Fantasy Black Channel - Origins and Recording

Origins and Recording

Having officially formed a band under the name Late of the Pier in 2004, childhood friends Sam Eastgate, Andrew Faley, Sam Potter, and Ross Dawson initially developed the sound of their first album by listening to the alternative dance music of British ensemble The Prodigy and the grunge music of American band Nirvana. They soon branched out into listening to diverse genres from the last 40 years of music, including Motown and soul. Potter has treated their conception of Fantasy Black Channel as a reaction to "mediocre, complacent indie-schmindie bands who find a sound and stick to it; whose songs sound exactly the same", while lead writer and composer Eastgate has pointed out that they wanted to "take people past their own limits". The nascent recording stages took place in Eastgate's bedroom, where unconventional time signatures and experimental chords were performed because, at the time, no band member could play an instrument properly.

Late of the Pier started using the album working title Interesting Adventure in 2006 after practising in Eastgate's bedroom for about a year and previewed their new material at the Liars Club in Nottingham. After receiving contract offers from Parlophone and Atlantic Records, the band members signed to Parlophone because the label gave them total autonomy over the recording process without pressuring them to be commercially successful immediately. The record deal was followed by the recording of an EP titled Zarcorp Demo, from which a demo single, "Space and the Woods", was released in March 2007. Eastgate has claimed that the band members were influenced by the music of the 1980s during these formative stages of Fantasy Black Channel even though none of them were born before 1986.

Sam will ... make a computerised machine track. Then from there we learn what he's put down in a human way... After that process you get a recording of it like a demo, then from that we'll gig the track and it changes again. Our music goes through lots of filters: it's a really strange process and I don't think many bands do it.

Sam Potter, on Late of the Pier's methods of creating Fantasy Black Channel

In late 2007, Late of the Pier formally met renowned DJ Erol Alkan after seeing him play a set at the Liars Club. Alkan called them "THE most exciting band around" and offered the band members help in the recording process of Fantasy Black Channel. They accepted and made him producer for the album because of the immediate rapport that developed between the two parties. Dawson has explained the choice of producer by suggesting that Alkan is famous for playing broad genres of music and that he understands the properties and crossover of dance and guitar music. Alkan fully embraced the band members' ideas and immediately understood what they were trying to achieve. "Bathroom Gurgle" was recorded by the new collaboration and was released as a limited edition single in September 2007.

The production process for Fantasy Black Channel gathered pace around December 2007. Late of the Pier usually proceeded by taking bedroom recordings into the studio, where they were refined by Alkan into "a more presentable package". They tried unconventional techniques in the style of avant garde producer Joe Meek during the live studio recording sessions, including stamping in baths and reamping guitars through air vents. When tracks were mixed after being recorded, the band members, Alkan, and engineer Jimmy Robertson worked in tandem and unanimously decided when a track had finished undergoing the studio effects process. No songs changed after this point, even when one of the parties had further ideas. At the time, in an interview with the band, Stuart Turnbull of the BBC Collective indicated that Alkan managed to "channel Late of the Pier's sonic attack into something more focused yet still undeniably different".