Phil Elverum Quotes

I get very deep into the writing and recording process.

I loved the idea of recording. The idea of sound-on-sound-recording captured me as a young kid, and once I realized what it was I had an epiphany. Before I was even playing the guitar, I would create these lists of how I would record things and overdub them, like Led Zeppelin song, 'I could put this guitar on this track...' and so on.

I've always been interested in what happens in the studio.

I realized I liked being in the studio and working on translating the ideas into recordings.

After discovering the Ramones, I discovered really crude ways to multi-track by taking another cassette recorder and plugging that into the eight-track, playing it back, so that as I was recording with the mic in my guitar, I could have another cassette player I had recorded on feeding into the recording.

Well, I don't really use MIDI that much. But I do record audio around me a lot, and just layer it up and see what effect it has, without any aforethought.

Future's the guy, like, where, if I send him some beats while he on the road, and there's a pack of beats that he really like, if there's a new vibe or new wave, he's like, 'Man, keep feeding me more. Feed me more of this every day.'

When you record an album in six days, you don't have time to work out a lot of stuff.

Being a guy who was a geek with tape machines in the early days and really interested in how records get made, I was inspired in particular by how the Beatles were innovating when they were making those records late in their career while using the studio in a maximal way.

The modern recording studio, with its well-trained engineers, 24-track machines and shiny new recording consoles, encourages the artist to get involved with sound. And there have always been artists who could make the equipment serve their needs in a highly personal way - I would single out the Beatles, Phil Spector, the Beach Boys and Thom Bell.

Brian Eno taught us how to use the Recording Studio as an instrument.

I like being in a recording studio. I like watching a song go from the simplicity of the original music.

I knew absolutely nothing about recording. I had this four-track recorder, and I'd plug my electric guitar right into it, which sounded real bad. I moved any fader that made a drastic change in sound. I thought that was cool - that it was communicating something. I didn't have the skills to do anything subtle. It was just like screaming.

I'm very lazy when it comes to making the original sound. I don't go through amplifiers and different compressors and signal parts. I just grab something, whether its an old guitar or a children's toy that happens to be lying around, and record it straight into the computer.

I'm not really gonna stop. We've got so much stuff to do, so many songs we talked about, so many things to record.

Analog, electronic, whatever it happens to be, I simply love and adore literally every aspect of making music.

Well, I've been recording myself on a computer since I was about 13 or 14. So it's completely entwined with my creative process. Essentially, it allows you to make music that's better and smarter than you are, by using your ears to lead the way.

Unlike motor sport, I didn't get into music for the live performances. I like writing and studio work and seeing how a song can come to life.

One always has to remember these days where the garbage pail is, because it's so easy to make sounds, and to put sounds together into something that appears to be music, but it's just as hard as it always was to make good music.

I was trying to do the same thing that I always do which is make an interesting record.

By the mid-'60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

What producers did was mostly recording in the studio, so it never changed our sound just that much.

I spend a lot of time working in the studio as a producer, not just a singer.

It's a massive undertaking putting an album together... It's not light weight at all.

The whole thing with recording is you have to know when to turn off the tape machine and just stop recording because you want to keep fixing, fixing, fixing, you know?