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With a lot of the pre-production work completed in our bedroom studio, we needed a different environment to put the finishing touches to the tracks, so came up with the idea of hiring a cottage in the black mountains in Wales. We also wanted a third ear to bounce engineering and production ideas off of, this turned out to be Andy Guthrie who had worked a lot with Banco de Gaia. The fourth person to be a part of this journey was our mate Derek (Dhubba, Dibs), who apart from having great taste in music, offered to be our chef for the 14 days to allow us to completely focus on the music.
We had found the perfect place called Rose Cottage who's nearest neighbour was a mile away and as Toby (BDG) was away for for the time we were recording, he said that we could borrow any of his equipment we may need for the job! So with our (t)rusty old Transit van packed to the gills, we headed off to make the album.
When we arrived, we quickly found the best room to use for the studio and set about converting it to our new studio, complete with extra (and better) equipment. One snag we hadn't prepared for was that the cottage had an electricity meter that you had to put 50p in every so often. As the reliability of electricity is pretty important for these things, we had to bypass the meter with some interesting work arounds!
As the snow fell around us we started the process of recording the tracks; setting up the track in the day, mixing in the evening and a final mix in the morning with fresh ears. We tried to create alternate mixes of each track and as a lot of it was performed live as we recorded, we had some different variations of each track to choose from later, (the alt versions of Underwater dub featured on a free 10" dub plate that came with the first 1000 copies of the vinyl version of Sirius Sounds).
With the serene surroundings and no other distractions, (apart from a visit from Mike Dog with much needed supplies ;), we managed to complete all of the tracks for the album and started the ball rolling for the release.
Our friend, Emerald Mosley, had created some of her amazing art that was inspired by the name and music and was perfect for the album artwork. However, with the release in the U.S. Walmart banned the cover due to pro-life concerns, so you may see a cover with a black and white shot of us playing with the electronic innards of some piece of equipment made to look like a the picture you'd find on an MB games box!
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