Long Distance Collaboration

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This has definitely been a year of change for Humanimals.  We started the year playing shows in Lima, with little more than a Facebook page and a few home-recorded songs on our Soundcloud, and now we have dispersed all over the world, released our first music video, and are finishing up our first full-length album.  The crazy thing is that besides Bruno and Felipe, none of us are currently in the same city.     

view from my apartment in Harlem

I’m living in Harlem, Sebastian is just over the river in Brooklyn, Felipe and Bruno are in Lima, Matt Todd is mixing the tracks in Arkansas, Lauren Edwards is working on the album art in San Francisco, and John Ewing is helping us with our website from Sarasota, Florida.   The great news is that we all have enough gear to record and compose where we are, and then through online file sharing pass everything around to keep working collaboratively. 

the NYC studio

Right now Felipe and I keep the master folders and arrangements, each of us taking primary responsibility for about half of the album, and we work from there, recording tracks for each other, sending the songs off to have other people record tracks, and sending mixes and ideas back and forth.  Sometimes I head over to Brooklyn and work with Sebastian from his place, recording bass or working out beats in Ableton that I just can’t get to sound good in Logic.  Then I package everything up when a song is done and send it over to Matt, for mixing, communicating via Skype and e-mail about the musical direction, style, and what’s missing.  

It’s definitely been a challenge to be separated, but at the same time I think it gives us all a healthy distance from the music and a chance to think more critically and creatively about it.  Instead of always playing the music, now we can let it settle in, revisit it, change things around, and come up with new arrangements we wouldn’t be able to think of if we were always just playing together.  Something about the separation makes the music mature, I think.

Recently we’ve been working on Empty Space and Fountain of Youth, which are sounding AMAZING, thanks to the wizardly mixing abilities of Matt Todd. 

And we just launched our music video for Like You Like, which we filmed in Lima (Cieneguilla to be more exact) in May. Check it out! https://vimeo.com/51421463