In a Lonely Place (JOY DIVISION acoustic one-man cover)
July 9, 2024
Where to listen:
FROM YOUTUBE:
Apparently the last song written by Ian Curtis.
This cover was recorded... actually in two separate places. The first is the ruins of an amphitheater that you see and where the song was actually played and sung. But the reverberation of the sound in there was just OK for a heavily ruined amphitheater. Not an enormous larger-than-life reverberation which was needed to re-create the somber atmosphere of late Joy Division's music.
That's where the second place came into action. The abandoned railroad tunnel which I found while searching for a place to record. That tunnel was The Real Lonely Place with no people in maybe half a mile radius. There was no chance to perform the cover in the tunnel though. Too dark, too cold, too dripping, too scary and uninviting. So I just stood at the entrance and recorded my hand claps. These hand claps (the more the better to lessen the dripping noise) were joined together to create the impulse response of the tunnel.
I then used the ReaVerb plugin in Reaper to add the tunnel's reverberation to the record. To make it sound like the tunnel was just right behind the camera. Joining together two places which are 30-something kilometers apart in real life sounds magical, but it can be done easily by sound processing.
I've put a metal bottle cap under my left leg to make it sound different from the right leg, more like a snare drum.