional band, which might have many independent instruments to record, all our sound gets forced down a single tube.



Ben had a few ideas about what to do: In addition to the main signal, we captured clean drum sounds, normally unheard by the audience before we scar them with further circuitry. We also captured the bare norns signal before its bath of reverb and distortion. The resulting nest of wires took hours to plug in and get running properly, due in no small part to eccentricities we discovered about our beloved MFB Tanzbär and KORG MS-20 Mini.





Plugged in and ready, we proceeded to spend two intense days recording hours of takes of material. Nels Motel is a tiny space, truly an old single motel room whose 500 square feet have been reduced by soundproof walls. The interior is wholly decorated as a surreal vignette of the 70's, a tiny time capsule of fading oil paintings, brown furniture, a red plastic telephone, a few golden lamps, and zero exterior windows. The inside of this space became our universe, and everything outside became a dream.







On occasion, we took a break to walk through the rain to the large studio next door, Avast— primarily to steal their coffee, but also to hang out with their talented staff.



On the third day of intense focus, we began by tracking some vocals on an expensive microphone that came in a wooden box. After that, with tracking finished, we spent the next 8 hours poring through all the material with Ben. Ultimately we produced a rough mix of the whole album, which Ben performed live on the board, incorporating and blending all the different ingredients captured during recording.





At 8pm on New Years Eve 2019, we emerged, dazed and hardly verbal, drove down the street, and closed out our favorite bar on its last night of operation.





Now that we've made this recording, more work remains: Final mixing, mastering, artwork, and ultimately some kind of physical manifestation, probably a cassette we can hawk at our merch table.



Thanks to Ben and Nels Motel for working with us!



This essay is part of a series about producing an album. To read about mixing the album and assembling art and packaging, see Part 2.



The best ways to support Bit Graves are to follow us on Instagram and buy our music through Bandcamp.



35mm photography by Matt Collins, half of Bit Graves.