Spiritualized have announced news of their new studio album ‘And Nothing Hurt’.
There are points – the thunderous climax of ‘On the Sunshine’; the
spectral waltz of ‘The Prize’; the towering guitar solo on ‘I’m Your
Man’ – where the waves of blissful noise are almost overwhelming, where one
can imagine the studio’s
speakers vibrating themselves off of the walls. Which is an incredible feat when
you discover that the album was conceived and recorded almost entirely by one
man – Jason Pierce, AKA J. Spaceman – in an upstairs room in his east
London home. Sat in an edit
suite in Whitechapel a month or so after finishing recording, Jason talks
honestly about the painstaking, frustrating process of creating And
Nothing Hurt.
“Making this record on my own sent me more mad than anything I’ve done
before. We’d been playing these big shows and I really wanted to capture that
sound we were making but, without the funds to do, I had to find a way to work
within the
constraints of what money I had. So I bought a laptop and made it all in a
little room in my house”.
Whereas bedroom recording is commonplace for a generation of musicians
who’ve grown up with horizon-expanding tech, Spiritualized have long used the
studio as they would an extra member of the band – as a vital building block
in the construction
of some of the most cherished records of the modern era. This time would be very
different. With no grounding in digital recording, Jason had to learn everything
from scratch.
“The biggest thing for me was to try to make it sound like a studio
session. But I was new to it all, I didn’t have all the short cuts people
use as when they’re making records – I just sat there for weeks… for
months… moving every level
up bit by bit just to try to get the sounds right”.