Circle Takes the Square Report from the Studio

Circle Takes the Square released their debut album, 'As the Roots Undo,' in 2004. The experimental Savannah-based post-hardcore band has finally gotten around to recording their follow up, 'Decompositions Volume 1,' which they will release via their own Gatepost Recordings label this fall.

Despite the gap in between recordings, CTTS have not been idle. The group has added members, toured with the likes of Thursday and Portugal The Man, endured members moving, getting married, and even tabled material written by vocalist-guitarist Drew Speziale and vocalist-bassist Kathleen Stubelek in favor of exploring new musical ideas. The resultant album, 'Decompositions Volume 1,' is over 50 minutes in length. You can watch the band in the studio by going here.

Noisecreep recently grabbed some time with Speziale and Rabitor for an exclusive studio report, just as the band was heading back to the studio for one final session to wrap the album.

The process of recording unfurled in a relatively smooth fashion. "Hopefully I'm not speaking too soon, but so far we haven't suffered any equipment damage or failed hard drives while making this album, though the operating system crashed at one point and we all held our breath nervously as Anthony re-installed," Speziale said. "We attribute our unusual bout of good luck to the two black plastic pyramids that we intuitively stuffed full of quartz crystals and placed strategically at a high point in the back of the tracking room. We shine an LED spotlight on one of them occasionally, just to get some crucial refraction going, and we're pretty sure that's what keeps this whole operation up and running. Sometimes we put them on top of our amps when we're laying down the gnarliest of tracks. The results are yet to be determined, but will probably weigh in just to the left of 'staggering.""

The process was pretty routine from day-to-day. However, there were a few interesting encounters, such as arriving at the studio one day only to find an 'X-Men' film crew shooting a scene a block away. There were also rumors that Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant was on vacation nearby. Alas, unfortunately there were no sightings of the classic rock legend. "Allegedly, we barely missed crossing paths with him on one of our afternoon kombucha runs, but unfortunately we never got the chance to ask him if he'd be interested in a guest vocal spot on 'Decompositions,'" Speziale joked.

While the band did scrap material already written in favor of collaborating with their newly recruited members, the songs will eventually be used. "We opted to honor the more unrelenting vibe of the riffs that arose from our practice sessions," Speziale said. "Some of the older ideas are definitely going to resurface down the line, but they'll have to be fine-tuned a bit to fit into an updated context. We like to keep things fresh, so even if we are tapping into some archived riffs, adding new elements to the progressions or partnering previously written parts with newer material can help to keep them relevant, and allows them to take on a new and evolved meaning to us."

Speziale also offered an inside insight into 'Spirit Narrative,' which will appear on 'Decompositions: Volume 1.' The song was influenced by the location in which it was rehearsed. "It's the first movement in a larger piece of music that makes up the first few tracks," said Speziale. "We spent about a month holed up in a shoebox-sized, sunlight and oxygen-deprived, hot and dusty storage unit obsessing over the song structure for this one, after having been ousted from countless more comfortable practice spaces earlier in the year.

"The room we landed in was basically a concrete and sheet metal echo chamber, deep in the heart of a labyrinthine, industrial wasteland -- melodramatically speaking -- and listening to the rough mix of this track, it's hard to deny that the vibe of Storage Unit D-37 has permanently attached itself to the overriding mood and meaning of this song," Speziale said.

The song is short, compared to most of the other songs on the album. "We challenged ourselves to utilize a somewhat traditional song-structure template, which definitely isn't our usual M.O.," the singer continued. "After a handful of demos, we succeeded in distilling it down to its essential form, and the structure ended up like this: verse/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus/verse, but with some typical CTTS twists and turns here and there. The role of 'Spirit Narrative' in the greater landscape of 'Decompositions' is to introduce some of the musical and lyrical motifs that will reappear (as variations) in other tracks later on, so we wanted it to be focused and linear, to effectively showcase those themes like the key on a map. That said, this one is quite fierce, or 'pretty f---ing tear-ass,' as Caleb might say."

A couple fun details that CTTS added during the recording process include "micing a hammer striking a makeshift anvil; generating a gnarly feedback loop by re-amping a melodic/octave guitar line through a series of pedals while Kathy manipulated the wah and delay and creating some ominous, reverb-drenched vocal tones as a backdrop to some of the lead vocals."

Tech nerds interested in how CTTS record, which is in a modern, digital fashion. Speziale said, "Once tracking starts, we're all open minded about getting ideas down that are spontaneous and interesting. We've been using digital equipment to track everything. It's really beneficial for us because we can record unlimited layers and ideas or instrumentation without worrying about the cost of tape or being limited by track counts. There must have been 50 different microphones to chose from at the studio too, which was a lot of fun auditioning them when we were doing guitars."

The new album will be released on vinyl, and the band is booked to play the 10-year anniversary of The Fest in Gainesville.

Watch a video of Circle Takes The Square in the studio

Buy Circle Takes The Square albums