Music

Black Lips on how to use a human skull as a reverb chamber

by Ciaran Thompson

Black Lips want their forthcoming album Arabia Mountain (June 7) “to be so plentiful that kids in third world countries are wearing our shirts like U2 shirts.” The Atlanta, Georgia garage-punk band’s sixth studio album features Mark Ronson handling the production on the majority of the 16 tracks, but what you might not have known is that a human skull was used during recording as a reverberation chamber.

“You have an empty space inside the cavity of the skull. You put a mic in one end and a speaker tube, kind of like a talk box, into one of the eye sockets and you have your send going through the speaker tube into the skull cavity,” drummer Joe Bradley explains to AUX.

“There’s another microphone on the inside that picks up the sound so you get the natural reverberation on the inside of the skull. We used that for a couple songs.”

Apparently guitarist/vocalist Cole Alexander found it in an oddities store on the lower east side in New York City and the idea to incorporate it in their music came about from the band 13th Floor Elevators who used a jug in their recordings in the same way.

“The human skull has a spiritual element so it’s kind of spooky,” bassist Jared Swilley adds. “His name is John. There’s no history on the skull, so who knows who he could have been, but I like to sit up and night and think about that sometimes.”

The skull was used during the making of their latest music video (below) for “Modern Art” and will also appear on new album’s cover. According to the band, the title of the album stems from the 1992 horror film Pet Sematary Two, which was shot near the mountain in DeKalb County, Georgia.

Another fun fact: Sean Lennon plays the theremin on a few of the songs on Arabia Mountain after Ronson asked him to come into the studio.