Live Session: Vera Lune Performs 'Glasshouse' on Our Roof

Vera Lune played "Glasshouse" once, at 4:40 in the morning, on the roof of our building, and went home before the coffee shop downstairs opened. That is the whole session. No sound check, no monitors, no second setup. What follows is how it was recorded, and the four minutes of conversation we got in the stairwell on the way down.

Two microphones and no second take

The kit list, in full:

• A pump organ borrowed from a church hall two streets away and carried up seven flights by four people at two in the morning
• One dynamic mic - the eighty-dollar one we keep arguing about - thirty centimetres from her mouth, angled down towards the reeds so it takes the voice and the wheeze in roughly equal measure
• One small-diaphragm condenser three metres behind her, pointed away from the organ and out over the parapet
• A four-track and a reel of Ferric tape running at 15 ips, on a plastic garden chair

The second mic is the entire idea. Convention says the room mic faces the performer and picks up the space around them. Ours faced the bus depot. Everything the city did between 04:40 and 04:47 is in the recording at a level you cannot ignore, because it is not spill, it is the other instrument.

What made the final mix, in order: a delivery lorry reversing at 04:41, whose warning beep sits close enough to F sharp that she waits four seconds and starts underneath it; gulls, twice; a window closing somewhere below and to the left; and, arriving under the last verse as though it had been booked, the first bus of the day pulling out of the depot at 04:46.

The take

There were two takes. The second is better in tune and worse in every other respect - she knew where the lorry went, and you can hear her waiting for it. The one we used is the first. Six minutes forty, no edits, one and a half decibels off the top of the room mic and a fade at the end. She asked for the roof door to be propped open and would not say why. It is audible at 5:12 and it is the best sound in the recording.

Three questions in a stairwell

You have a studio. Why a roof at twenty to five?

"Because nobody is deciding anything at that hour. The city is running on its own timetable and it does not care what you are doing. If you record at two in the afternoon you are the main event, and I am not interesting enough to be the main event."

Most people would have gated out the lorry.

"Then you have a recording of a woman pretending she is somewhere else. I do not leave things in. I record them. It is a different verb."

Would you ever play this in front of people?

"That was in front of people. There were four of you and a man on a bike who stopped at the lights."

A longer conversation with her - on night shifts, tape hiss as a comfort blanket, and why she will not tour - runs next week.