SnowGhost Music

My first encounter with The End of the World was at SXSW in 2006. Our friends were their friends and it seemed inevitable that we would meet up at some point. Amidst the chaos of St. Patrick’s Day festivities at the festival (when in Texas go big), we were caught in a flurry of text messages, sending coordinates for a meeting that never seemed to materialize. Stefan, lead singer and drummer, was on the trail of a pretty little thing that had caught his eye. We never had that beer together at SXSW. But we stayed in touch through periodic phone calls and progress reports from our friends. I loved Stefan’s paradoxically simple and complex nature; and his voice was of 20 grit smoothness, despite claiming to have never smoked cigarettes. Throw in some uber-textural guitar playing by his college mate Ben, and you had wall-of-sound rock band like no other. As I learned more about Stefan and Ben, I discovered that they were some epecially capable fellows, running their own record label (Pretty Activity Records) and magazine (Take the Handle). They had enough songs for a new album and wanted to come to Montana for a vibe that they would, most certainly, not find anywhere else.

After a week or two of driving across the country in a medium-sized hatchback, the slightest bit more burly than Luke Temple and Robert Stillman’s baby blue PT Cruiser (our most memorable artists’ vehicle to date), Ben and Stefan were in Whitefish on a gorgeous summer afternoon. They were on tour and had decided that they were going to pool together their record collections, in search of every Rolling Stones recording they owned. They wanted to be inspired by the rawness one of the greatest bands of the 60s, let alone of all time.

So we spent the first few hours just listening to The Stones in the car, in the control room, and in headphones. How could we channel Mick, Keith, Ronnie, Brian, and Charlie? The first thing that I noticed was the drums: snappy, with a very short decay. Then I noticed the break up of the amps: Not like your modern amps, with a separate high gain structure channel for distortion tones. These amps were fairly low wattage Fenders, Marshalls, and Voxes turned way-the-fuck up. The bass was again, snappy and short, with a muted plucking tone. Mick’s vocal sound was definitely treated with vintage mics, tube pres, and lower gain tape machines. The was a wonderful crackling distortion somewhere in the signal the lingered around every turn of the music. The sound they wanted could be summed up by the most cliché inside joke for rockers… everything must go to eleven.

To be continued...