"We literally were waking up in the morning and just making music all day and all night. We left the house maybe three times!": C or D?

Twice this year, artist's I'm interested in (Solange, quoted above, and Grupo Fantasma) have talked about isolating themselves in a house somewhere and mostly just making music.

How well does this usually work based on previous examples?

make that 3 months and forget leaving the house and you have Trout Mask Replica

The Fever Ray album was produced alone (in the room), well outside Stockholm, in the wee hours of the morning, between baby feedings. Or that's my understanding.

I think this almost always works fine when the band has creative momentum and likes each other - - - pretty sure OK Computer is one of these records for example, also um, one of the Zeppelin LPs? When it's conceived as a kind of group therapy project ("No distractions, we'll get back to what it was always about, us and the music!") it's a disaster.

Aren't the majority of albums recorded under this sort of intense excommunication from society? Maybe not to the point of renting a house and living in it doing music all the time, but more just because studio time is so expensive and getting all of the band members off work at the same time is so hard to negotiate, mostly aren't people doing 12 hour days in the studio?

I was wondering about that. I don't know enough about how these things usually work, but that's possible. How different is it really? Is there an extra degree of psychological isolation if it's an actual house, especially a physically isolated one?

Also, if there's no big difference, why do some recording artists make a big deal of how they locked themselves in a house and just made music? (It sounds good in interviews and press releases?) At the moment it seems like a symbol of avoiding compromising influences, or something of that sort.

More than any of you want to know about Grupo Fantasma's recent project (with results that are disappointing to me, to be honest):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyzNhxFwrHg

(Except I lied it sounds like not everyone involved was even living in the house.)

(No wait! They aren't living there at all, apparently. So much for the skimpy list of examples that start this thread.)

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSRKYB865TWFJqojAUg933BjCgN1yodRt-19j0X7atUZaycoXY&t=1&usg=__dEZn45QT7WIAqGyiXvkuhLWX7EQ=

Yellow House is the second studio album by indie rock band Grizzly Bear, released on September 5, 2006 on Warp Records. The album's title is in reference to vocalist Ed Droste's mother's house where a majority of the recording took place. Droste and bandmate Chris Taylor suggest that: "there is not really a theme with the lyrics but the theme of the album is us figuring out how to work together and recording in that house, which is what brought it together in that weird way."[2]

i think the isolated house vibe really makes itself felt on the grizzly bear album. plus, the house was on a small island. on a small island near the small island i was living on when i first heard the album. so maybe that helps explain why i felt a kinship with the music they made.

Albums recorded on the moon?

http://musosguide.com/public_html/musos.wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/grizzly_bear.jpg

you mean these guys?

its a beautiful album. its the romantic ideal of creation in isolation with a small community of like-minded souls. kinda like the cure at jane seymour's house.

amon duul

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkRczBPRbCk
Didn't all the Can dudes live at Innerspace for some amount of time?
Oh and the first three Faust albums were done this way iirc.

Didn't Uwe Nettelbeck basically build a studio and move Faust into it from 1971-74?

(x-post)

Hold up -- Scott likes Grizzly Bear??!

Also, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers did this, I think with blood sugar sex magick.

"Hold up -- Scott likes Grizzly Bear??!"

i liked that album. i even wrote a rave review of it:

What a dream of an album Yellow House is. Summery, shimmering, light as air, yet grounded enough in solid song-craft that it never floats off into the ether. Which is the problem with most alt/lo-fi/fractured Americana/folk/psych groups and artists who worship at the altar of Wilson/Parks or whatever forgotten author of teenage symphonies to God knows what is being touted and resurrected this week. They sound pretty and create aching wisps of reverential fluff, but they go in one ear and out the other. Grizzly Bear's melodies stick with you. Now a four-piece – Grizzly Bear’s 2004 debut Horn Of Plenty being recorded by the duo of Christopher Bear and Edward Droste – the band makes drifting sand-pop (the album was mostly recorded in, yes, a yellow house off of Cape Cod) where sound and instruments waft in and out of the room like ghosts. There is guitar, a brush on a drum, banjo, strings, horns, and pianos that reverberate or tinkle or act as percussion. There are gorgeous side-two-of-Abbey Road vocal harmonies and there are lone voices lost in the weeds. There is a lot to take in – the ambient live noise and various fx adding to the mix – and yet Yellow House never feels crowded or messy. It’s hypnotic and intimate but never cloying in its intimacy. You never feel the hot breath of desperation. Only the cool breeze of delight in invention. The album makes you wish that more indie acts would take the time to learn how to make their songs breathe -to live with and inhabit their songs until they are sturdy and can stand on their own without crumbling- instead of just trying to turn their record collections into gold.

posted not because its the greatest thing i ever wrote but cuz i mention that they make a sturdy house of an album.