The debut album from Norwegian singer-songwriter Aurora Aksnes has been released on Decca and Glassnote records, following mastering at Abbey Road Studios. Aurora is best known in the UK for her cover of Oasis’s ‘Half The World Away’, as used in advertising campaign for John Lewis, but the new album, entitled All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend, is set to extend her appeal.
Her songwriting calls to mind a young Kate Bush or Alison Goldfrapp, but with a modern production aesthetic that mixes lilting piano, haunting harmonies, hymnal suspensions, pounding percussion and highly dynamic electronica – sometimes on the same track. The album sounds more like an experienced artist’s sixth release than a debut.
In part, this may be down to its long gestation. 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 Skålnes, 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 Skålnes 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.
‘I first worked with Geir Luedy way back in the day and mastered Odd Martin’s solo album here at Abbey Road a few years back, too, so I know the kind of sound they like – and they chose me to work on mastering Aurora,’ Wharton says. ‘Geir mentioned a while ago that he was collaborating with someone really special, but I didn’t hear any more about it until he sent me Aurora’s first track.’
Wharton did all the mastering for Aurora’s debut six-track EP. He then continued to work on more tracks as they were recorded at Lydriket and mixed for the debut album, respecting Luedy and Skålnes’s preference for an analogue signal path for as much of the mastering process as possible. 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 DA converters.
‘After that, the signal chain was nearly all analogue,’ Wharton explains. Room 7 features one of Abbey Road’s original analogue EMITG12410 mastering consoles (‘a very musical desk… everyone loves that warmth’), and also a Shadow Hills optical/valve compressor and Prism Maselec MEA-2 EQ.
‘I often use a Cedar system on the Sadie for denoising, and Retouch to tackle any sibilance problems when mastering but not on the Aurora album,’ he continues. ‘The only digital processor on that was the Jünger Audio Accent 2 compressor, and even that was used very sparingly.’
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 advertisement campaign. ‘That came together completely separately from her album, and happened very fast,’ Wharton recalls. ‘It was recorded and mixed within two weeks, and then came to me for mastering. I had to work fast – it was released on the advert the next day.’
Once the album’s producers had selected the final mixes for the album, Geir Luedy and Odd Martin Skålnes 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 the tracks, which feature everything from delicate piano and acoustic guitar to electro-mechanical keyboards, live 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: ‘This was a special mastering job for me, as I’ve known the guys for ages and it’s a warm, organic-sounding record. Aurora has the voice of an angel, and it was a pleasure to complete the project on an attended album mastering session, with us all working on it together.’
