Young Magic is the musical project of Melati Melay and Isaac Emmanuel. If you listen to their music or follow them online you quickly learn they don't sit still for long. They are curious travellers and restless creators; always moving, listening, and ready to record whatever, whenever they find something of interest. Breathing Statues is their second LP, a document of their journey around the world and inside their imaginations. On the eve of their Australian visit this week they lent us their travel diary to show some scenes behind the recording of the album.Studio. Upstate New York
Melati Melay and Isaac Emmanuel: Last summer we drove up to the Catskills to stay with a friend and were introduced to this house on a whim… some kind of paradise tucked away deep in the mountains. Over the past year we'd been recording sketches and demos; late night hotel sessions, on planes, buses, trains…. wherever we would find a moment. This is the place where we put it all together and finished recording and mixing the LP.
Chefchaouen, Morocco
We'd just finished a tour in Europe and had 3 weeks to kill before the next shows. Paris was edging into winter, rainy and too expensive, so we found 50 dollar flights to Tangier and flew to North Africa the next day. We took long overnight trains and buses around the country, staying in small towns and little fishing villages…. meeting people along the way with grandiose stories, of which I can imagine only half are true. It was exhilarating, scary, and somehow meditative, which aren't three adjectives that usually to live together very well, but whilst making this album seemed to pop up constantly.
Izak at edge of the Atlantic. Big Sur, California.
This strip of coast has held a place in our imagination for a good part of a decade. There is a quality to this landscape that is hard to describe – jagged and unforgiving, yet extremely peaceful. The demos we made from this early tour became the ground on which the album would stand on.
Paris, France.
Some friends of ours happened to be house-sitting for a French director who had an apartment across from the Louvre, so our first experience of the capital was pleasantly biased. We spent the days exploring old cemeteries and museums, and the nights recording.
Layover. Seoul, Korea.
Our apartment. Brooklyn, NY.
We met Jacqui Cornetta at a coffeeshop and weeks later she lugged her ornate 1920's harp up our 6-floor walk-up in Brooklyn. Captcha started as a simple bass delay and ended up with harp swells improvised over a looming climax. Cobra, Ageless and Holographic were all tracked in one long night, sans coffee.
Subway. Queens, NY.
Additional mixing was done at Sean Maffuci's place in Queens. He'd worked on the Gang Gang Dance records and I used to play in a band with him called New Moods. This was our time capsule each and every day for a few weeks straight, getting the long train ride out, listening to mixes, day dreaming, deliberating.
Upstate New York.
Most of the last album was recorded in the box but this time we had a chance to record live percussion, analogue synths and other sounds sourced from hardware. A friend's Sequential Circuits Prophet 600 was the centerpiece –I love that Prophet, but a few of the voices were broken so it would behave erratically, a quality I became really attracted to and even encouraged over time. Often mid-take it would drop into an arpeggiated sequence, or bounce back and forth between 2 voices, letting these lovely unexpected delay effects and loops happen, which we'd flip like the end section of "Fall In".
Mastering, Downtown Brooklyn, NY.
Xilitla, San Louis Potosi, Mexico.
After we finished mastering, a last minute offer popped up to play a festival in Mexico. We had been talking about making a video in this location for years and now here was the moment! It's a tiny town famous for a surrealist garden that an English patron of the arts started building in the remote mountains 50 years ago. I read somewhere that he sold his life's collection of Dali's and Ernst's to fund it, then spent the next 30 years making his dream a reality. It's a kind of looming, disorientating series of gigantic winding structures that stretch over a fantastic amount of jungle. It sits up there alone; rarely poking it's winding spires through a constant low-hanging fog. Seven days up there with the locals felt like a year had just passed in a waking dream.
The finish. Upstate New York.
The coming Winter upstate was clinical, icy and long, and coincided with the loss of a family member who meant the world to me. It was a time of coming together with family and celebrating life, and looking backwards and inward at my own life. I was searching for solace and beauty in an extremely difficult time, a loss that still lingers. "Foxglove" was one of the last songs we wrote for the album, and for me encapsulates my personal world at that time. Rumi said it first, but it didn't ever resonate properly until now: "Sometimes the deepest cuts let the most light in."
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Melati Melay and Isaac Emmanuel: Last summer we drove up to the Catskills to stay with a friend and were introduced to this house on a whim… some kind of paradise tucked away deep in the mountains. Over the past year we'd been recording sketches and demos; late night hotel sessions, on planes, buses, trains…. wherever we would find a moment. This is the place where we put it all together and finished recording and mixing the LP.
We'd just finished a tour in Europe and had 3 weeks to kill before the next shows. Paris was edging into winter, rainy and too expensive, so we found 50 dollar flights to Tangier and flew to North Africa the next day. We took long overnight trains and buses around the country, staying in small towns and little fishing villages…. meeting people along the way with grandiose stories, of which I can imagine only half are true. It was exhilarating, scary, and somehow meditative, which aren't three adjectives that usually to live together very well, but whilst making this album seemed to pop up constantly.
This strip of coast has held a place in our imagination for a good part of a decade. There is a quality to this landscape that is hard to describe – jagged and unforgiving, yet extremely peaceful. The demos we made from this early tour became the ground on which the album would stand on.
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Some friends of ours happened to be house-sitting for a French director who had an apartment across from the Louvre, so our first experience of the capital was pleasantly biased. We spent the days exploring old cemeteries and museums, and the nights recording.
We met Jacqui Cornetta at a coffeeshop and weeks later she lugged her ornate 1920's harp up our 6-floor walk-up in Brooklyn. Captcha started as a simple bass delay and ended up with harp swells improvised over a looming climax. Cobra, Ageless and Holographic were all tracked in one long night, sans coffee.
Additional mixing was done at Sean Maffuci's place in Queens. He'd worked on the Gang Gang Dance records and I used to play in a band with him called New Moods. This was our time capsule each and every day for a few weeks straight, getting the long train ride out, listening to mixes, day dreaming, deliberating.
Most of the last album was recorded in the box but this time we had a chance to record live percussion, analogue synths and other sounds sourced from hardware. A friend's Sequential Circuits Prophet 600 was the centerpiece –I love that Prophet, but a few of the voices were broken so it would behave erratically, a quality I became really attracted to and even encouraged over time. Often mid-take it would drop into an arpeggiated sequence, or bounce back and forth between 2 voices, letting these lovely unexpected delay effects and loops happen, which we'd flip like the end section of "Fall In".
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After we finished mastering, a last minute offer popped up to play a festival in Mexico. We had been talking about making a video in this location for years and now here was the moment! It's a tiny town famous for a surrealist garden that an English patron of the arts started building in the remote mountains 50 years ago. I read somewhere that he sold his life's collection of Dali's and Ernst's to fund it, then spent the next 30 years making his dream a reality. It's a kind of looming, disorientating series of gigantic winding structures that stretch over a fantastic amount of jungle. It sits up there alone; rarely poking it's winding spires through a constant low-hanging fog. Seven days up there with the locals felt like a year had just passed in a waking dream.
The coming Winter upstate was clinical, icy and long, and coincided with the loss of a family member who meant the world to me. It was a time of coming together with family and celebrating life, and looking backwards and inward at my own life. I was searching for solace and beauty in an extremely difficult time, a loss that still lingers. "Foxglove" was one of the last songs we wrote for the album, and for me encapsulates my personal world at that time. Rumi said it first, but it didn't ever resonate properly until now: "Sometimes the deepest cuts let the most light in."