After several months of writing and recording demos in our rehearsal space, in April of 2016 we finally went into studio to record Marrow. In reality, we just moved to the upper floor since we were already rehearsing at HAUS, a complex of several rehearsal rooms and a recording studio near Santa Apolónia, so it was like we never left “home”.
For this album we strived to be as efficient as possible (thus all the time spent in pre-production) and booked only 2 weeks of studio time, in stark contrast with our previous albums that took months to record. We didn’t finish everything in those 2 weeks, but there was only some minor stuff that went over the deadline so it was still quite an accomplishment!
One thing that I think most people don’t realize – I know I certainly didn’t before playing in this band – is how much of our time is spent waiting, be it in the studio, on the road or on venues. This is particularly true when recording an album, where you have to wait for all the gear to be setup (mics, amps, etc), wait for the sound check, adjustments and troubleshooting, wait for your bandmates to record, and then when it’s finally done there’s still a whole lot of waiting to be done during the editing and mixing process.
This time around I decided to put all that waiting time to good use by documenting the recording sessions with my camera. I’m always more interested in the less glamorous processes that go on behind the scenes than the action itself, so I focused mostly on the moments in-between takes when my bandmates were most off guard. I guess this is something I got from my biggest music photography inspiration – Vera Marmelo – who built her whole career documenting the backstages and intimate moments of bands and artists.
Along with my Fuji X-T10, I also brought the Canon A1 with a roll of Tri-X 400, which I shot at 1600 and then ask the lab to push it in development. It was the first time I tried push-processing (and quite extremely for that matter), so I was very afraid that I might get nothing usable out of it. Fortunately, it worked much better than I expected, I absolutely love the heavy grain that came out as a result of the push processing. The photos below are a mix of digital photos processed in color and black and white, and the film photos with no post-processing.
Life, Unintended 