Morningrise - Recording and Production

Recording and Production

With the delay of the first album, Orchid, Opeth began performing a few shows. Lee Barrett of Candlelight Records led them to the United Kingdom to play a couple of shows. One of the performances was held at the London Astoria, and the show also featured Impaled Nazarene, Ved Buens Ende, and Hecate Enthroned. Back home, Opeth rehearsed frequently, and booked Unisound studios again to record the album.

Morningrise was recorded during March and April 1996 at Unisound in Örebro. They stayed at the residence of the family of Peter Lindgren's girlfriend. Opeth again produced and mixed along with Dan Swanö, similar to how the previous album, Orchid, was recorded. Swanö also engineered the album. This was the last album that Swanö worked on with Opeth. It was also the last album that was recorded with Johan DeFarfalla and Anders Nordin.

As the release of the first album was delayed, they had already written most part of Morningrise when Orchid was released. Although some parts of the material recorded date back to 1991, Mikael Åkerfeldt said, "the material we had been writing felt really fresh and new." According to Åkerfeldt, recording Morningrise was "quite boring" because of "the endless drum takes, click track and shit like that." The band spent most of the time in the studio sleeping and smoking. Despite the downtime, Åkerfeldt and Lindgren wrote an instrumental piece that was meant to appear on the album, but they did not have enough time to finish it.