Today is release day! You might have noticed we’ve made the fantastic ‘I Want to Believe: The Contact Buzz Demos’ available to purchase, they will also be available to buy from me personally at any event, as well as any Lula gigs. This is the first artist focused release under Contact Buzz tapes and I couldn’t have asked to have put out a more creative and inspiring artist. There’s a few recordings off there that were recorded by Lula herself using a 4-track I loaned her, but Cult Song and March 22 were ones we worked on together. The full project will be available on Lula’s Bandcamp and Spotify so do give it a listen in full after checking out this music video.

When Lula and I started discussing making a release together, she gave me a list of songs she thought might be good for it, ranked in order of how well suited to the project she thought it would be. March 22 was dead last. I loved it, thought it sounded so personal and vulnerable - maybe thats why it was so buried. So I popped around to Lula’s new place - big living room window, bunk bed so high you’d bang your head if you woke up too quick. We cracked open the 4-track dug for treasure, finding such great tunes as Noni and Anthony Bourdain (I still love you).

But now wasnt the time to rest on our laurels, we needed to make a closing track that would leave everyone reeling. We started on the famous horse acoustic guitar, a bit of chorus and reverb, you know the drill. The mic we used was super sensitive so we ended up catching people coming in and out of the gate of her building, the squeal of the hinges. We then added some nice organ keys from the diverse and desirable PSR 200, (I need to get my hands on that Keyboard). First takes, nothing too fancy, took barely any time, so we grabbed a meal deal from Sainsburys.

Lula showed me Radcliffe, a tune that's out now for her upcoming EP. Now I love the version we did together last year, but hearing it realised and agonised over is always such a joy, producer Oscar did a great job. And the video that went with it? Perfection. You can see why I ask her to do some Contact Buzz vids. So now it was just the vocals - main vocals were compressed and squeezed through her Landline Mic (Contact Buzz made) and further pushed through my ODR-1. That’s what I call fuzzy. The big breaths in the middle of vocal takes you might be able to hear are actually just Lula winding up the rotary dial. Also throwing in some hums for good measure. She then did another take for a harmony which gradually takes up more space as the track goes on, blowing on a harmonica for those gaps.

The perfect way to end a melancholic and expressive release, also tagging on some Magnum Opus II as I had to record onto that tape for their live show with Muckypup. Never intentional, but when it sounds good, it sounds good. We seemed to pick up so many sounds for this recording - thats one of the things GBV get praised for on Bee Thousand, you can hear the room it was recorded in and I think thats certainly the case here. So I head off, say goodbye to Lula and Walter with the plan to record Cult Song that Sunday, excited about the prospect of this very release. Boy was I correct to have my hopes up.

For Fans of: Grouper, Angel Olsen and Daniel Johnston