POST has a new home.
High above the Gold Coast, we’ve built a recording and rehearsal space where we can write, practise, experiment and make records without watching the clock. We call it the Studio in the Sky.
Although “studio” has become a slightly loose term.
One room is the actual studio. The living room is now a rehearsal space. Guitars are appearing on walls. The cello lives beside the window. Microphones, pedals, speakers, cameras and stands move around depending on what we’re doing.
It’s easily the best view we’ve ever lived with.
After years of music having to fit around everything else, having a permanent place for it has changed things. We can leave an instrument plugged in. Record an idea when it appears. Spend far too long on four bars without having to pack everything away because real life needs the room back.
And lately, there have been a lot of ideas.
We’re writing songs, rehearsing them, recording, learning more about production, creating the artwork and visual world around the music, working on merch, running the business behind POST and occasionally stopping everything to hand-sign a pile of postcards.
Ally also goes surfing.
Quite a lot.
The beach is directly out the front. On a good day he can get out three times. Esther calls these his breaks from his breaks.
Then he comes back upstairs and picks up the cello.
Which is useful, because Esther keeps writing pop songs.
Sometimes Ally’s first response involves the word “cheesy.”
Then something darker or stranger appears underneath the melody. The song shifts slightly sideways, and somewhere between Esther’s instinct for melody and Ally’s instinct to interfere with it, we find the place we’re looking for.
That’s becoming a fairly good description of how POST works.
The songs are changing. The sounds around them are changing too. We’re working out how far we can push what two people, a voice, a guitar and a cello can become — without losing the thing that happens when the three instruments are simply in a room together.
Not everything we make up here will survive.
Some things will disappear into hard drives forever. Others might become records we haven’t made yet.
Right now, the living room is where we’re finding out which is which.
We’re rehearsing our original songs for a live filmed demo from up here — voice, guitar and cello, played together in the room.
When it’s ready, you’ll be able to see what we’ve been doing up here.
