Bank Notes

Day 1 - Wednesday 6 of May

Photography by Elizabeth Stacey

Okay, the first day of the studio went ah. Maze. Zing. Lee. It began with Abbe May. Abbe has made about three EPs in one year so she is no stranger to the live recording format, which means that her contributions to the Bank Notes sessions aren’t super-special. Regardless, she played a couple of songs for us, on ukulele, that haven’t been released previously.

As always, she was incredible and super professional. We billed the studio as a one-take kind of environment but she was the only person who really only needed one take. Still, she recorded a couple of versions of each track, both amazing.

Channel 10 news kind of fucked around asking her questions after her set, but while they were doing that the super-brutal Extortion set up.

The improv studio is made for soloists who only need their voice and their guitars mic’d up, so the fact that every one of these guys’ sounds drowns out the other made us think that maybe their songs wouldn’t turn out too good.  Well, that shows what we know about recording, because they sounded crisp as a winter toilet seat. What’s more, they played fucking eight tracks, two of which are recorded but as yet haven’t been put out anywhere, and one of which is a Tubronegro cover.

It was a dramatic change to then see Leonie Brialey, a.k.a. Li’l Leonie Lionheart, set up. Whereas Extortion played their whole set in one take and shut out all observation from the crowd, Leonie’s set was much more intimate. She was just one person on a chair with a guitar or ukulele, so basically every minute of what she did was invaded by our staring eyes. We only stared because we didn’t know that such a weight of emotion could be offlaid by one person, let alone such an unassuming person as Brialey. I think she caused everyone to shit themselves.

Anyway, when the sky got dark Boys Boys Boys stepped into the room. They only did two songs, but to be fair about 20 people are in their band. So, they only did two songs. That is totally fine, though.
They are perfectionists, unfortunately. We still love them. You know why? Because they dare to suggest that their straight male friends actually want to feel up a bunch of buff dudes. Nobody else is that subversive.

Anyways, see you later tonight.