'I Record Everything at 4 A.M.': A Conversation With Vera Lune

The lift in Vera Lune's building has been broken since April, so the interview begins with five flights of stairs and a fire door that only opens if you lean on it. It is 3:40 in the morning. The room at the top was once a dentist's surgery: lino floor, one deep sink, a window over a car park where a single sodium lamp does all the work.

Lune is awake the way people are awake at the wrong end of a night shift, which is more or less what this is. A four-track sits on the draining board, a Ferric Audio deck older than she is, cabled to a mixer balanced on a stack of phone directories. Two mics on stands point at an armchair; one is the eighty-dollar Halden 55D, grille held on with electrical tape.

Her second album, 'Glasshouse', came out on Basement Records in June, recorded here over fourteen months and never outside the hours of four and seven. Last week she played the title track once, straight through, for a camera on our roof, and went home before sunrise. This is the first interview she has given about any of it. She makes tea in a beaker, apologises for the lack of sugar, and sits down at 3:52.

On the four o'clock rule

Everyone assumes four in the morning is a romantic decision. Is it?

It is a shift pattern. Sorry, it was a shift pattern, now it is just what I do. Six years on a hotel front desk, ten at night until seven, and four was the hour when nothing was asked of me. Not silent. Buildings are never silent. But nobody wants anything from you at four. When I left the job my body kept the timetable, so I thought, fine, we will make something out of it. It is not mystical. It is admin.

You say the room itself changes at that hour. That sounds like a feeling, not a fact.

No, it is a number. The trams stop just after one, and the air handling unit on the roof opposite shuts down around three. Between half three and the first plane this room loses about eight decibels of floor noise, which is the difference between having to sing and being able to speak. Everything on the record is at speaking volume. Recorded at two in the afternoon it would be a different record. Louder and worse.

What does the schedule cost you?

Friendship happens at dinner, and I do not do dinner. I am not going to tell you it is healthy, because my doctor has opinions and she is right. I have become an extremely reliable person to text at four in the morning and an extremely unreliable person to invite anywhere.

On hiss as a comfort blanket

The tape hiss on 'Glasshouse' is not subtle. People are going to call it a costume.

Then they can call it that. I grew up on cassettes my brother dubbed for me, and the hiss always came on a second before the music did. That second was the best part: it meant something was about to happen. So yes, there is nostalgia in it.

There is also a practical thing nobody asks about. Digital silence is a hole: you join two takes and the floor drops out under the edit and your ear finds the seam every time. Hiss is a floor. I can stand on it, I can cut anywhere, and the room stays the same room. Everyone talks about noise as damage. Noise is glue.

A plugin would give you the same glue for nothing.

It would give it to me afterwards. The tape gives it to me while I am playing, and I sing differently when I can hear the floor underneath me. Also the four-track has four tracks, and four tracks is a deadline. If somebody gave me ninety-six I would still be making this album in 2031.

Everyone talks about noise as damage. Noise is glue.

On refusing to tour

You have turned the Fjord Festival down twice. Why not tour?

Because the record is a document of one room at four in the morning, and a festival tent at nine at night has completely different physics. I would have to lie about that, and I am not a good enough performer to lie convincingly. Walking on at nine and making eight hundred strangers believe they are in a small room is a real skill. It is not mine.

And this is the part that gets misquoted: I am not frightened of audiences, I am frightened of the fortnight around them. Airports, hotels, three hours of nothing and then twenty minutes of something. I worked hotels for six years from the other side of the desk.

Who is 'Ninth Floor' about?

Next question.

Is there a version of playing live you would say yes to?

One room, one night, at the hour I actually work. Two hundred people at most. I liked what Low Ceiling did with their capacity rule, because it is not a gimmick, it is an admission that a sound is the size it is. Open a two-hundred-cap room at four in the morning and I will play it, and it will lose money, and it will be wonderful.

On what happens after this record

Are you recording now?

I am recording the room with nothing in it. Twenty minutes a night, no instrument, just the sink and the window and whatever comes in off the car park. I do not know whether that is an album or a diary or a symptom. Ask me in a year.

Advice for anyone trying to make something in a room like this one?

Stop buying. Listen to your floor for a week first, properly, at different hours, and write the times down. Everybody wants to know which microphone. Nobody wants to know what their fridge is doing at eleven at night. The microphone is the last decision, not the first.

At two minutes past seven a plane comes over low from the east and Lune stops mid-sentence to let it pass, the way you wait out a siren. Then she covers the four-track, rinses the beaker, and goes to bed.