As a way of celebrating the end of another Summer, FUR have got back together after a nearly five year hiatus and thought it would be both fun and appropriate to record an end-of-the-Summer cover song. They discovered Bananarama and Cruel Summer from watching Karate Kid; while it is undeniably cheesy, they always loved the subtly gloomy, elegiac undertones of the song and wanted to draw them out in their own version. Take a listen to the track via YouTube below.
For this one, they decided to build upon a little experiment in frugality that started with their last release, ‘Closing the Loop’—a record that they recorded, mixed, and produced themselves, and recorded it in two days and for no less than $200.
FUR are going to stop spending money to create music. No more $650/day for studio time. No expensive preamps, mics, boutique pedals, MIDI programs, or fancy plugins. Less impressive in 2017 than it would have been a couple decades ago, but for a band that has dropped thousands of dollars in recording studios, this is quite an exercise in resourcefulness and self-restraint.
With that philosophy in mind, Cruel Summer is the result of their first experiment in spending a massive sum of ZERO dollars on recording.
The percussion for this song was recorded by Zach, at home in an open room, using five low- to mid-fi microphones he’s had since we started playing music together. Excluding vocals, everything else comes from a shitty Yamaha PSR-36 keyboard, essentially a mass produced toy, that Ryan found in a thrift store. While the keyboard is MIDI-equipped, they stuck to their rules and didn’t use it. Vocals were recorded using a handheld M-Audio condenser microphone that was given to Ryan. And that’s it. No guitars, no live bass, no auto-tune…just stock plugins and a ton of EQ.
This song is a precursor and they are looking forward to continuing this challenge with their forthcoming, five-song release, ‘Diadem’.
