kevin augunas
Making of the Montpelier EP
In June last year we were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to fly over to the USA to make a record with a producer named Kevin Augunas who has made records with Cold War Kids, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes and Yves Klein Blue to name a few. Don’t ask us why he wanted to work with a small, independent band from Brisbane, but we are incredibly grateful that he did.
Kevin worked out of an amazing studio called Fairfax Recordings in North Hollywood, Los Angeles, which was more like a museum of awesome vintage gear than any traditional studio we’d ever seen before. We were over there for about 2 weeks and it was one of the best experiences a new band could possibly hope to have had when starting out I think.
Here’s a bit of a video of our time in the studio with Kevin making our debut self-titled EP.
Climbing the Hollywood Sign
While we were in Los Angeles last year recording our EP with Kevin Augunas, one day before going into the studio, Kevin decided to take us on a climb up to the Hollywood sign. At the time we didn’t realise that it was ludicrously illegal to climb up to the sign and that it was freaking difficult to get to.
After hiking for a couple of hours we finally reached the sign, bruised and bleeding, only to set off motion detectors and an alarm. We stayed up there long enough to get some footage of us sitting on the first “L” before a park ranger came out and chased us away.
If Kevin wasn’t seven feet tall and didn’t pioneer the way through the scrub we probably wouldnt’ have made it. It was ridiculously good fun though and no one in LA would actually believe we went up there.
Making of “The Rafters”
Putting this video together took me straight back to LA. It was such a fantastic experience working on the record. We learned so much and became a way better band because of it I think.
We’re incredibly excited about releasing this single and then the full record over the coming months. Hope you like it.
I Miss Kevin
Today I realised I missed our producer Kevin Augunas and had a strange desire to put that feeling into words. Strange I know but still true. Recording in LA was so much fun. Dammit I want to be back there!
In The Studio – Part 5
I’m writing this sitting at Salt Lake City Airport, gate C6 to be precise, waiting for my connecting flight to New York City. In my attempt to save money on my plane fare I took a ridiculously inconvenient choice of flight. Flights out of LAX were substantially more expensive than from other airports and so I thought, why not just go from a random airport, it can’t be that bad. So my first flight was out of Santa Ana John Wayne which happens to be in Orange County. I didn’t realise it was in Orange County and I didn’t bother to check. Which in hindsight was silly really.
LA has awful public transport. And this is coming from someone from Brisbane, Australia, a city that has pretty awful public transport itself. This was my trek out to the airport (skip over if you get bored): I caught a bus from Ventura Blvd to Universal City; a train from Universal City to Union Station; another train from Union Station to Irvine; the 86 bus from Irvine station to the corner of Macarthur and Main; and then I was supposed to catch the 76 from there to the airport but I seemed to have a bit of a brain meltdown (I had a few drinks last night and didn’t get much sleep) and for the life of me I couldn’t find the bus stop. There was no one on the street save for some guy holding a sign and he didn’t seem to know. I wandered around aimlessly for a while and finally got my bearings only to see the bus pulling away from the stop with me stuck on the wrong side of the road. I was a little devastated because I had come so close to precisely executing my save money trek. I had to call a cab which ended up being only a $6 fare and in the time I had to wait for it I literally could have walked to the airport. But I made it albeit a little bit stressed out and then had almost all of my toiletries confiscated by security at the airport, even my toothpaste. Go figure!! They seem to be a lot more security crazy over here in America compared to Oz. I had to take my shoes and my jumper off and the guy at the screen was this loud, obnoxious, overweight, condescending guy who was just a wanker really. But I’m venting and I apologise.
Earlier this week we were losing our minds a little bit waiting to get back into the studio. Kevin had been mixing away on the completed tracks and we were left at home playing iPhone games (Peggle, by the way is a great example – I think John successfully completed the game 3 times) and getting restless waiting to hear them. If you notice a video currently on our Myspace page involving Greg wearing sunglasses indoors and Andrew playing a Ukulele understand that we filmed it in this losing our minds waiting around time. It might seem stupid waiting at home instead of actually doing something cool but we didn’t have a car and, like I mentioned before, if you want to catch public transport you’d better plan for it and have heaps of time. But we finally got back into the studio and it was awesome.
We’d decided that for the fourth track on the record we wanted to bring in a string quartet and so on Wednesday night we rocked into Fairfax to find a string quartet all set up and ready to go. You’ll notice a video below this of said quartet in action. It’s awesome enough on video but being there and listening to it in person was amazing. It was Kevin’s idea actually and it was certainly a good one. I can’t wait to hear the track when it’s finished. There’s something inspiring about being around really really good musicians and all four of those string players could play!!
That left one more thing to go: tracking the final synth parts for one of the songs. Andrew had been freaking out a bit because he was leaving on Friday and still hadn’t finished tracking, and sure enough Friday was the day he had to go in and finish. I headed along to the studio with him (I just love being in there and it was going to be my last time) while the other two swanned around Hollywood I think. He tracked, Kevin produced and I watched South Park. I’m not sure if you’ve seen the “Fish Sticks” episode of South Park but if you haven’t, definitely watch it. And then we were done. It became apparent at that point as you might imagine that our involvement in the making of the record was done and dusted. It was quite a sad moment really. When you’ve enjoyed making music in such a great environment for a few weeks, to know that that experience was over was kind of like finishing high school. Well, not really but I can’t think of a better example right now. We said our goodbyes to Kevin, Andrew cried (haha not really) and then Andrew took a cab to LAX to fly home and I took a cab back to the house.
Myself and Greg (being way cooler than John who decided to be a loser and not come with us) went out that night with some American friends to celebrate stuff, we got home really late, I woke up 3 hours later, experienced the shit fight of a public transport mission I described earlier, and that brings me back to the start of this post. I’m going to New York City yeah!!!!!!! And yes, you can safely assume that the next post will be about that.
