1) Retrograd
Released 2004
Recorded in the summer of 2004 by Karl Bjerre Skibsted and Henrik Bjørslev at The Royal Danish Music Conservatory. We had only recorded a demo and an EP before, so our studio experience was rather limited. Prior the sessions we had several meetings with Henrik, who produced the record, discussing sound and stuff. We had an ambition to capture the energy from the liveshows and to give it all an extra push Kim had written arrangements for brass- and string quartet for most of the tunes.
There was tension in the air already from the start. One thing was that Rune’s girlfriend was extremely pregnant and about to give birth any time, which would have overruled the recording. The little unborn waited for her turn though, and it went all well. And then there was this mixer board. It was old and trashy and could freeze any moment, which also overruled everything. In the midst of any take it took a break and we never knew when and how to get it started again. Stressful. We used a couple of weeks recording and some additional weeks for mix and ended up with a good result. The night before we had our deadline for mastering, Andrzej called Henrik and was not happy with the mix. Henrik worked all night adjusting the mastermix of the whole record and showed up in the mastering studio with a new mix a couple of hours late. He had worked for too many hours and rushed through rush-hourized Copenhagen. All red, sweaty and stressed up we were seriously concerned about his heart and health. Henrik survived, Jan Eliasson mastered the album and we all went for some beers celebrating the process.
Retrograd was released 5th October 2004 and came in a nice 6-paged digipak with a 16 pages booklet. The beautiful cover was made by Jakob Bendix. Retrograd received a Danish World Award in the category “Best World Album 2005”.
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