I just posted "The Future Never Comes" to SoundClound and I figured I'd use this track as an opportunity to talk about some of the production on "1979". As some of you have been asking, I bounced all of the songs on the album straight to cassette tape. I bought an old Marantz portable tape deck on eBay and the songs went straight out of the computer onto the deck, fully mixed. The tape recorder is kinda fucked up and has a really pronounced pitch warble that I love. It gives everything a very distinct character. Throughout the years I've become less careful with my mixes. I don't think I would've ever done this when I was first making music and was obsessed with clarity or whatever, but now that I've been doing it a while I'm much more into interesting mixes... Mixes with character.
This song in particular almost didn't make it onto the record. It's the only song with a beat on the album, and I wasn't sure that it fit because of it. But after playing the album to a few friends some of them said that it was their favorite, and that it provided a nice contrast to the rest of the songs. It's hard to gauge these things while working on the music sometimes as you're too close to it. But I'm glad I was convinced. Ambient music is just music after all.
- Ben
PS: The SoundCloud player really does some heinous shit to the tape noise in this one. Listen to a real copy if you can sometime.
You can grab it HERE.