Animal Kingdom Work on Songs, Open Trap Doors

Posted on Dec 15th 2009 5:00PM by Animal Kingdom
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Holed up in a North London church-turned-studio, Animal Kingdom are gathering material for their sophomore album just months after the release of their breakthrough debut, 'Signs and Wonders.' The British quartet will be checking in during their creative brainstorming process with personal anecdotes and photos. Here, the band talks about their latest work-in-progress and what they've unearthed at Ark Studio.

It's been a cracking week down in the church. On the writing side, we've been working on a lovely track called 'The Mirror.' It started off as a Neil Young-esque tune with a traditional '70s bass line and matching drums, but we decided to get out of that zone and try experimenting a bit more using samples and glitches from a great little modular synth on the iTouch called Jasuto, and shoving the bass through a little Casio SK1, then back out of the amp. These sounds mixed with the simple acoustic guitar and melodic vocal line are working nicely, although it's still only in the early stages.

On a less musical tip, we found a secret trap door when we moved our piano, which would have once led down to the crypt where the bodies were kept ... We hoped that it would reveal a great space for recording amps and for storage so we got started on lifting up the wooden hatch. It was hard work grinding at the screws that had rusted and not been moved for years. We felt like we were in the Goonies -- in fact Hamish even did the "truffle shuffle." After a good hour of drilling and chiseling away we managed to achieve some movement. Eventually using brute force, we lifted up the door and we were amazed to find...

...Message us with your predictions on what we found on MySpace or Facebook. If anyone gets the right answer, we'll send you a digital treat. All will be revealed next week!

'Bright Lights,' our penultimate track on the album 'Signs and Wonders.' is being used on a teaser for HBO's 'Big Love' starting this week, so we thought we'd do a quick video to go along with the track. We used the studio upstairs (previously Dave Stewart's rehearsal studio), which has a huge live room. We set up a 5m x 3m sheet, which we bought from a local Indian Sari tailor for a few quid, got a couple of friends to walk around with some candles while we performed the track, all shot with a basic DV camera. It was simple, no messing around, and done on our laptops in two days. We hope you like it. You can see along with our other videos on our YouTube channel.