Inside the making of Nightform

The barn came with a leak, a wood stove and a resident barn owl that only ever appeared during quiet takes. We had booked three weeks upstate to demo four songs and ended up staying six, tracking an entire album live to two-inch tape with the doors propped open on whatever weather New York decided to send us.

None of that was the plan. The plan was a clean, fast record cut in a proper room in the city, mixed in a fortnight and out before the summer festivals. What we got instead was Nightform — slower, stranger, and far more honest about what this band actually sounds like when nobody is watching the clock.

Two tape machines, one survivor

The Studer arrived on a Tuesday and died on a Thursday. Its replacement, an unloved MCI hauled up from a basement in Kingston, held together for the rest of the sessions on a diet of new capacitors and superstition. Every song on the finished record passed through it, which explains the slight wobble at the top of “Halogen” that we decided to keep.

Working to tape forces a kind of honesty. There is no comping forty takes into a perfect one; you play it until the room agrees with you, then you move on. By week three we were tracking two songs a day and eating dinner outside while the mixes printed.

Sequencing took longer than tracking. Side C exists because of a rainstorm that arrived halfway through a take and never got edited out; you can hear it under the second verse if you listen on headphones. We tried removing it four separate times and the song got worse every time.

Nightform is out now on 180g double vinyl, cut at 45rpm from the original tape transfers. If you come to a show this year, we will be playing most of it front to back — barn owl not included.