Effra Road
Effra Road is funny one. The tune/lyrics itself were started about 2015 after a stroll around Effra Road and finished a few weeks later during a slow day at work in a Martello Tower out in Seapoint, County Dublin. Sounds a bit wanky but thats how it happened. I put it aside for years , including it as a quieter song in my live set. The recording of it though, started with a beat and it was now 2020. That beat was from a Yamaha PS -55 - a vintage home keyboard which doesn’t seem to get a lot of love even though its packed with great features and has a superlative build quality. In the years between I had enough of America and Americana and traveled back to the 90's where I had treasured tapes of One Dove, Slowdive, St Etienne and those amazing compilations of Volume/Trance Europe Express (these pre-date full blown Britpop and were described in various terms at the time but the one that stands out in my memory was NWON- New Wave Of New Wave). I made steps to record something outside my comfort zone and wondered what would come of marrying a quiet ballad like Effra Road to a beat and wrapping it in growing collection of cheap synth-y keyboards.
As I said it started with the beat and that was used in place of a click. Which was fine until tying in the arpeggio you hear rising and falling in the background. Id love to say it was skill that it ended up more or less in time but a large portion was luck. That beat itself is a mono auto accompany mode straight from the Yamaha into a barely triggered Vox autowah then a cheap old analog rack, then compressed, split between the DI out and mic'd up speaker of a Roland XD-50 amp and mixed back together in Audacity. The speaker was mic'd with a copperphone and the mix is about 75/25 in favour of the DI. The bass and a couple of ostinato bits came from a cranky Akai Timbre Wolf the rest is the Yamaha PS -55 treated with either reverb, delay or both. The intro decelerating arpeggio and filter sweeps came from a Dato Duo. The strings are a Yamaha FB-01 and I honestly cant remember the reverb I used on them- it's possibly a Boss RV-6. A couple of Glockenspiel pings from a Mellotron phone app rounds out the synth stuff. The cloud of guitar that rises up toward the tracks finale is that old analog rack and a Boss RV-6 going head to head and yes- it's DI'd. I had a Squier superstrat type guitar that I snagged for 80 quid an it was a joy to play. I wanted something shoegazey and I like how it fits itself in behind things already introduced in the mix.
The vocals were the most challenging part. Since the lyric was a real, if brief, contemplation on love , life and death I had a notion to frame it all in a Krapps last tape type scenario. The vocals are recorded into a Dictaphone and chopped into lines and dragged into place. Why ? the reels drifted so much it dragged the lines out of time.You experiment and you find out ! And that's a good place to leave it- the whole recording is a huge experiment in finding out and a massive step outside my own sonic comfort zone. So here goes ...
