By posting this message we finish our “Dutch”-edition Boot Recordings tour. By minus 2 degrees last Saturday, the 23rd of February, we drove to the North of Holland for the first recording. Yesterday, the 6th of March, enjoying a comfortable 17 degrees, we reached the South.
We recorded 15(!) awesome talented artists on our way. It was a pleasure to meet so many different creative persons. We slept 11 nights on couches, mattresses and beds. We were offered 11 dinners and 11 breakfasts. We want to thank all the musicians for the efforts they put in making us feel welcome! We really enjoyed it and we felt like princesses on peas. We slept at most artist’s houses and learnt a little bit about their lives, before we moved on.
As you already know, the artists get a recording, video clip and artwork. Especially the artwork was made differently this edition. Ron prepared a custom letter set out of “Hema-erasers”. For every artist he printed a unique Lp-sleeve on the spot. The design contains the artist’s name and the date of the recording. Nice to notice that the erasers slowly got damaged, which resulted in even more characteristic prints. The manual way of working and the usage of real ink and hand crafted characters fits perfectly with the analogue way of recording.
The recordings were done with only two microphones and had to be close to the van, because the power and mic cables were only 10 meters long. The tape deck was in the van where Evert was recording the artists. Surprisingly, from the two takes we recorded of each artist, most often we chose the first one.
For this trip we spotted most of the singer/songwriters in advance at the “digital pub”. We made a schedule before we started…a schedule way too tight! We worked our asses off to make it work. Next time we’ll work the same way we did at our first two trips in the UK, more spontaneously.
We want to thank all the people who put us up and made beautiful music for us to record, but also the people who followed us during this trip on our Facebook, Vimeo and Bandcamp pages. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did!
A special thanks goes out to Vintage Road Trips, who offered us this great VW van and gave us assistance on the road.
On Saturday 23-2 we recorded Thomas Aram and Sascha Elisah. A great promo film was made by Rick van der Burg on the Church Square in Meppel. Sascha translated an English song into Dutch, especially for us. The recording in Groningen with Sascha ended in a well organised theme party, the dress code was East Germany, we drank beer on a ration card and the brands on our clothes were taped of. A great way to begin our Holland tour! In the midst of the night we visited some art studios which were in the same building. Of course this was the beginning of a 12 day tour with a huge shortage of sleep smile-emoticon!
We spent the night in Groningen and on Sunday we drove to Alkmaar, where we recorded Gerhardt. He surprised us with his poetry, and what a beautiful setting! We slept in his studio at ‘Life 072’.
On Monday we drove back to Amersfoort to change our van, we had some technical problems, we got a nice blue van instead. From there we drove to Amsterdam, where Harold K was waiting for us to be recorded. He sang a song in Limburgs, we’re still trying to sing along, but it’s hard, beautiful song though.
On Tuesday we drove to Leendert and recorded him with Yvonne v/d Eerenbeemt. Their performance really moved us, such a great couple and what a wonderful song!! In the night we went to the Amsterdam Songwriters Guild, we enjoyed some singer/songwriters playing in a pub.
We drove to Haarlem on Wednesday. Misja Nolet sang about a great loss and hope for the future, we felt very humble to record Misja in her own house. Misja and her mother made us feel very welcome. In the evening we recorded Cordula in Muiden. This was a special recording, Cordula played on a mandolin. Her voice sounds great in Dutch. Due to some technical problems we spent two nights in Muiden. We were treated very well, it seemed like everyone prepared a vast booze supply, which we happily slaughtered! Close to the fireplace we worked. We had a lot of mixing, editing and uploading to do.
On Friday morning we drove to Schiedam, where we recorded Rudebeats and Elle. They performed a beatbox song. This was a challenge because of our dogma. We record only with two microphones, and the artist only has two takes. With Rudebeats we had to think of microphone placement very well. In the end we put up some speakers, where the loop station was amplified through. We placed a mic between the two speakers, Elle had the other mic. That evening we arrived in Heesbeen, the Kant residence. Jeroen was playing his song upstairs while his amp was downstairs in his living room, the amp was recorded with a mic standing almost outside, this song gave us chills, the whole atmosphere was breathtaking. With Jeroen we strolled the floodplains in the night to have a look at “the stone”.
Steven Engel was waiting for us on Saturday. He played a song about something a lot of people are dealing with these days. A great night we spent at Steven’s place.
On Sunday we arrived in Utrecht, our first recording was with Joost de Baas. On his banjo he played a protest song. That evening we recorded Duijf. He is an analogue master, it was great to record Duijf from the boot of the van.
Monday we spent in Utrecht as well. On the Oudegracht we recorded Danny & Marieke. A beautiful and catchy song about ‘I’. We drove to Mevrouw Tamara’s place and recorded her while she played with a loop station, guitar and piano.
On Tuesday we drove to Overasselt and recorded Aafke Romeijn. She is Ron’s old neighbour from a long time ago. Now they met again for this recording. This was the last recording of this Holland edition and it was a nice one! We spent the night in Overasselt and yesterday, Wednesday the 6th of March, we drove back to Utrecht.