From the edge of a vision to the depths of "real life" (Patreon)

Dress It Up is one of the first songs we wrote together as Operators.  We arranged and demo-ed it in our San Jose, CA HQ in the back room of a converted, low brick warehouse that used to serve the bustling local fruit canning industry back when Steinbeck was kicking around in the area.  Our writing space was essentially a large concrete box that had..."interesting" acoustics.  Any frequency that came out of the PA would bounce around and hover in the air like a sound phantom and we really played to the feel of that room.  I think the repurposed industrial sonic ambiance gave a kind of sheen to these early songs and actually influenced the way we constructed them.  We wanted to write a song where the bass line never changes and all of the movement is in how the vocal melody, synth lines and percussion piles up over top.  The bass is a nasty unprocessed saw wave from the Moog Minitaur and the lead is coming from a very temperamental Arturia MiniBrute (which was eventually ditched in favour of a synth that didn't require manual repatching between songs).  The percussion is all Analog 4 generated kicks and hats.  Dress It Up made its stage debut at our very first show (flyer above) which was in the back room of a music store in San Jose and still one of the most exciting/nerve wracking shows we've played.  This version was recorded in Montreal and we spent a lot of time trying to recreate the sound of our practice space and its "complicated" acoustics.  The space is gone, bought up by developers, probably converted to condos or commercial space but the after image lives on as ghosted reverbs and odd reflections on this track.  I wasn't intending on writing a eulogy for our first practice space...but that's what happened.  RIP