Their dark materials

A cliché is also a truism. You’ve got your whole life to make a first album, and only 18 months to produce the follow-up. It’s a syndrome of which Dublin-based electro-pop combo Dark Room Notes, who are about to release their debut album We Love You Dark Matter, are all too cognisant.

“If you look back far enough, this one’s probably been 15 years in the making,” admits the band’s guitarist/singer Ruairi Ferrie. “That’s about how long myself and Ronnie (Gaughan) have been making music since we started off in Galway. We recorded and released EPs and singles and stuff and put them out ourselves as far back as the late ‘90s, and we’ve always known we had something, but it took until we hooked up with the right producers and stuff before we could really concentrate. We’ve already started writing our second album as we’re rehearsing for the launch of the first one. We can’t help but be distracted.”
Produced by long-time collaborator Ciaran Bradshaw, We Love You Dark Matter eschews any notion of church and state segregation between pop and rock, merging the drive of a live band with electro synth hooks.
“We’re all huge fans of ‘80s pop, the golden age,” Ruairi admits. “Certain rock bands sneer at that, but I grew up with a lot of older brothers, so I would’ve been hearing that on the radio and a lot of ‘80s and ‘70s rock coming through their bedrooms at the same time.”
At the suggestion of Bradshaw, the band recorded the album live, using analogue equipment rather than the quick fix of digital editing techniques.
“We got a lot of nice vintage analogue synths from Flood’s studio when we were over in London,” Ruairi recalls, “he was kind enough to lend them to us. It avoided the problems of recording with a lot of electronic sounds, where it can sound a bit sterile.”
The band’s lucky number is 14. The Dark Matter sessions involved recording 14 songs in 14 days, working 14 hours a day. It was, Ruairi admits, a little cabin feverish at times.
“The cheapest place we found to stay was on a college campus about three miles from where the studio was, so we packed the bikes into the van, drove over to London and cycled around for two weeks, and it was 30 degrees most days. Looking back on photographs of what went on in the studio was kind of weird. Because it was so hot there was quite a lot of partial nudity happening, a lot of cabin fever, a lot of sweat!”
Be thankful there isn’t a scratch ‘n’ sniff version. These fragrant sessions were subsequently rendered hygienic by mastering engineer Steve Fallone, best known for his work with TV On The Radio.
“We’d heard of his reputation, so we decided it was worth splashing out the extra cash on making our album sound as strong as possible,” Ruairi says. “We sent it over and it came back a week later with this massive sound. You can actually put it into some software and look at the WAV files and it’s almost a solid block. People are complaining about that these days, that things are over-mastered, and your ears get tired, but you can actually zoom in and see subtle peaks and troughs, so I think he did a great job on it.”