Well, I think the first songs that I knew were going on the record were Waiting and What Never Happened. We had been playing those live for a little while, and eventually I booked some studio time for them to be recorded. This was done at Snorkel Studios in Forest Hill, engineered by Luke Kulukundis, around January 2020 (I think). Waiting was written more recently, whereas What Never Happened was mostly extracted from a very old riff of mine.
Those songs were recorded and then sat on a hard drive for many months. When we did get round to working on them, Luke did most of the treatment on the live instruments, whereas I handled more of the synthesis and sound design elements. We worked between Ableton and Logic, which was a stupid idea, and I wouldn’t recommend doing.
The next tracks written were Fine Isn’t Good (Wet) and (Dry); I had been lent a synth (Roland System 8) by my boss and was fiddling around on it when I cemented the idea. Generally, with most of my favourite songs of my own, I will first have heard them in my mind, or just found myself humming them, before actually figuring them out on an instrument or in midi. This was the case with FIG. I don’t know why I decided to have two different versions of the same piece, I think I was trying out the chords on different patches and could see how it would work in different contexts, plus I like the idea of reprise or recurring motifs in a record.
Eventually I had built a track list of the four aforementioned pieces and felt like there wasn’t a strong enough single. In light of this, I decided to write White Pearl around an old bass line I had written in midi maybe six or seven years ago. I find myself drawing from really old bits of music I’ve written all the time now. I think I had a golden era when I was in my late teens, and now I’m just riding on the coattails of my younger self. Anyway, we made White Pearl and, in a very abridged way, that was the process behind the record.