Heroes Are People Too

Melbourne trio Because of Ghosts recorded their second album 'This Culture of Background Noise' with some big names manning the desk. ADAM D MILLS got on the blower with drummer Jacob Pearce to find out more.

After a year-long hiatus, instrumental Melbourne trio Because of Ghosts have now returned to their rightful place – the cockles of our hearts, where else? – with their spectacular second album, This Culture of Background Noise.

Recorded in Montreal at Thee Mighty Hotel2Tango by Howard Bilerman (whose credits include albums by A Silver Mt Zion, The Arcade Fire and Molasses) with additional production from Efrim Menuck (former guitarist with Godspeed You! Black Emperor and current leader of The Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band) the album is a heartbreakingly beautiful collection of fragile yet epic instrumentals, in parts reminiscent of the Montreal “scene” to which Godspeed, et al belong but brimming with the group’s unique, spidery melodies and fluttering percussion.

So, why Montreal?

The Hotel2Tango has been a place we've known about for a long time, being fans of bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, A Silver Mt Zion and all the rest from that area. So it's certainly a place we've been thinking about for a while, that it would be great to record there.

But the biggest drawcard in the end wasn't the Godspeed people, it was Howard Bilerman. We were all huge fans of the Arcade Fire album Funeral. We're very big fans of the music, but we also all loved the production on that album – that was Howard Bilerman. We all listened to it to closely to hear what he did with the drums and the guitars, the rawness of it and the analogue sound that they get using all the analogue equipment. They have a big very nice tape machine and they have a lot of outboard gear for an analogue setup. That was actually what really got us interested in going over there.

The news that an Australian band is going overseas to record an album is often met with derision, as if it’s a move that’s been calculated to achieve some sort of international indie cred …

A lot of bands decide to go overseas and work with somebody famous, and that becomes a bit of a gimmick for their press release. We were kind of hoping to avoid that a bit in that we didn't go over there to make a Godspeed record with the Godspeed people. We had a job to do. We went over there to record our stuff, and we thought that these people would be able to capture our sound really well and produce it really well. It was kind of good that we managed to keep our own sound while going overseas. I like to think that we worked pretty hard at doing that.

Did you ever feel star struck around Howard or Efrim? You did, after all, have a sticker on your glockenspiel that said, “I saw Because of Ghosts before they played with Godspeed You Black Emperor!”

“’Big’ producers [are] not scary heroes that are going to be all surly around you. They're just people as well.”

Maybe when we were younger and just starting out we had our favourite bands and we thought of them pretty highly, and we still do think of them highly as musicians. But as people, the three of us don't tend to worship our heroes in that way. It's something that we thought about near the end of the week of recording, when we were starting to name some of the tracks properly. One of the tracks came out as 'Heroes Are People Too', which came from this idea that … I think it was probably day three or day four, we were sitting at home having a very late dinner after the session, and Ruben and I looked at each other and went, “Fuck! These are the guys from Godspeed!” It didn't really sink in at first. Maybe it was a good thing that it didn't, because it meant that we didn't succumb to some kind of idol-worship syndrome. From the beginning they were really lovely down-to-earth guys and we all got along really well. They certainly were very intrigued that a band from Australia would come all the way to record with them. I've kind of realised now about “big” producers, that sometimes all you need to do is just get in touch with them. They're not scary heroes that are going to be all surly around you. They're just people as well.

Even though it was recorded on the other side of the world, the sound of This Culture of Background Noise still bears a lot in common with your earlier releases. How was the recording process compared to how you’ve worked previously?

We didn't really do anything differently. We just had some really good equipment and people with really finely tuned ears that were appreciative of the same kind of music, so we were able to say, “This is how we imagine doing this song.” For us, the record sounds like a really perfect mix of a very well-played live show. We only had one week in the studio and we had been rehearsing the songs every night for our tour, so by the time we got to the studio we were ready to set up and play a really good live set. We had a couple of overdubs here and there, but 85 percent of every track is a take in a room. It was a matter of spending two days at the end of the week with Howard and Efrim mixing really carefully to make sure that everything sounded how we wanted it to sound.

You recorded and mixed the entire album in just five days, didn’t you?

It was funny. When we got there we sat down with them and said we wanted to record an album in five days, they thought it was a bit ambitious. We spent the first day setting up, and by about 6pm we were ready to go, so we did two songs by 10pm. We came back the next morning and Howard and Efrim were saying, “This is great, we've already done two songs” and we said, “Well, actually, we want to scrap them and start again because we think we can do better.” So, that was a bit of a set up and getting sounds right day. The next two days were four tracks a day of tracking and then we had two full days of micing. We even finished early on the last day and went and had dinner. So it went better than planned.

You make it sound too easy.

If you look at our past recordings we've often had just one or two weekends in the studio to get something done. The nature of our music means that we can do it pretty much live. At the same time I think that in Canada we were at the peak of our performance in terms of precision and working off each other in a live setting. We all knew exactly how everything was supposed to sound. We'd been practicing for a long time, [and] we'd played 11 or 12 shows in a row. We'd been thinking a lot more than ever about how we wanted to record these tracks because we knew that we had a very exciting opportunity to go and do it. I don't think it was too easy; we did have to work hard. One of the reasons it worked well was that when we arrived we made a pretty good impression first off by seeming to be pretty hard workers. We didn't turn up late and hungover or anything. We were there to get a job done. By the second day Efrim especially had relaxed a lot around us and we all felt really comfortable because they obviously realised that we hadn't come to bow at their knees and say 'oh, we love your stuff!' We do love their stuff, but we were there to record an album and get a job done. I think they respected that and it meant that we all worked really well together. So it was a very, very productive five days. It was really nice that it turned out that way. It could have gone differently, for sure, but we were prepared, we were ready to be productive and they respected that and we all worked pretty hard.

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