Hey everyone, Ellie here. I suppose I should start by saying that I’m writing in solidarity with everyone who has the lockdown blues. January in London passed by in a haze of Bernie Sanders memes, that one day we had slushy snow, Bridgerton and all those times when I got back from a muddy walk and felt like my fingers and toes had died. But thankfully what is generally considered by most to be the hardest month of the year (and I’m not just talking about veganuary) is finally over. Furthermore, February 1st marked St Brigid’s day, which is a traditional Gaelic festival marking the official beginning of Spring. So that’s a reason to celebrate.
In these times of uncertainty, I have been keeping sane by working on a project of my own that has been a dream for a few years - setting up a little recording studio. Last October, myself and M.F. Tomlinson (some of you may have recently discovered him on January’s VG Selektor) rented a small soundproof room in East London, with the aim of making it a perfect little space for high quality recording and mixing. We have pretty much solidly been working away at it lately and even though these things are always a work in progress, we have finally got to a place where it looks less like open heart surgery- so take look at Sir Killalot Studios!
We called it Sir Killalot because to name anything after one of the house robots from Robot Wars is one of the dumbest things we could think of. Setting up a studio definitely taught us both a lot: how much Michael loves a good rock salt lamp or two, how I have a borderline unhealthy attachment to the boxes my microphones came in and how we don’t understand each other’s patch bay diagrams even though they apparently say the same thing. But one of the best things we discovered was how to make our own acoustic panels for the walls and ceiling. This isn’t to make the room more soundproof, but is a way of treating your room to be able to listen to music more accurately. You can see in the pics a great many of these beige beauties around the place, including bass traps in the corners and a ‘cloud’ for the ceiling.
The absolute diamond of the studio is the little loveseat that Imogen and William gave me for my birthday- they had it re-upholstered and even did the webbing themselves; a real labour of love that I’m absolutely thrilled with!
So what now? This little studio is currently my main location for producing other artists and writing new Voka Gentle material (more news on that and album two developments coming very soon!) Imogen and William have been building their own studio too, outside London, which I’m sure they will tell you about in a future entry. In the meantime, check out our new February Voka Gentle Selektor playlist that is now up for your enjoyment, and if you are a musician who would like to use Sir Killalot for a project, get in touch!