Behind The Beat: The Wardrobe That Made Emas & Debu

Every vocal on Emas & Debu was recorded standing between a winter coat Palupi has never worn and a stack of unsold merchandise from her first tour.

The technical setup is almost aggressively ordinary: one condenser microphone, an interface older than the album's youngest session player, and a duvet. What made it work was distance — roughly forty centimetres, which is closer than most engineers would allow and exactly why the record sounds like someone is in the room with you.

The horn problem

Recording seven horn players in the same apartment was not possible. They were tracked in a rehearsal studio in Tebet across two afternoons, then deliberately mixed slightly behind the beat.

“If the horns are early it sounds like a wedding,” the album's engineer told us. “Late, it sounds like a memory.”