English producer and engineer David Kosten has worked with a broad spectrum of musical artists, from Snow Patrol and Keane to Bat For Lashes and Brooke Fraser. He is also a respected musician in his own right, recording and releasing contemporary electronica under the moniker of Faultline. Over the years, he’s helped create many weird and wonderful sounds, and selects ‘Seal Jubilee’ by Bat For Lashes as a favourite.
Gold Standards
“This is my favourite sound and not because it’s a hugely unique or special tone, or involved a complex chain of effects to create, but mainly because of its significance and meaning to me. It signalled a moment in time when I finally, after many years of trying without success, found myself working as a producer on music that felt really brave and creative, and which also found a much wider audience.
“The sound is the crumpled tape, lo‑fi main guitar part in this song. We worked very fast on the album this track is home to, 2006’s Fur And Gold, and whereas four of the tracks were from our initial demo session recorded at a song per day, ‘Seal Jubilee’ had enough time lavished on it to let us really think about the mood and instrumentation we wanted.
“We’d recorded the guitar initially on a fantastic valve microphone. It now sounded like someone was captured performing right in front of you, a perfect representation of the real thing. But what we really wanted for this was something much more dreamlike and fragile, and being a ‘good’ recording was of no importance.”
David Kosten: What we really wanted for this was something dreamlike and fragile, and being a ‘good’ recording was of no importance.
For Better Or Worse
“The sound on the track was made by running the guitar into my unserviced, unreliable and often useless 1977 Roland RE‑301 Chorus Echo, with a tape that had been on the machine for years. Initially we’d thought about putting an old‑style slapback echo on the guitar, but that didn’t feel right, and then someone accidentally soloed the wet‑only echo element, and suddenly there was the guitar sound we wanted. You could hear the join of the tape loop crossing the playback head, the tape that had been chewed up multiple times and then salvaged again wobbling and sticking, sounding like a lost recording from decades earlier. I just needed to time‑adjust it so it started at the same place as the original guitar and to mute the original guitar completely.
“By doing this, it completely changed the tone of the song, and pointed a way forward for both the song and the rest of the album and probably a career’s worth of me upsetting artists with new ways to make recordings sound much worse. Recording an orchestra at Abbey Road? Can we use the Dictaphone mic please? That pristine vocal sound? Let’s put it through a guitar amp! Surely the drums will be better if we put them through the Moog? Now of course this capability kind of comes in a $20 plug‑in — but there’s fun to be had playing with real machines, when you can, that’s very hard to match.”