Making of: Terraplane "Into The Unknown"

Me, Jens Vogel, Florian Furtner, Christian Oelke at rehearsal break (Wernigerode, Jan 2006 by Fab)

I would like to share stories about how the important albums of my career came to be, what influenced us at the time etc. Starting with the first label release, Terraplane "Into The Unknown" (review here), on Nasoni Records in February 2007 and before that a self-released CDr in July 2006. This was actually our third attempt to record an album, after "Orange Sunshine" in March 2003 and "Psychedelic Wonderland" in May 2005. Many problems surrounded us, most of all we were still very inexperienced. We had many songs, but sometimes didn't even rehearse them properly, we were just impatient to "explode" on stage. So we created these and after a few rehearsals played already live, or worse: recorded them as they were - quite incomplete. That was the main problem with our first album, half of the songs were not played well enough. The other problem was that in the early 2000s, nobody in rural Harz-region understood how we wanted to sound. Some of those early recordings have a strange "metallic" character. Money and flexibility were also a big problems, especially with "Psychedelic Wonderland", which was partly my first self-production and also sounded like that, ... bad. In fact, only a few copies were spread among fans, some liked it anyway, but I was rather embarrassed. With "Into The Unknown" at least things have changed for the better!

Although I often refer to the time with Christian Oelke on bass and vocals and drummer Andreas Herbst as a kind of "the original Terraplane", this is indeed somewhat nostalgic. After Andreas left in the fall of 2005, we found a capable replacement in Jens Vogel, who put up with a three-hour drive coming to our rehearsals and also brought recording skills. This was new and exciting! After all the problems in the past and a first "test flight" recording a demo EP with him, we decided to do the final album recordings ourselves. I felt confident enough to do the final mixes (in Magix Musicmaker - LOL) and took care of overdubs and vocal recording, while Jens contributed the basic tracks (rhythm guitar, bass, drums) and drum mix. For about one week we rented a garage in Wernigerode, where friends had rehearsed before, and there the "magic" happened. Or not so much magic in reality ... but in the time when you are young and discover something new, you know how it was. Everything seemed possible.

Little Man Chris in a happy creative mess ;) Wernigerode, Jan 2006 by Fab

Jens was super dedicated back then. He joined us shortly after the split from Lunalone (listen here) and lived for the music and a kind of grunge lifestyle (this was 2006, so the 90s weren't that far away yet). We were all pretty poor, but Jens really lived on dry bread and tap water back then and slept in this garage for a week! I can't remember why I didn't offer him to crash at my place, or maybe it was because I was living in a tiny 25sqm apartment myself at the time. Some of my memories are fading, which might also be a good time to write them down. Anyway, these were kind of crazy times. We devoted our whole lives strictly to music, but we were also still pretty clueless about a lot of things. Nobody had the slightest idea about the music business in general, we were super super naive. But we had some cool songs that finally got recorded right. Even though there were problems again, Jens computer barely managed to record ten minutes without crashing, so the "Into The Unknown" jam had to be split into two parts. We didn't know that it's common to split long songs anyway. Still, it was tricky. But most of the other tracks went very well.

As I mentioned before, we recorded only the basic tracks in this garage, just the three of us from noon to nightfall: Jens on drums and recording, Chris O. on bass and me on guitar, with the only exception of the song "Mantra", where Florian Furtner played bass. At that time we also changed the line-up, Florian came from our side project The Ians Experience, probably because I felt that the band would gain tightness with a fourth member. Terraplane was perhaps a bit of an odd group, we were more influenced by 70's hard rock and 60's psychedelia, which was rather unpopular at the time, while the heavy Swedish stoner groups (Dozer, The Awesome Machine etc.) were still prevalent. So we tried to find our balance within that framework. A pretty strong influence at that time also came from Five Horse Johnson, who we had just discovered. If you listen to "Once I Was You" in particular, it could really be a riff of FHJ's "Last Men On Earth." I think after four or five days we had managed to record the basic tracks, and I went on with the rest, mostly in my aforementioned one bedroom apartment, while the vocal recordings took place in our rehearsal room, which was in this medieval building that was rent to us by the church for only one euro per person, per month! Fantastic times, weren't they? We had to share that with a lot of other people though, which wasn't so great and also the reason we did a lot of the main recording in that other garage.

A little ways up the hill from the garage where we recorded was that spot on the album cover.

What's particularly amusing to me in retrospect is what simple tools we used to produce this album. I think Jens used only one microphone (probably SM57) for the guitar, probably only DI for the bass (okay, it could sound better) and no expensive state-of-the-art or vintage stuff like on most Samsara albums I might talk about later. It was all very simple, but it worked! The mixing program I used was pretty funny. I bought this Magix Musicmaker-program in 2005 for about 60 EURO. It was super limited, but I didn't use any compression or EQing anyway, just the pure recordings as they were! For the vocals we just used Oelke's SM58 mic. All of the guitar overdubs were done just through my BOSS GT-3 multi-effects unit. If you knew how to use it, it actually did a good job. I was happier with the guitars in particular than I was with some of the later Samsara recordings. All of this was long before modern amp modellers or usable software. What I want to say in summary is that you don't need expensive gear at all! The musical ideas are what should count. I don't know why I feel it's often the other way around these days, maybe I've spent too much time in somewhat "fancy" recording environments or looking at Instagram illusions. You don't need fancy stuff!