There are some people who arrange for thunder, lightning and rain all at the same time. Yeah, you could say that Silvana was a bad-ass drummer. Not everyone is capable of inventing an atmosphere that surrounds their chosen task, and Silvana’s drums were like a Miller-Urey experiment in progress. Dareck and I decided to meet up before I left to go out west, and record some tracks. We would see where we were at, musically speaking and otherwise, I guess. He had rented a house in Toronto, that he shared with two or three other roommates. There was a drum kit in the basement.
When I arrived, I was surprised to see how clean the place was, given that it was inhabited exclusively by males. During my first couple of years at school, I subleased and moved to new accommodations pretty frequently. It didn’t matter how awesome the houses would look on the outside – the bathrooms were almost always a toxic nightmare. In the first apartment I shared, the thin plastic shower curtain was calcified. The water would leave mineral deposits on it, and over the years, I guess this shower curtain began to obtain tensile strength and moved as one piece. In another place, I painted over the stains in the bathroom, so there was a layer between me and it. But the absolute worst was when I lived in the attic. This house was right beside campus, in a very respectable area, and on the outside, it looked like a squeeky clean, well kept Victorian era home. There was three or four of us living there over the summer, including the dude who never left his room – he’d be on his computer 24/7. He pretty much had a monopoly over the shower downstairs, which left the upright shower on the second level for everyone else. It seemed alright at first first glance; older, but the sink worked fine, and the tile on the shower floor looked pretty clean. The next day after moving in, I got into the shower and turned on the water. At first, I couldn’t tell where it was coming from – that faint, mouldy odour. But it grew and grew until it was the only thing I could smell. Five minutes later, I felt something against my foot. I looked down, and the fucking tiles were bent and raised off the floor. The wood underneath them was swollen, and pieces of it pierced upwards from below the tile. There was mold all through it. For the rest of the summer, I got up extra early, got in my car, and took a shower at the YMCA. Wearing flip-flops.
After taking the tour of Darecks really clean house, I saw the drum kit set up in the basement, owned by some girl apparently. She was dating (or had just broken up with) one of his roommates, and the drums were still in the basement. I began to set up the Symetrix gear next to the drums. In the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s, Symetrix made a lot of equipment designed for broadcast studios. You can still find their equipment today, devalued on the used market. In 2004, there still was not that many available options when it came to good gear on a shoe string budget. That is, not much between relatively inexpensive but mediocre sounding hobby gear and the out of reach pro stuff. The older Symetrix equipment lived between that gap, and ebay always had their microphone preamps, EQ’s and compressors in stock. When you lit them up, they still had lots to say, and gave this kind of gritty radio tone to whatever you recorded with it. If you listened to people talking on the radio in the 90′s, then you’ve heard what symetrix sounds like. Dareck made a few calls, and Silvana showed up the next day, ready to play her kit in the basement.
With the old electrovoice mic and symetrix rack, we did the base tracks to “got a new kitty”. We experimented with a few things; at one point, Darecks friend Adrian came over and played some tin whistle over the top of it. I could never find those tracks again, but they left their mark on the album – I think there was some headphone bleed, because whenever I listen to the intro of that song now I can faintly hear the whistle! When Silvana came over, she sat down on the floor next to her drums, and listened to the tracks. The timing near the end of “got a new kitty” worked, but we didn’t use a metronome or click track, and therefore the tempo wavered back and forth towards the ending of the song. Despite all that, she liked it. In three takes, she adapted her playing to ebb and flow with the tempo variations, and improvised an explosive drum track. An hour later, I had three dozen drum tracks full of alternative takes for that one song. She hit those drums hard – I have no idea if she was creating this work back then, but later on, I learned that she would take the drum skins off the kit, and would create these images out of the stick impacts (http://www.silvanabruni.com/gallery.html).
Sitting in the golden trailer, I had all these drums tracks of hers that I started to mix…
2012 by