Mystery Jets: Making Curve of The Earth

We took a long time making this record, spending almost 3 years in a North London Button Factory with low ceilings and bars over its dusty windows. The process for each song was never straightforward.

I can think of one in particular that began life as a David Guetta-style synth pop experiment and then, over the course of 2 years finally found itself in the guise of an intimate piano piece. The day would always start with a round of soya lattes and someone's latest new music discovery, and then, depending on the work ahead would either go on till midnight or further on into the witching hours. Every record has its own very personalised and often quite strange rules and agendas to which it adheres. These day-to-day idiosyncrasies are the brick and mortar of the music, so I'm going to take this opportunity to share some of the ones that went into the making of Curve of The Earth.

Back to the Drawing Board

One of the best pieces of equipment we bought for the album was not a rare 1960's valve compressor but a simple Ikea white board. This board was initially used to ridicule late arriving members of the band and also create our very own "Ten Commandments of Recurd making" a spoof list of rules that we were supposed to obey religiously, the most notable being a once-a-day viewing of Future Islands Letterman performance and the rather questionable advice to chuck anything a bit "funny" sounding to the back of the mix with a load of reverb on it. This board believe it or not actually saved our skins as it bought a sense of order to what was fast becoming a sprawling, endless endeavour .. that is, once we started using it sensibly.

To the Heath

On hot summer afternoons when the Button Factory was too hot to work in or when the music wasn't quite flowing, we would sometimes drive out to Hampstead Heath and go for a dip in the swimming ponds. Swimming amongst the ducks and reeds, looked down upon by willow trees and the afternoon sun proved to be the perfect way to re-charge energy levels and enthusiasm for the work back at the studio. Sometimes the afternoon trips to the pond would stretch into the evenings, a rug, acoustic guitar and drink provisions fuelling our midnight meanderings on the Heath.

Ghosts

One of the production devices we employed during this album was a thing called the 'Ghost'. A 'ghost' was a sound or texture that lived in the back of the mix, something barely audible that created an atmosphere and gave the song extra dimension. We wanted to make songs with sonic depth because lyrically the songs are either rooted in memory or jump back and forth in time giving an over arching perspective on the subject matter. This album has a direct connection with the past and so these sonic 'ghosts' were a way of keeping the lyrics and the production ethos of the music in tune with one another. Often the 'ghost' of a track would be something salvaged from a songs first demo, a piece of accidental spill on a microphone, or the sound of the environment in which the song was written.

Water and the Fender Rhodes

Water plays a big part on this album, be it the water in the Thames that whisked by unheard during countless writing sessions or the sea beside the Kent coast that accompanied and sometimes threatened Blaine as he wrote in a small beach cabin. Water, tides, the magnetic relationship between the moon and the sea and a contemplation of the moons effect on our bodies were all considerations for this record. Many of the lyrics deal directly with water or allude to it in some way, hinting at its power over us or pondering its sliding relationship with madness. I don't think we knew it at the time but it seems to me now that the fluid, watery tones of the Fender Rhodes appear so often in the songs because of our preoccupation with water.

Many decisions in music making are sub-conscious and this I think is one of them. The Rhodes' undulating glissando provides the water for the songs to float upon, and the water in the lyrics recognises this.

The Whole Earth Catalogue

Steve Jobs described the Whole Earth Catalogue as the analog Internet. A series of weighty, A-3 sized encyclopaedias printed on now crumbling yellowed news print. Its front and back covers depicted the first photographs of planet earth taken from space and often came accompanied with cryptic sounding messages printed small and positioned in missable places.

These books were a discovery for us, a sign post towards our inspiration. Peering over their pages, pages as old as our parents, they gave an insight into the minds of a generation past - what the desires, the dreams and the hopes were of the people that came before. Emerging in the very early seventies and spear-headed by the visionary Stewart Brand, these catalogues exist as a kind of counter-culture bible, demonstrating spiritual practices, philosophical treatises, ideas for better living and do-it-yourself ecology.

A dense mass of information that was bound together and illustrated with a sense of wonder and intrigue, it most importantly served to connect people from different parts of the planet with a shared interest in exactly the way that the Internet does. If for example you wanted to know how to grow your own mung beans and set up a geodesic dome in your garden, the Whole Earth Catalogue could put you in touch with people who were already doing it.

These are some of the touch stones that went into the making of Curve, the fabric upon which the music is printed if you like. I think it's important to absorb your environment and to take something from it as you give something back to it, like a breath in and a breath out. Whatever comes 'out' of you, be it painting, song-writing, design or even a conversation in an idle moment, it is in some way connected to what's going 'in' to you. When I sit in front of a blank page, charged with the task of writing something, it helps me to remember this, the relationship between input and output.

Curve of The Earth is out tomorrow, January 22, via Caroline International. Order your copy here.

Lead photograph by Charlotte Patmore. All other photographs by Will Rees.