Recue X Jolea – In the Attic, Session #1 – Blame from recue on Vimeo.
There’s something to be said for the rucksack studio.
When we last caught up with Finnish artist Recue, our friend Riku Annala was stranded in an airport hotel room, but managed to coax a live jam out of the experience.
This time, mobility wins again, in a collaboration with Helsinki-born vocalist / singer-songwriter / producer Jolea.
http://www.audiobaum.com/artists/jolea/
It’s a reminder that you don’t need to wait for the studio setup of your dreams. You can produce just by carving out a small amount of space – and time. Sure, we could at this point “recue” (ahem) the discussions about music being too accessible or too plentiful. But, speaking even as an overwhelmed music journalist here, that seems to me like wishing that fewer of your friends cooked at home, in the hopes that having them all eat Chicken McNuggets would somehow increase the appreciation of music. It’s absurd. Let’s enjoy.
I’ll let Riku tell the story, as recounted to CDM:
Few months back as I was stuck in the hotel room, I did the set with a mobile setup messing around with a cappellas. That one left a spark, that the concept of working with vocals live needed to be pushed further. I have been working with an awesome singer/songwriter/producer Jolea on my previous releases so it was just the logical step futher to ask her to start building a live set with me. So ‘Recue X Jolea’ is a live project continuing where ‘Do Not Disturb’ left off.
This time the set is focused on more premeditated (though not necessarily pre-rendered) material. It reduces the element of surprise, but at the same time it let’s you focus on tinkering with details as all the major pieces are already in place and you don’t constantly have to concentrate on just trying to hold the whole thing together. The decision came naturally as we both need to know where we’re going without letting the music slip into noodling. The primary technical principle of the live performance however is quite exactly the same as in “Do not Disturb”. Even the setup is quite the same with few additions. Still fits in a backpack though.
‘In the Attic’ is a rehearsal session we did at a gloomy penthouse/loft and recorded the whole thing. The first cut from it is a track called Blame. It ended up having such a nicely building energy accompanied with the beautiful dark footage by Theofanis Kavvadas, we decided to make the whole track freely downloadable on SoundCloud. [see below]
NOTE! You might notice there is an [Arturia] Minibrute [synth] included in the setup. No sounds are heard from it on this particular track. I use it both as a synth + a controller at the same time as the keyboard is polyphonic. That way I can choose the sounds by mixing layers in and out in the DAW (including the synth itself). Just a disclaimer as I know it’s kind of a hot synth at the moment and might raise some questions on which sounds are from it. Another thing to be noted is that we played the same track few times and filmed it. The music is from one of the runs but the footage had to be cut from few as the camera was moving around.
…and yes, the EDM hunch is still there.
The full track is freely downloadable:
Finnish vocalist Jolea onboard again for this one. Yes, to make collaborations happen, keep those backpack studios handy.
More Jolea x Recue:
