Living Thing in my Living Room

So last week I had a great opportunity to do some guerilla recording with Vancouver psych-rock band It’s a Living Thing in my home studio. I was initially expecting a two person, electric guitar set up after having listened to some of their earlier work. To my surprise I was greeted by four members of the new line up; Damon (guitar), Falcao (drums), Monashee (violin/keys) and Alissa (bass), fresh in the midst of their first cross Canada tour. Needless to say it was a pleasure to have them all in my humble little home. All four members of IALT sing in beautiful three and four part harmony, and have a really tight sound that had us all nodding our heads throughout the session.

For the recording, we ran a couple of microphones into a small console and ran the auxiliary into one of the bands’ amps (for lack of a PA monitor). The rest of the sounds - drums, amplifiers, violins, etc. - were captured by an over head condenser with severely tweaked out EQ and any additional bleeding blended into the vocal mics. I have to say it’s not the best setup for recording. However, we were able to capture an entire two sets of music and the energy of the bands’ performance is tangible. Good enough. Sometimes sacrificing sound quality for energy is preferable.

Here is the full podcast of Vancouver’s It’s a Living Thing live in my Montreal living room.