The Bottle Garden

We were the guests on CBC Radio One’s Cinq à Six on Saturday March 26th talking about analogue production and some music recorded at The Bottle Garden. Jeanette Kelly was a great and affable host. And it turns out she has ace razor-blade editing skills from her early days in radio production.

We were guests for the full hour and played music by artists who recorded or mixed at the studio, including: Lantern, Sheer Agony, TOPS, Jef Barbara, Moss Lime, and Exit Someone. We also played ‘Song For Insane Times’ by Kevin Ayers as a example of a recording that we love.

There were a lot of other things we worked on that we hoped to play, including Brave Radar, Each Other, Ursula, Bickleigh Ghost, Tess Roby, No Family, The Nymphets, Holding Hands, Cheap Wig, Sigh Down One, Cool TV, Pretty Boys, Kurvi Tasch, Avia Kit, P.S.A, Traces, etc… but we ran out of time and/or your band was deemed too raucous for daytime public radio.

Listen to the full show here.

This was our very first open reel tape machine. We recorded a few albums on it and it sounded fine and never gave us any trouble. Lately we’ve been more apt to use it for tape loops and echo but we don’t love it any less.

Now that we have both this machine and an Otari 1″ 8-track, I must sadly report that Tascam’s ad copy is mendacious

This is our main mixdown deck. For the first two years we owned this machine, it had an annoying habit of falling out of record mode. Because of this, we relegated it to tape echo, rewinding and other secondary duties. We replaced every single electrolytic capacitor in the machine chasing down the prob, but it ended up being just a little jumper that wasn’t pushed in properly. Boy, do we ever feel stupid.

Now it’s just a sweet sounding late-70s Swiss mastering deck that gives us no sass and just happens to match our console.