I had the great pleasure of producing The Water’s debut album Scandals and Animals this past spring. The Water are better known to us as Dan and James. Dan plays all the drums, loops and guitar and James plays the guitars and synths.

This record was a long time coming. These guys have grown tremendously since the first time I saw them at The Metro Gallery 3 years ago. In making Scandals and Animals, we used quite a bit of gorgeous vintage The Water, but a lot of new territory was charted as well. This isn’t simply a regurgitation of their live show in a studio. There was discussion of using an acoustic guitar on the record. There’s a pretty Beach Boy bass on a few tracks. It’s epic, dynamic, full of lyricless emotion and all while layering on piles of loops and beautiful melodies and polyrhythms crescendoing to an enormous dénouement .

The Water’s music speaks for itself. It’s not a record you can listen to in pieces. It’s a full-length record in its purest sense. Sit back, relax and listen from start to finish without interruption.

You can preorder the record here from Baltimore’s own Scenic Route Records and you can listen to my favorite tracks below:

Handsome Homeless

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DeSelby

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Future Nails

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Last month Mobtown and The Windup Space produced a week-long festival that highlighted (mostly) Baltimore instrumental bands. The festival was called NOVO (ie. No Vocals).

Russell (Windup’s owner and a generally swell guy who also makes a mean Jim and Coke) curated the shows (with a little help from us) and I recorded and mixed every night with Alex, with the plan to release the tracks on Aural States as an extension of the festival.

Some of the bands included Nathan Bell (Human Bell, Lungfish) featuring Ami Dang, Microkingdom, Jason Urick (WZT Hearts), Expanding Man, Yeveto, Insect Factory, Notendo, We Used To Be Family, JDay, Dustin Wong (Ponytail), The Water and members of the Out Of Your Head collective.

We had an awesome turnout and we’re already in the planning stages for 2011. Props to David at TeamAdelle for all the hard work on the visuals and design and Tedd Henn from HennPict for the wonderful photography. Here are some audio samples of my favorite performances. You can stream and download the entire festival over at Aural States.

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I’ve been working with The Water for a few months now. Why they haven’t been scooped up by a record label is beyond me. They are evocative and angular. Beyond their amazingly intense and shoegazey music, they are incredibly nice guys. Dan is sort of the ringleader, but James is the less vocal mad scientist.

Dan has a suitcase cut in half mounted on his kick drum (where the tom would go) filled with effect pedals that would make The Edge drool. It’s his command center. There is also a speaker “egg” Dan built that is the size of a large child with speakers custom built that give him a monitor mix of what all the pedals/loops are doing. It’s piercingly loud, but it’s also part of the sound and we captured it here in these recordings.

James has an equal amount of electronics and cables mounted in front of where his guitar cab goes. Quite possibly the loudest band I’ve ever worked with, and most definitely the most emotional. And not cry-baby emo. Emotional in all the best of ways.

These songs were primarily recorded live in the studio to capture their fierce synergy. Cutting everything up and tracking separately would have drastically changed their momentum and emotional capabilities. Very little is in fact “fixed” – basically what you hear is what you get aside from a few keyboard overdubs.

Here are two of my favorite songs:

Mercury Switch

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Mr. Fritz/Fantasia

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