Dummy by Portishead is one of my favourite albums of all time, and while a large portion of that will always be down to the incredible creative capabilities of Geoff Barrow, Adrian Utley and of course Beth Gibbons – the unusual mixing techniques have always stuck out to me and created a lot more interest in their workflow.
One of the more extreme examples of these unique sound design techniques is their ‘vinyl abuse’. They would start this process by getting Clive Deamer to play a collection of breaks before pressing into vinyl. After this Geoff would ‘chuck it on the floor and kick it around’ in order to degrade the quality and add characteristics like the iconic crackle the vinyl format has become famous for. He would also put it on his turntable and scratch all the snare drums individually to make them sound more dull. [1]
Similarly, in ‘Strangers’ the band avoided using instruments and hardware of high quality – instead opting for a “absolute piece-of-shit acoustic we found lying around the studio,” and recording it using a dictaphone. This achieved the unique distortion that would be next to impossible to emulate using digital processing. By the sounds of it this was also used on the vocals in that section.
[1] reverb.com. (n.d.). Making Portishead’s ‘Dummy’: The Production Experiments of a Trip-Hop Classic. [online] Available at: https://reverb.com/uk/news/making-portishead-dummy-production-experiments-trip-hop-classic.
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