Following an emergent trend of turning the recording process into a public performance, electronic dance act Join The Riot are recording their debut album a glass box in the middle of the Swedish capital.
The five-piece band have set up in the display window of a hotel on the corner of one of Stockholm’s busiest streets, built a studio in it, and are spending a month working on A Glass Cage Of Emotions. Throughout the month, passers-by can watch what’s going on through the many windows and listen to the sessions via headphones on the street.
‘We’ve been working on the album for a little over a year, and figured that when it came to recording it, collaborating with the Scandic Malmen hotel to promote its music profile at the same time as our new album, would be much better than renting an expensive studio,’ says vocalist Henrik Ljungqvist.
The temporary studio is centred on an Audient ASP4816 analogue mixing desK and Genelec monitoring, supplied by Sweden’s largest music store, Deluxe Music.
‘It’s really cool to have such a professional desk in our studio,’ Henrik says. ‘We’ve never worked with this kind of stuff before. Our sound engineer came in for a couple of days and gave us a few lessons on the mixing desk (it was new to him too), but when he’s not here we’ve been learning new things about it every day.’
This ease-of-use is a credit to the nature of the band, as well as the console’s intuitive design.
‘The cool thing is we’re not only using it for recording,’ Henrik continues. ‘We already have a mixer that we use for gigging, but we realised that the Audient has way more channels than ours, so we decided to use it for the live mix as well as recording.’
Offering with the key features of a large=format console, the compact ASP4816 features Audient’s analogue circuitry, and fits neatly into the Join The Riot’s temporary studio set up.
In addition, the bandmates are planning a live streaming concert for Brazil, where they have a burgeoning fan base: ‘We’ll set up some cameras in the studio,’ says Henrik, who’s also been working on promotion. ‘The other day we had a spontaneous gig. There’s a door in the corner of the ‘studio’ so we just opened it. We became street performers, but indoors – so we still had that great sound.’
‘We get to feel the pulse of the city here,’ he adds. ‘We’re usually sitting in a dark room making music, and this is totally different: it’s light and you can hear sounds outside when people are passing, so you get inspiration that way as well.’
Without a label behind them, the band have had to do everything themselves: ‘That’s something we’re very proud of,’ says Henrik. ‘Sometimes the things you want have to take a bit longer. At least then you’ve created something exactly the way you wanted it.’
The album is due out in September 2015, after their stint in their own glass cage.
More: www.audient.com
