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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