Silk Screens is a behind the scenes look at the making of a track.

In our latest edition, Erin Fein of Psychic Twin discusses the making of “Strangers” off of her new Strangers 7″ courtesy of Polyvinyl Records.

Over the summer we started to record at Jonny’s (backing band) house. We were about half way done with our record and we all took off work to record for a week. We had previously been recording songs in my basement, but I moved, so we no longer had that space. Jonny’s recording room is hysterical. The walls are literally lined with Star Wars figurines. And the wall that doesn’t have figurines nailed to it, has shelves housing Ton Ton’s, The Rancor, and Jabba the Hut. He also owns a Yoda backpack. There’s a magic 8 ball, which helps us make tough decisions and a skull hanging from one of the shelves. So obviously this was going to be the perfect space for us.

We have really dialed in our recording set up. This is kinda how we do it: we set up Jonny’s VOX AC30 and use a Ghost Echo Reverb, Tremelo, Delay, and pretty much run everything through that. We set up our “magic” keyboards which are an old organ called “The Fun Machine,” a Juno 106 (most amazing fucking keyboard), and a Casiotone 701 (also a gem). We write our drums using a bank of sounds that we have been customizing and putting together for years. We use the same drum sounds in almost every song because we feel like it defines the sound of Psychic Twin. Many long nights drinking booze and smoking have resulted in a rather large and weird bank of sounds.

When we recorded “Strangers,” I finally realized that I hate recording vocals with a pop screen, so we ditched it and just held the mic and sat on my knees while I sang. I ran my vocals through the VOX for this song and it changed the course of our whole record. There was this amazing dreamy fuzziness that was present when we recorded this way and it put the vocals exactly in the space that we wanted them to be in.

I should mention that a copious amount of weed is consumed while we record…this is just the place we need to be in when writing together. We have fun when we record. We drink and we let ourselves go. Brett (backing band) recorded the arpeggiated synth that runs through the track on his 4-track to get a warmer tone. Every layer of synth is picked over when we record. We jokingly refer to making “synth sandwiches” when we record a song. If the layers of synth aren’t in just the right space, it doesn’t work. I think “Strangers” is the first song that we felt sounded exactly like what we meant it to sound like.