- The locations might be strange, but not all of the music is.
Most artists record their music in a well-equipped studio, with quality gear, air-conditioning, and other luxuries. Others, however, go for a different approach.
Plenty of albums, both popular and obscure, have been recorded in rather unusual locations. Sometimes artists do it as a marketing gimmick, sometimes the place serves as inspiration, and sometimes they just can’t afford to do it anywhere else.
Here are six albums that were put on tape at decidedly bizarre locations.
1) Prince Harvey — PHATASS (2015)
The Location: An Apple Store
Prince Harvey has put out several albums on his Soundcloud. But it was with PHATASS, in 2015, that he set himself apart with how he recorded it.
The rapper recorded the entire album during business hours at a certain Apple Store in New York. Not only that, he composed the music with the GarageBand app and recorded his rapping with a display laptop’s built-in microphone.
It’s not like he really had a choice. Harvey had kept all his musical at a friend’s apartment, but all of it got confiscated due to unpaid rent.
So, every weekday over four months, Harvey came to the Apple Store to work on his album. The staff let him do it, since they figured it’d be good for business.
2) Nine Inch Nails — The Downward Spiral (1994)
The Location: The Sharon Tate murder house
In 1969, members of Charles Manson’s infamous cult murdered Hollywood actress Sharon Tate, her unborn child, and four other people at a certain Hollywood Hills home. Then, 25 years later, industrial rock star Trent Reznor recorded his breakthrough album The Downward Spiral in the same building.
If you’ve listened to the album, it seems like a fitting location. Reznor’s abrasive, electronic rock and questionable lyrics definitely have the bad vibes of a murder house.
Reznor claims that he didn’t try to up his edginess by moving into the house, and simply happened to find the locations up for rent. However, before the album’s release, he did have a meeting with Tate’s sister Patti that made him realize that maybe he could’ve picked a better location.
At least we got a good album out of it.
3) Matmos — A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure (2001)
The Location: Medical surgery rooms
The American electronic music duo Matmos’ 2001 album A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure invokes medical procedures with its name. And it’s no wonder — the album was recorded during actual surgeries.
Well, the actual mixing and editing was done in a studio. But most of the sound samples heard on the album are from genuine surgical operations.
On the album, you can hear samples of bonesaws hacking through bone, liposuctions, hearing tests, plastics surgeries, and other operations. It’s not an unpleasantly visceral listening experience, though — clever editing and sampling masks the gruesome noises with surprisingly catchy, glitchy EDM.
4) Killing Joke — Pandemonium (1994)
The Location: The Great Pyramid of Giza
The same year that Trent Reznor was holed up in the Sharon Tate house, British post-punk pioneers Killing Joke were busy at another unusual recording location. Namely, the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Granted, the didn’t do the hole album within the ancient monument. But singer Jaz Coleman did record the vocals for three of the album’s tracks in the pyramid.
Allegedly, the band ran into some supernatural issues during the recording. Bassist Martin “Youth” Glover claims that the batteries they used to power their equipment kept mysteriously dying.
So, he did the only sensible thing anybody would’ve done in the situation. Glover threw off his clothes and performed a butt-naked ritual with sage, holy water, and quartz crystals.
Apparently it worked, since the songs got recorded.
5) Stalaggh — Projekt Misanthropia (2007)
The Location: An operating mental asylum (supposedly)
As you might expect from its name, Projekt Misanthropia is not pleasant listening. The 2007 album by Stalaggh — a Belgian/Dutch experimental music group — consists of horrendously distorted noise and electronic feedback, mixed with inhuman screams.
According to the band, those screams came from actual mental patients. One of the band members supposedly worked at a Dutch mental institution, where certain patients participated in a therapy that involved them releasing stress by screaming.
The band got permission from both doctors and the patients to record the screaming sessions. Among the voices is supposedly a schizophrenic man who killed his mother by stabbing her 30 times.
Now, we don’t even know the band members’ names, so there’s no way to confirm whether any of this is true. But if you listen to this hellish mess of ugly noise, it sure sounds plausible.
6) Chris Hadfield — Space Sessions: Songs from a Tin Can (2015)
The Location: Space
Chris Hadfield is a now-retired Canadian astronaut. It’s only fitting, then, that his 2015 album Space Sessions — whose subtitle aptly references David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” — was actually recorded in space.
Hadfield was on a mission on the International Space Station (ISS) between December 2012 and May 2013. Apparently, the hours get long while floating in a most peculiar way, so the musically-inclined astronaut composed and recorded some songs.
Hadfield returned safely to terra firma and released his collection of guitar-driven pop a couple years later. That probably makes Space Sessions the most out-of-this-world album in human history.