The making of the album

4 days and 15 mics, the band, in a room, live… This is the story of how we recorded 10 of our songs in a little studio on a far away location from the 25th till the 28th of October 2007. It involved lots of headaches, broken cymbals/sticks and strings, one heavy metal wheelbarrow and an inexhaustible source of blood, sweat and cigars. This is how everything came together...

We are very proud of the result. The songs we recorded were found in an abandoned factory, on the back of our hands, in a sarcastic remark of the last man on earth and on the top of a green metal crane with a view of a frozen city, at night.

This is what we did. We’ve decided to call it: Adieu Delicate Atheist… here’s to that.

Setting it up...

Day 1: soundchecks, setups, drumtechnics. With all our cymbal-changes and rim-shot/trash-snare multi-powered action it proved almost impossible to get a good mix for the drums, especially in the bits where we change configuration mid-song, but hard work comes with great rewards and we tamed the beast, she's our garbagecan sweatheart

you need more

Recording day 1 and cafe-days

We wanted the band, together, plugged in the same room... live.

So that's what we did. Sometimes it took thirty takes, sometimes it took just one, it didn't really matter

almost everything you hear on the record was played together... Hats off to the headphones for that

Set your soul to cruise control

Silent Times (between recordings)

We stayed at a local resort, which we frequented with a passion that was only rivalled (if not fueled) by our exhaustion from the whole day of noise. After the first day of recording we nailed Cyanide, Cowboys, Charlotte and another one we forgot... in the middle of the night, Bram started singing russian revolution songs and we taped the whole thing... why do some nights never seem to have an end?

Flight of the J-Bird

Recording, day 2

Day 2: we did Catwalks (which is a real knockout on tape), killed Another world with our seventh shot and than proceeded to throw ourselves into Cosmo, which gave me quite a few bruises but was worth it... the gypsys made it out alive

Fancy restaurants, dirty shirts

Recording, day 3

Day 3: we did 30-something takes for roadkill, which nearly run us over in the end, but with the help of some ductaped-on headphones and lots of energy from our producer/friend/guru/the-man-with-the-nasty-glasses Martijn Doolaard we succeeded in grabbing the wheel of the bastard and ran that baby all the way to it's rusty home of a junkyard paradise.
Day 3 was also Silent Times, which we did between roadkill 15-somewhere (blast that song, we've put it first on the album)

anarchy in fashion sense

Wheelbarrow Soundchecks & John Lennon

Recording, the last day

The last day was bloody intense... after we went all-out for three days (think live, think pain, think both) Tim was completely exhausted/mentally deranged and still had Polka (the last song left) to look forward to... Martijn eventually found a heavy metal wheelbarrow for him to bang on, which we used, not really on the album, but more on the drummers morale... The version of the song you hear on the album was played with the absolute last that our muscles could take... these are our last breaths, our very last gasp of strength, when bram had to record the vocals for this track he went so far out that he had to lay down afterwards... *thank you*

After the last day we bagged our gear and headed for home, craving sleep and the last stages of production and mastering (courtesy of Martijn Doolaard)

Some chaos and a video

Nowhere

DIY Producing & dubbing

Every album needs it's extra's, so we went to Utrecht where we recorded all the vocals & bass/guitar-doubles, went on swimming trips and played countryside versions of half of our songs. For the extra destruction that you sometimes need in these days we suspended two condensator mics out of the window of the first floor near Martijn's house and went out in the middle of the night to record the sound of a collection of cymbals, thrown full force against a brick wall... (yeah)

Artwork & Master-tapes

The crew

................................................................................................Thank you's to all concerned... Martijn - for every inch of tape, Roel - for the coffee/the studio, Sjoerd - for snaredrums we didn't use, Ravinia - for believing in us, The Doolaard family - for the central heating in the house, You - for reading all the way through, you get a free T-shirt.

Cheers,