written by sacr
The Senne is the river by which
Brussels was built. In the nineteenth century it was covered up and now runs
under the city.
Most of these songs have some or
other relationship to Brussels. Some were written trying to describe in sound
specific Brussels locations, in others, Brussels is the backdrop where the
action occurs, while others were written in Brussels thinking of something else
and a fourth kind of songs seem to be unattached to any particular place or
time. However they all allude to something which is there but cannot be seen,
touched or measured, something which you can guess but not know.
The colour of this record is a certain
sadness and that sadness has something in common with giving meanings and
feelings to what are simply objects, places, cities.
Halfway through the recording,
while songs were still growing towards their final form, we learnt about Senne,
the unsuspected river over which we had lived for so long, and we knew that was
the title...
The first signs of what would in
time come to be Senne appeared in a letter from Pepe to Sergio in 1996. It was
a song called Stationary Planet, for which Sergio would later compose new
music.
The last part of Senne to be
written was the middle section of Grounded. One morning in October 2000 I woke
up suddenly with the idea of a very soft bridge section starting with a minor
chord. I took my guitar into the bed, and, using phrases written the night
before, wrote the chords and melodies for this part. Later, Sergio wrote the
bass line, which complemented perfectly the rest.
All the songs in Senne were written
between those two moments. There was no method in the writing other than
absolute flexibility, and a determination to get to the heart of each song.
There were fragile songs we had to nurse delicately so as not to crush their
flame. There were enormous songs from which we had to take away all that was
not necessary. There were songs that took much thought and pondering for each
minor change. There were songs that appeared out of nowhere, already fully
formed…
Of course, whether on our own or on
the rare moments we were able to play together, we wrote many more than the
songs here collected. The songs in Senne are the ones that survived the natural
selection process of time, the ones that refused to disappear. Some of them are
to us amongst the best we’ve written, but all of them are special in their own
way.
In Autumn 2000, Sergio and me
discovered we were going to be both in Brussels for 3 months. I had just
finished my studies and he was leaving in January for Spain, so we decided to
record some of the songs we had written over the last years, but which we had
not got round to recording.
We had some MIDI structures or
acoustic demos we had done during my brief visits to Brussels, and some ideas
on the arrangements. As he had to study for his exams, our modus operandi was
to record together on the weekends, and then I would work on those recordings
and start new songs.
On old four track tapes we found
some usable elements (for example, the last recording we had made of Sergio’s
family’s piano, which makes up basically all of Stationary Planet) which we
transferred into my computer.
Once we had basic demos, we
recorded the drums in two nights at Didier and Nicolas’ rehearsal room.
Then came the post-production,
which involved mixing, re-recording and sometimes radical overhauls of songs.
In some places I added small
details (e.g.: spoken voice and white noise on Underground), in others I took
away elements that I felt were obscuring others (e.g.: How does it feel?, which
was progressively stripped down until it reached its present form).
During this period, while beset by
technical problems, I sent a tape of the work in progress to Jose Manuel
(Pepe). He answered with several long emails discussing the songs. In the end
these emails were to be fundamental in the finishing of the Senne, as, instead
of addressing the technical aspects that were worrying me (“is it in tune?”,
“is it on time?”, “is it well-recorded?”), they centred mostly on the “soul” of
the songs (“what does it say?”, “what else could it say?”, “how does it
say it?”, “how does it feel?”), and led, in some cases, to a
dramatic reassessment of the songs.
Finally, the 6th of December 2000, Senne was finished.
