The debut album from Norwegian singer-songwriter Aurora Aksnes has just been
released on Decca and Glassnote records, following mastering at Abbey Road
Studios. Until now, Aurora was best known in the UK for her cover of Oasis’s “Half
The World Away’, as featured on the Christmas 2015 advertising campaign for John
Lewis, but the new album, entitled All My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend, is set to
change all that.
Aurora, now nearly 20, began songwriting when she was nine and released her
debut single when she was 16. She has been working with a trusted team of
producers, writers and musicians at Lydriket studios in her native Bergen, on the
west coast of Norway, for several years. They include album songwriter and
musician Geir Luedy and Odd Martin Skalnes, who plays bass and guitar, co-wrote
several tracks on the album and co-produced it together with another songwriting
collaborator from the Lydriket creative team, Magnus Åserud Skylstad. Luedy and
Skalnes have a long-standing relationship with Abbey Road mastering engineer Alex
Wharton, which led to all of the album, and the 2015 EP and digital singles that
preceded it, being mastered at Abbey Road, including Aurora’s Top 20 Oasis cover.
Wharton did all the mastering for Aurora’s debut six-track EP, released in Spring
2015, and continued to work on more tracks as they were recorded at Lydriket and
mixed for the debut album, respecting Luedy and Skalnes’s preference for an
analogue signal path for as much of the mastering process as possible, which he
recalled from working on their previous projects. All the pre-mastered Aurora
tracks were supplied as WAVs, played back on the SADiE digital workstation in
Abbey Road’s Room 7, where Wharton works, and out into the analogue domain via
Benchmark Audio D-As.
After working at a leisurely pace on various tracks and mixes for the project, there
was a flurry of activity in Autumn 2015, when Aurora was chosen at short notice to
record the Oasis cover for the John Lewis Christmas advertisement campaign.
Once the album’s producers had selected the final mixes for the album, Geir Luedy
and Odd Martin Skalnes brought them over on a drive to London in person, together
with Aurora herself. They took a couple of days to master the debut, and then the
files were handed to Wharton’s Abbey Road colleague Christian Wright, who
supervised the cutting of the vinyl master on one of the studio’s VMS lathes. The
diverse sonic textures of Aurora’s tracks, which feature everything from delicate
piano and acoustic guitar to electro-mechanical keyboards, real drums, sampled
percussion and sub-bass, required careful handling at the mastering stage,
especially to tame the bass for the vinyl release. Alex Wharton is particularly
pleased with the result.
All My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend was released on Decca Records in the UK
on March 11th.
