Conception and Recording
The recording of Middle Cyclone took place in Tucson, Brooklyn, Toronto, and Vermont. Case herself stated that only the "piano orchestra" sessions were recorded in Vermont and that the rest was recorded using WaveLab in Tucson. At the time, Case was transitioning from living in Tucson to a recently purchased farm in Vermont, where she recorded in a barn on the property. Case described how the barn was retrofitted to suit her musical needs, as well as the "piano orchestra" that appears in three of Middle Cyclone's tracks:
| “ | I didn't really convert it into a studio. Basically the floor was made of dirt, and so I hired a friend of mine to come in and put in a wood floor and build a stage. And it looks amazing, but then we decided it would be really hilarious to see how many free pianos we could get off of--because that's how I got a piano right off the bat, but when I went on I couldn't believe how many free pianos there are on Craigslist. And I was like, well I have a barn. So I ended up with eight, which are playable. That's when I came up with the idea for the piano orchestra. I thought it would just sound so beautiful to have a bunch of people playing piano at once in that barn. | ” |
Of the eight pianos that Case rescued, six were playable after two days of tuning by two tuners. One was a broken player piano, which Case decided had the potential to be repurposed.
The open and unconstrained nature of the barn-as-recording studio resulted in several of the tracks on Middle Cyclone having elements akin to a field recording. Case asserted that because of the barn "We ended up with robins on the recording and frogs and all kinds of stuff. And with a barn, you just don't have control, which was another element I really liked." "Polar Nettles" features the aforementioned birdsong 39 seconds into the track, as well as a chorus of spring peeper frogs at the track's end. (The latter fortuitous event was recorded on video and published on ANTI-'s YouTube channel.) "Don't Forget Me" contains a gust of wind close to the song's end. The final track, "Marais La Nuit" (French for "Marsh at Night"), is an actual field recording of the environs around a pond on Case's farm. When asked about the track in an interview with Paste magazine, Case responded "I actually went down to the pond and recorded that myself."
Read more about this topic: Middle Cyclone
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