Fact #79818

Mike Hedges (producer) : I got heavily into choruses and flangers on the album (Seventeen Seconds). I basically collected every single flanger and chorus I could find anywhere in the studio and borrowed them from people with new units, and for A Forest I think we had as many as seven flangers running on 'envelope', flanging on the shape of the sound coming in rather than as a constant. Aside from bass and guitars, you can particularly hear it on the cymbal crashes, which dive away immediately following the hits. You see, Robert was heavily into choruses - he had a JC120, and so if you had a U47 on one speaker of the amp and a 57 on the other, you then had a stereo chorus, which was great. We loved the chorus, and because of that I originally started playing flangers to do choruses until I realised that flangers were fantastic as well, at which point we actually started using the flangers as flangers. These made the overall sound slightly warped - nothing was quite natural, adding to the underlying atmosphere.

We wanted it to be quite ornate, and it ended up being the most produced track on the album. To me it always sounded like a single. We all thought it was an amazing song - I loved the guitar line - but we also figured it would take a bit more work than the others. The other songs immediately sounded more complete, whereas 'A Forest' sounded like it did need several overdubs.

Practically the whole album was mixed on the second-to-last day, and then the mix for A Forest took up a good part of the final day. All things considered, that was very, very extravagant.
(Interviewed by Richard Buskin for Sound On Sound, 2004)