Houses of the Unholy
Plenty of artists trade the luxury of a traditional recording studio in favour of something a little more homely, but not all come with the calm, idyllic sanctuary that Grizzly Bear enjoyed. Darren Carle gets all Yvette Fielding on our ass.
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BETTER THAN A HUNGRY CASTLE
Yeah, yeah, so Grizzly Bear had themselves a wee holiday in a nice country home in the middle of summer to record Yellow House. Big deal. Check out singer-songwriter Justin Vernon who, as Bon Iver, dropped For Emma, Forever Ago on us last year. When his college rock band dissipated and his relationship ended, not to mention suffering a bout of liver disease, Vernon did the only sensible thing and isolated himself in his parent’s remote log cabin in Wisconsin where he set about writing and recording For Emma. The results impressed us to the point where we have to stop ourselves wishing Vernon more bad luck in the run up to his next album.
DON'T MAKE WAVES
Popular culture’s macabre fascination with murderer, Nazi sympathiser and all round bad man Charles Manson is well documented. In 1993, Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor seemingly became another convert when he recorded The Downward Spiral in the house where actress Sharon Tate was brutally murdered by The Manson Family in 1969. Reznor initially denied he had chosen the location specifically because of its grizzly past, though tracks like Piggy and March of the Pigs seemed to say otherwise (Tate’s murderers daubed Le Pig on the house door in her blood). A chance meeting with Tate’s sister later caused The Rez to rethink his actions, moving out after the album’s completion then later having the house demolished.
WHEN YOU BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND
Invoking the occult is something of a habit for The Mars Volta, highlighted by the Ouija board hokum surrounding 2007’s The Bedlam in Goliath. But even with their storming debut album, 2003’s De-loused in the Comatorium, the band were privy to some ghostly goings on. Recorded in the former home of Harry Houdini, The Mansion as it is known was perhaps already cursed after the previous owner to Houdini had pushed his homosexual lover from the balcony. Singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala commented on doors that would open of their own accord whilst the whole band avoided the bell tower room completely. Such superstition would probably not have sat well with Houdini however, who devoted part of his later life to debunking the supernatural.
THE BOG TO OVERCOME
Lightening up our tour with a little toilet humour are heavy metal quartet Machine Head, just to show that some domestic home-recording can come from necessity rather than artistic fancifulness. Recording the demo that would eventually snowball into debut Burn My Eyes, the hard-up future metal pioneers recorded in a friends’ house with the amps set up in the bathroom, approximating a studio sound as best they could. However, frontman Rob Flynn later admitted that he enjoyed the acoustics in his mate’s crapper so much that it had become his vocal booth of choice. No shit!