Morcheeba’s Paul Godfrey after battling serious depression went underwater with the group’s sixth studio album Dive Deep. Evolving the band’s trademarked trip-hop, he along with his brother Ross Godfrey, collaborated with guest vocalists, such as Judie Tzuke and Thomas Dybdahl to create a surreal aesthetic that is the musical equivalent of the light filtering through clear blue ocean water.
The Journey to Dive Deep:‘When we came out we were very lucky, we were in the right place at the right time with the right sound for our first album Who Can You Trust?, which was very much in the trip-hop trend. Then we kind of brought in more of folk and blues influences on our second record Big Calm and tried to push the songwriting envelope a bit. Then, we experimented with 80s R&B pop on Fragments of Freedom. In Charango, we kind of brought it back together again. Then we split with Skye [Edwards, the groups vocalist] after that album. Antidote was very much a kind of live, 60s-inspired record. Dive Deep brings all of our experience together, and we found something we really wanted to do, which was experiment with different vocalists.’
The Selection Process: ‘Before the album, I was stuck in a very dark depression. I became very insular, a bit Howard Hughes, I guess… So, I got on the Internet and spent hours and hours researching on iTunes and Amazon and myspace just to find the right voices that I thought would fit with the sound of the music. Then I approached people and spoke to them directly. It wasn’t a case of our people talk to their people. I said ‘we’re kind of at rock bottom. We don’t have any money, but I want to make an album.’ So, everybody who wanted to get involved, it was really genuine.’
Putting the Album Together: ‘A lot of the vocal performances for the record were just demo takes that we did and we just kept them because they worked so well. It really hadn’t felt that fluid and free-flowing since before the beginning of our career. It was really like being a teenager again and making bedroom music.’
The Liquid Aesthetic: I was always inspired and intrigued with water and the look and the feel and the sound that goes with it. I was always in the water as a kid. I think that was some sort of subconscious attempt to get back into the womb, where I had previously felt comfortable. I always used to lay in the bath with my head underwater and listen to the sounds that were going on in the outside world. It seems very natural for me in the studio to mutate the sounds in a way that they take on a slightly more abstract form. They’re not so realistic and they become very coloured and filtered… It was just a very subconscious, intuitive process that I didn’t analyze too much. Every sound that made it to the record felt right, be it a bleating voice or a tiny abstract noise in the background, everything had its perfect place.
