Flowers and Paraffin is a five piece band (actually now there’s another guitar but at the time of this record they were five) from Montoro (AV) who plays an interesting mix of punk, shoegaze and emocore with spoken or screamed vocals on the top.

They are Francesco (drums), Alessandro (bass), Gerardo (guitar), Antonio (keyboards) and Giovanni (vocals). The band contacted me after hearing the Vacanza’s records, since they were great fans of the band and were looking for that sound. They sent me some demos beforehand so that I got and idea of what I was about to deal with.

They suggested to track everything live except vocals, I’m always keen to agree and support this choice, since it’s way more challenging and more fun and more rock’n’roll! We recorded all the six songs in one morning, I had the room and the instruments set up the day before they got to the studio, so after a couple of hours of trials we were ready to roll. The band had rehearsed the songs properly so we quickly managed to get 3 takes for each song that we were happy with. The thing we spent more time on were the guitar sounds, we changed stompboxes and settings for each song until we got to a place we liked. We picked the favourite takes, then had lunch (no musicians ever left my studio hungry) and then we tracked vocals with an RE20 (i like it better than condensers on certain types of voice, especially thin ones), which was also pretty fast.

Some gears’s insight: drums was a Tama 80’s kit miked with an AKG d112 on the kick, 57 on the snare, Recorderman small modded Oktava sdc; bass (fender jazz MIM) and microkorg, straight to the Daking 1/4”, guitar, a MIM Telecaster Thinline ‘72 in a Victoria Bassman Replica miked with a Micheal Joly large diaphragm condenser. 

I mixed and mastered itb with a pair of Yamaha HS50M. The record was published by the independent label La Fine from Eboli and got some rave reviews from the italian punk fanzines! I hope you’re gonna enjoy it too!