“There’s this sense of striving for perfection where you can actually take momentum away. “We worked so quickly that there was a running optimism,” he continues. “We said, ‘I’m just going to do what feels good in the moment.” “We were coming to the studio on these sunny mornings everyday with an open mind,” Summers shares. After two weeks, Summers and Weikel began cutting those loose takes into rough shapes, steadily building songs from their cavalier sketches.Īlthough making records can be a laborious and tedious process, Summers delights in the memory of making this one. Mistakes didn’t matter, and second chances didn’t exist. In time, they returned to each fragment, broadcasting it over the studio PA, jamming and recording the results. Summers and Weikel didn’t discuss what they were making or the reference points that informed it, though such discussions had once been central to The Helio Sequence’s more self-conscious process. One piece documented, they quickly advanced to the next idea. They began exploring and capturing, recording guitar riffs and keyboard loops, drum patterns and bass lines. In May of 2014, inspired by the “20-Song Game”, they began arriving each morning in their Portland space-housed in the cafeteria and break room of an old warehouse- with the mission of making as much music as possible in one month. Summers and Weikel discovered just how adaptable and powerful their studio could be. As producers, they’d remixed Shabazz Palaces, picked up mixing sessions with Portland acts and earned representation from Global Positioning Services. In 2013, the pair took on their first full-scale production project, the Brazilian rock band Quarto Negro, after the group inquired about their space and availability through Facebook. They’d sunk entire recording advances into studio purchases, collaborating with local engineers to build custom gear and a space where they could blend high fidelity with kaleidoscopic sound. That’s how we tend to work, but we wanted to try something new, open and immediate.” In a sense, The Helio Sequence had spent their whole career preparing for this record. “We shut ourselves off from the world and disappeared down the rabbit hole. “Negotiations was a very long, introspective process,” remembers Summers of the band’s 2012 Sub Pop LP. Brandon Summers and Benjamin Weikel took the spirit of the “The 20-Song Game” to heart, and forged ahead writing a new record.
When they were finished, they’d have a party, listen to the results and talk about the process-of taking the good with the bad, of letting creativity push past constraint, of simply making music in the moment. Several of the duo’s friends within the Portland, Oregon music scene had been playing “The 20-Song Game.” The rules were simple, playful and ambitious: Songwriters would arrive in their studios at prearranged times and spend all day recording 20 complete songs. The self-titled sixth album by The Helio Sequence began with a friendly competition.
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