“I’ve never heard anything like this”: The unique way Slint recorded 1991’s ‘Spiderland’
“It was weird while I was doing that record because I remember sitting there, and I just knew there was something about it. I’ve never heard anything like this,” was what the sound producer for the second and final Slint album, Spiderland, said about it.
It’s a rare thing for a producer to be lost for words: Usually, they have the largest vocabulary of all, a necessity when having to nail down exactly what an artist might want a certain segment of their work to sound like, when all the ego-filled star behind the screen can do is gesture frustratedly at the air. Discordant? Polyphonic? Primal? Tonal? Strident? Operatic? With Slint, producer Brian Paulson was stumped.
Paulson shot off to Minneapolis as soon as he finished high school in Bemidji, Minnesota, and began his career playing in Man Sized Action, the first band on Bob Mould’s Reflex Records label. He toured with Steve Albini, making friends that way with David Grubbs, and from there worked on a Bastro album. Here, the path led him directly to Slint.
In an interview with Independent Weekly, he recalled, “It just happened so quickly”. The fresh-faced group, consisting of late teenagers and early 20-somethings, had “liked something I’d done,” Paulson shrugged nonchalantly, so the producer jumped at the chance. He was still waiting tables in the week, after all.
If Paulson was plagued with imposter syndrome while on site at River North Recorders in Chicago, Illinois, he didn’t let it show. He didn’t exactly have the time, but as he recalled, “We knocked that record out in four days. It was a stay-up-all-night-until-you-can’t-see-anymore”.
With little time, Paulson made sure the setup was relatively straightforward and raw to hone in on the themes of disaffection, alienation, and isolation. No EQ, no compression, and straight to tape, and while Paulson added a pinch of delay on the vocals, he explained, “We felt like the best thing to do was to keep it direct”.
With nowhere to hide, Brian McMahan and Britt Walford found their innermost thoughts had a path straight from brain to recording, like a runway lit up at night with great, beady white lights. They’d not even prepared any lyrics. This wasn’t an oversight on their behalf, though, as McMahan later explained, “I did not want to rehearse the vocals…it was a one-shot, cathartic experience.”
Anything could’ve happened in those four walls. Paulson’s production style, minimal live takes to capture a song’s original birth essence, a rattling kind of spontaneity, might’ve thrown the fleshling post-rock outfit off the mark. On the contrary, the music didn’t suffer, but they did. The gossip mill churned out stories that at least one of the members had checked into a psychiatric hospital during the making of the project, though Wlaford cleared the air on that front. He did, however, admit that the band was “definitely trying to be serious about things, pretty intense, which made recording the album kinda stressful”.
It took just four days (and nights) to birth a masterpiece that remains one of the most important post-rock offerings in the alternative canon, an intensity that would be endlessly imitated by countless Slint wannabees for decades to come.
