Made In The Dark

{{Infobox album
(2006)
(2008)
(2010)

**Made in the Dark** Is the 3rd album released by Hot Chip in 2008. This was the first album to reach the charts.

## Track Listings

* Out at the Pictures
* Shake a Fist
* Ready For The Floor
* Bendable Poseable
* We're Looking For a Lot of Love
* Touch Too Much
* Made In The Dark (song)
* One Pure Thought
* Hold On
* Wrestlers
* Don't Dance
* Whistle For Will
* In The Privacy Of Our Love

## Trivia

* Ready For The Floor was featured in 'Now That's What I Call Music! 69'.

## Production

Hot Chip often record their music in a bedroom. However, the band took a different approach in recording Made in the Dark to make it sound "not quite so homemade". Recording took place in a variety of locations, including in-studio and live venues, to make "different acoustic spaces to be obvious to the listener". Lead vocalist Alexis Taylor said there was tension between the band's members, as the band did not want to continue creating music in the same way, but also did not want to "throw away a songwriting and production partnership that has worked before." Taylor and vocalist Joe Goddard worked on some of the songs together. Several songs were overdubbed with parts of the rest of the band playing.

In regards to editing, Taylor said that Hot Chip have "never really been too good at bothering to get rid of little imperfections in the music"; he felt they added personality and said that "it's good not to be too dogmatic about it if that's what suits the song". Hot Chip used a variety of vocal structures, including layered vocals, where two takes of the same vocals were added together, changed by idiosyncrasies from the way it had been sung, and the doubling of a single performance, shifted out of beat.

Drummer Felix Martin said Made in the Dark was a "true group effort". The process began with Taylor and Goddard creating lyrics, then Goddard would produce parts of tracks, which Alexis would then add "lyrical content and melodies and so on that he's thought of while he's on the bus or in the bath or wherever he happened to be". The other three members of Hot Chip, Owen Clarke, Al Doyle, and Felix Martin would then "have some influence on the way the songs are put together."

Some equipment used to create the album remained the same as previous albums—Goddard used Steinberg Cubase SX3 on his laptop and Doyle and Martin worked on songs using Apple Logic in their studio. To create the chorus for "Ready for the Floor", Goddard used plug-ins from Arturia, such as Moog Modular. He used two sound channels to control noise and melody, and placed the noise channel in Cubase and had it follow the melody, to make it "punchier". With "Bendable Poseable", Goddard recorded live percussion parts with a Shure Beta 57A mic going directly into Cubase and "fashioned them into a jittery, three-minute loop". This was emailed to Taylor, who then recorded the main vocals for the song. To create the beat in "Shake a Fist" Martin used the Elektron Machinedrum.

Hot Chip enjoy being a live band and have said it is "something [they've] always tried to do". As the group contains "a lot of different types of musicianship", the band "have to be spontaneous whenever they can." Doyle, the guitarist, stated that Hot Chip change the original recordings when playing their music live. At the London-based studio called the Strongroom, "One Pure Thought", "Hold On" and "Shake a Fist" were recorded live, instead of on multitrack, and were subsequently pieced together. This was the first occasion that Hot Chip had recorded music in a studio environment.

## Album Name

Several titles were considered during production, including "Shot Down in Flames" and "IV". The former was rejected because Martin thought it sounded like a title The Beta Band would use. Taylor supported the name "IV" because he liked "giving people the wrong impression all the time", and defended his opinion, saying "if people give us any time, they would see that we're very serious about comedy ... and serious things as well". The album was called "Made in the Dark" because it was a title the band agreed on. Taylor considered the eponymous track to be one of his favourite songs, and thought it was nice to name the album after a thoughtful song, in contrast to Coming on Strong and The Warning, which he described as being "big, slightly jokey, macho phrases".

## Artwork

Darren Wall (Wallzo) and Owen Clarke designed the artwork after several graphical experiments. After the initial experimentation, Wall wanted to create a cover that was "more brooding and conservative" and formed a list of ideas that the band had responded positively to. The list included dual colour illustrations, circles, and verdigris—the green coating formed on copper during oxygenation. Wall amalgamated the ideas to create the image used on the album's cover, which was named "The Artifact". The image was embossed on metallic copper card to give a "tactile feel" that would imply the album was "an object rather than illustration-based design."