Queensland band Grand Atlantic wowed us with their last album How We Survive, and they’re hoping to do it all again with their newie Constellations. I recently caught up with the band’s frontman Phil Usher to chat about the album, it’s unusual recording studio, and conquering the world.
You’re releasing your new album Constellations next month. What can you tell me about the album?
The album is a collection of 11 new songs that were written over the past year. We actually had about 20 written that we were working on and slowly whittled them down to about 14 which then made it to the recording stage. We have a couple of others that need finishing at some stage which we’ll use for bonus tracks or B-sides. We traveled to Seacliff in New Zealand for the recording sessions. The recording process was like nothing we have experienced before. It was amazing to be able to be away from all distractions and concentrate on making music for a couple of weeks.
I believe you recorded it in an abandoned psychiatric hospital. How did that bizarre location come about?
We were talking to a few producers and we really liked the feedback Dale Cotton came back with after hearing the demos. He’s really into the idea of recording in unusual locations and suggested the old asylum. It had been converted into a backpackers and we decided to hire out the whole site to make the record. It gave us the opportunity to stay on site and concentrate on the recording in a way we haven’t been able to do before. The Asylum is located in a little seaside town called Seacliff just outside of Dunedin with rolling hills, sea breezes and not much else.
I believe you saw and heard some really crazy things during the recording process. Can you tell me a little about that?
There were a lot of things that happened while we there that made an impression. We heard some strange voices on a few takes through our headphones when we had the doors to the old stable building open during a session. On another day we saw a heavy-duty microphone stand move as if it had been knocked by someone. Three of us saw it and no one was within a few metres of the stand. It moved at least a foot from side to side and was definitely locked into position. Mat says he heard his drums being played in the middle of the night and we also had a fire restart itself as well. It was quite a spooky environment, especially as we had done a bit of reading about the site before we arrived. Unfortunately many people passed away on the site during a huge fire, so it has quite a sad history. It felt good to be able to go there and do something positive in a place that has such a heavy past.
Did that experience make your reevaluate your position on ghosts or otherworldly phenomena?
I guess it’s different for all of us. We were pretty well focused on making the album, so it was an interesting aspect of our time there, although there wasn’t really time for chasing ghosts. I think we are all definitely open to the concept of weird stuff happening and there were certainly some unexplained things that we saw. I guess in the end, everyone has their own take on the reasons behind them.