This past fall, Spanish Prisoners released Gold Fools, and with it, one of the best recent singles you’ve probably never heard: “Know No Violence.” This is a band that may alternately remind you of Prince, New Order and Sonic Youth, all translated through the swirly, undulating haze of a contemporary dreampop record.
Brooklyn's Spanish Prisoners self-recorded their debut album, Gold Fools
For Leo Maymind, guitarist, keyboardist and primary songwriter, self-recording was a predilection more than a choice. “It’s just what I’ve always done and what I’ve always enjoyed doing,” he says.
“I like the idea of being able to record whenever you want. I get very obsessed with songs, and there would be days where I would literally do nothing else but sit at home and work on these songs, drinking endless cups of coffee.”
In an approach that seems to be a standard for many beginning self-recordists, the finished album grew from the original demos. Maymind says, “There was really no distinction between demos and final tracks.”
“Everything we recorded, we treated as a final track. It was a very long process of adding and subtracting until we thought it was ready. There were even some sessions that dated back two years or so.”
For all that extended effort, and for the countless hours devoted to “carefully layering and sculpting sounds”, Gold Fools doesn’t sound stiff or labored-over. But that doesn’t mean Maymind wants to go through the same process again. Today, he and the band have essentially reversed their approach, and for their next recordings they’re “going to use the demos as demos, and then record everything together as a band.”
“We didn’t learn to play the songs on Gold Fools as a band until we were pretty much done writing and recording them, so in that case, we were chasing a sound that was already there. That worked sometimes, but sometimes it didn’t work at all, and it could be very frustrating.”
“I’m pretty burnt out on that approach now. Now I’m looking forward to just playing and letting someone else handle the engineering…A lot of this album was about finding myself as an engineer and producer, and I feel much more confident about it now that it’s over. I’m still doing a lot of demoing and writing on my own, but now we’re taking those songs into our practice space earlier on in the process to work them out as a band.”
Spanish Prisoners have already begun bringing some of their work into more conventional studios. Gold Fools was mixed by Dan Huron and mastered by Carl Saff, and they also completed a recent session with Jason Finkel at the Converse Rubber Tracks Studio.
But while Maymind says that working with all three of them was a great experience, it’s not always easy letting go: “We still usually engineer most of our own sessions,” he says. “All of us are kind of control freaks.”
Ghost Pal: Extended Family
Oliver Ignatius of Ghost Pal came to self-recording from a different angle. Raised by Americans stationed overseas as foreign correspondents, Ignatius grew up in Hong Kong, Belgium and Russia. When he finally came to live in the United States as a teen, his high school band “Rode a wave of hype in the early days of music blogs,” and even appeared on MTV’s “You Hear it First” and “TRL.”
Ghost Pal
“We weren’t really ready to ride that wave,” he remembers. “We made our record and had a good time, but the band broke up under the weight of all that.”
Ignatius would keep writing and performing in private, but put out nothing for years. He turned to self-recording, in part because he was never able to get comfortable in a studio environment otherwise.
“I always found that atmosphere kind of harsh in a way, and have always been frustrated with my experiences in professional recording studios. I’d never felt I had as good of a time as I wanted to, or was as satisfied with the execution as I could have been. Music is about being connected; finding your own center and getting deep into it. I could never really get relaxed enough in that environment.”
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