THE SANTA FE-TO-EUROPE INDIE-FOLKER BEIRUT GETS BACK TO THE ESSENTIALS
“Something clicked after No No No,” says Beirut mainman Zach Condon. He’s talking about the keyboardled 2015 album which stripped out the Eastern European influences that had been his metaphor since 2006’s breakthrough Gulag Orkestar. “It took me towards the end of recording to realise, if I just tuned out of the kind of tremendously powerful negative voices in my head, I found that I still had what I loved most about [the music]. Then I just got really excited.” Having written in isolation, he began work on the follow-up in late 2016, entering Relic Room studio in Manhattan with No No No producer Gabe Wax, regular rhythm section Nick Petree and Paul Collins, and brass players Ben Lanz and Kyle B Resnick. They recorded using busted amps, vintage tape machines and Condon’s trusty, battered Farfisa organ, lending weathered textures and noise to the
songs. At the time he was shuttling back-andforth between New York and Berlin for “personal” reasons: a choice of where to settle was forced on him when he shattered his left arm in a Brooklyn skate park accident in spring 2017. Plans for further NY sessions were abandoned, and, exhausted by the city’s demands, he elected to stay in Berlin permanently. “I’ve officially retired from skateboarding,” he adds. After further preparatory work in the German capital, October 2017 found Condon inviting Wax and bandmates to Sudestudio in rural Guagnano, in the ‘boot heel’ of southern Italy. “It’s where I tied up all the loose ends and where the focus was probably purest,” he says. “Working 14-16-hour days, I couldn’t have been happier. We left no stone unturned when it came to the sonics, even if it does sound like chaos. The studio’s an amazing place – there’s this big window to watch the sunset from, we were having brownouts from power outages, lightning struck the studio a couple of times… A few times I got lost walking from the studio to the old house because the fog was so dense.” Such escapes from modernity reached their apogee when Condon and pals visited the ancient town of Gallipoli one night. “We had this crazy experience, hitting this procession with this brass music and these priests holding this saint on their backs, walking through the town,” he recalls. “We just followed, in a trance.” The album had its title. The main body of recording continued into November, followed by a return to Berlin. Final vocal takes were taped at Condon’s home set-up, with mixing at analogue specialist Vox-Ton studios and mastering at Calyx. The results, arguably, take him back to his natural space, as horns-led, filmic indie folk strays into rhythmic pan-global exotica and he croons lyrics of departure, returns and rootlessness. “I’ve usually had a lot of crises involved [when recording],” he concludes. “Freak-outs and fears that, This isn’t gonna work. But I just put it out of my mind and decided to embrace it, and let it flow freely. I’ve never had it flow this much, and this smoothly.”
“Working 14-16-hour days, I couldn’t have been happier.” ZACH CONDON