page_title: Laughing Stock
section_title: Recording
hierarchical_section_title: Laughing Stock / Recording
caption_attribution_description: English: Neumann U47 Microphone
context_page_description: Laughing Stock is the fifth and final studio album by British band Talk Talk, released in 1991. Following their previous release Spirit of Eden, bassist Paul Webb left the group, which reduced Talk Talk to the duo of singer/multi-instrumentalist Mark Hollis and drummer Lee Harris. Talk Talk then acrimoniously left EMI and signed to the jazz-based Verve Records, and recorded Laughing Stock at London's Wessex Sound Studios with producer Tim Friese-Greene from September 1990 to April 1991.
  Like Spirit of Eden the album featured improvised instrumentation from a large ensemble of musicians. The demanding sessions were marked by Hollis' perfectionist tendencies and desire to create a suitable recording atmosphere. Engineer Phill Brown stated that the album, like its predecessor, was "recorded by chance, accident, and hours of trying every possible overdub idea." The band split up following its release, effectively making Laughing Stock their last official release.
  The album received praise from most critics. Pitchfork named it the eleventh best album of the 1990s, saying it "makes its own environment and becomes more than the sum of its sounds."
context_section_description: With Verve Records guaranteeing full funding for Laughing Stock and offering not to interfere during recording, the band took full advantage of the scenario "and locked themselves away for the duration of recording." As with the band's previous album, Laughing Stock was produced by Tim Friese-Greene and recorded at the North London recording studio Wessex Sound Studios with engineer Phill Brown, and around fifty guest musicians, although a total of only eighteen guest musicians feature on the final album. Working in an environment influenced by that of Traffic's recording sessions from 1967 that Brown worked on, Hollis' vision with Laughing Stock was to "collect a group of like-minded musicians together" in the studio where he could then record the "perspective of instruments in physical distance rather than off the board," after which "each player gets to improvise around a basic theme as he or she feels it." The process continued over a long period of time, and ultimately the album took a year to record, although its liner notes state it was recorded from September 1990 to April 1991. The record was "only complete" when Hollis felt each guest musician had "expressed their character and refined their contribution to the purest, most truthful essence."
  Hollis' discipline during the recording is well noted; Jess Harvell of Pitchfork noted that "the recording process has long been described as one of the most arduous and prone to control freakitude ever." Wyndham Wallace of The Quietus said that "what went on in that studio strengthens the belief that Hollis was on a crusade to push boundaries and perfect his art on an even grander scale than Spirit of Eden. Furnished with the opportunity to fulfil his most extreme creative instincts." Often working in darkness, "there was an effort to create a vibe in the studio sympathetic with the feel of the album," as Aspden recalled, and the band removed clocks from the walls, covered up the windows, "set up oil projections on the walls and ceiling, and used no other light apart from a strobe," to create a suitable atmosphere for recording.
  The guest musicians were brought in "to improvise on sections without hearing the full track. With just a basic chord structure at most, they were encouraged to try out anything their hearts encouraged them to, and then, thanks to the emerging digital technology, any results felt appropriate were employed, sometimes in places for which they had never originally been envisioned." Most of the music recorded never made the final album, with Brown commenting "it takes a strong discipline to erase 80% of the music you record. Few have the discipline to get rid of 'stuff'."
  As with previous albums, Hollis alone chose what parts of the recordings to use and in what context. Compared to Spirit of Eden, Laughing Stock was recorded with "a more conventional '80's set up." Brown and the band worked with a Studer A800 24-track recorder with Dolby SR noise reduction, which, to make editing simpler, was run at 30 inches per second.
  Harris' drums were firstly set up against the far wall of the studio's main recording room, Wessex Studio 1, and were microphoned in "the usual rock arrangement", using "about ten microphones all close to the kit – bass drum, snare, hi-hat, tom-toms, overheads, ambient etc." Following this, Brown and Hollis rented the Telefunken U47, a large-diaphragm condenser valve microphone manufactured by Georg Neumann GmbH during the years 1949–1965. They chose it from an offering of several valve mics, which besides the U47 included a Neumann U48, M49 and "Tube", alongside "the old Wessex Collection" which included three AKG C12As. They carefully listened to each before settling on the U47. However, they placed it "30 feet away from the kit near the control-room window," which became an issue as the physical distance triggered a delay of 26-32 milliseconds.
  Having by that point created backing tracks, they "made up Mitsubishi Digital masters" as they had done with Spirit of Eden, although this time they operated five analogue slave tapes, whic
caption: A Neumann U47 Tube microphone, the kind used to record many of the album's components.
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