The Waveform #022: Four in the Morning

There are two four-in-the-mornings. One belongs to people coming home and one belongs to people working, and they pass each other on the stairs without ever agreeing that it is the same hour. Everything Vera Lune has released was made in the second one. Mara stayed up to meet her there, and the transcript ran to nine thousand words before anybody started cutting. Reading it back at a sensible hour, on a Tuesday, with a coffee, felt like trespassing.

'I Record Everything at 4 A.M.'

Mara Voss sat up all night with Vera Lune and came back with the clearest account yet of why those records sound the way they do: night shifts, a flat that is only genuinely quiet between three and six, and tape hiss kept in as a comfort blanket rather than an aesthetic. She is also blunt about touring, which she has no intention of doing, and about what that decision has cost her. It is long, and it earns the length.

Also this week

• Live Session: Vera Lune Performs 'Glasshouse' on Our Roof. Two mics, one take, and a city's worth of traffic left in the mix on purpose.
• Low Ceiling's Debut Makes Small Rooms Sound Infinite. A band capped at 200 people a night, with a record produced to fit the same rooms.

One more thing

In keeping with the hours: 'Third Shift' by Cold Wick, forty lathe-cut copies, sold in person only and only after midnight, from a shop that keeps a bell by the door for exactly this. Six tracks of almost nothing, one of which is a night bus with a small keyboard playing along to the engine until the two of them agree on a key. I cannot tell whether the scarcity is a principle or a gimmick, and standing outside at two in the morning waiting for somebody to answer the bell, I did not care either way.

Sleep well. Ada