Notes From the Boat

The idea

In April 2016 Mike Vass bought an eleven-metre Dutch sailing boat, built in 1986, and that October he moved aboard. He fitted a small studio into her saloon and invited ten musicians to come and record a tune on board, one at a time.

He calls it an experiment. The tunes were older ones, each already recorded or written for an occasion, and the plan was to re-imagine them with the boat’s own noises as “ear-candy”. The result, in his phrase, is “a record of my production as it was in 2017”.

Guest first, arrangement after

The guests sat on the companionway steps; the microphone and its reflexion filter stood further into the saloon. Each played to a guide of Vass on guitar and a click, and that was all there was on the day. The arrangement came in the few days after they had gone, so the finished track was, he says, “always a surprise to me and the guest”.

Gillian Frame came first, on a Sunday afternoon in March 2017. What grew round her fiddle set the tone for the album: a multi-fiddle pizzicato intro with overdubs and delays, more guitar, percussion, a synth bass and her own voice reciting the phonetic alphabet, letter by letter, which Vass chopped up to spell “Last day at the Fèis” over the closing bars. Anna Massie was aboard two days later; Ali Vass and Mairearad Green on the same Saturday in April; Tomás Callister by the middle of May. The refining went on for months.

Two stormy days

The sleeve says which they were: Anna recording the waltz, Duncan the slow air. On Speeches it was so windy that the boat was being blown about at the pontoon despite the rope snubbers, and you can hear her heaving and creaking on her lines. Vass decided there was “no point worrying about it”, and let the wind be part of the track. On Anna’s waltz he went the other way, building on the weather with rattly percussion, a pan, a sieve, some bubble wrap and a kalimba, to give the waltz some lift.

The rig

An AKG C414 B-ULS, a pair of Neumann KM 184s and a pair of modded Rode NT5s with Michael Joly capsules, into a Universal Audio Apollo Twin or, when the boat was off shore power, a USB-powered Audient iD4. Logic.