Music

We did not know how to make a record when we started this one.

We knew how to play. We did not know how to put a microphone in front of an instrument so that what came back was the instrument. We learned that on this record, one placement at a time, moving the stand and listening, and moving it back.

We built the room ourselves, on a floor of an office building where the light had been fluorescent. We bargained hard for the insulation, got a good price, and bought far too much of it. There is enough left to do two more rooms. A quarter would have been plenty, because once it went up we found we didn’t want the room dead. We wanted it breathing. It has its own sound now, and that sound is on the record the way a member of the band is.

The recording happened in the summer before the record came out, in İzmir. The door stayed shut and there was no air conditioning on the inside of it, because the room had to be quiet for the takes. We went in in the morning and came out wet, and we did it again the next day.

What we wanted was to be in the room together. As much of this record as could be played by people standing in one place at one time was played that way, into the same air, with the bleed and the breathing and the small wrongnesses that come with it, and with us talking under it. Where that was impossible, we did it the other way. Where it was possible, we did not.

There is a railway station outside the door, a busy one, and the cargo trains come through whatever we put on the walls. They are on this record and they will be on every record we make. We grew fond of watching them go past.

We are still working out how to do this. Some of what we learned is on the record, and some of what we hadn’t learned yet is on it too. We are not going to tell you which is which.

There is no face on the cover. A hand holds up a piece of mirror and two eyes look out of it, back and ahead at once, and nothing around them says whose they are. That is what we asked for, and it is how the record works. Nobody held our hands through the making of it, and we are not going to hold yours through the listening. The face is yours.