Felicity Groom – Magnetic Resonance Centre (Vinyl, LP, Album)

Magnetic Resonance Centre was produced in a little blue room in the front of my house. I worked away at it in every opportunity I had between two children coming into the world. I would grab an hour here, or ten minutes there to continue to carve it out. If you listen very closely, you will definitely hear the sounds of small children adding to the timbre of the songs. Sometimes I even sampled the background noise and worked it in when I could. For instance Red Dust has a fly screen door sampled in the drum rack as my kids walked out the front door once while doing a vocal take.

This album provided an evolution of my capabilities as a producer. I was learning throughout and relied on the support of my trusted ears and bandmates (and partner) Andrew Ryan and Michael Jelinek to add parts and give feedback. Michael Jelinek then used his skills to sand and polish each tune.

There were two that I took to my friend Kevin Parker. Dance For None and Red Dust. I have worked with him over years on many things and I knew he'd do these ones justice with his wizardry. I always learn a lot from watching him work as he works fast and is constantly mixing the sounds in after capturing them... so the track takes shape pretty quickly. He helped me a lot. He and I wrote the outro of Red Dust together... scaffolding ideas off of one another.

DIY Enemy is another example of great collaboration and scaffolding. Mike Jelinek gave me some chords to add to the mix and Jelly and Andrew wrote drum parts and bass parts. Not happy with the intensity of sound, I pulled all the parts away and started again... and created the spooky doll vibe chimes. Andrew added that excellent bass line and Jelly wrote new drums to match the new tune it had become. Sooner Than The Sun was a similarly laboured song... continually pulling it apart and re-structuring it. Certainly the sun was sooner than the tune took to finish.

Burj Khalifa was one of the last songs I produced for the album along with Hey Sun and by that stage, my processes were honed and I was galloping down the other side of the hill of work.

I tried to let people in more with my lyrics on this album. I have a tendency to not want to share much...but in the end, I as much as anyone, want genuine human connection. The song All Of You is about how uneasy social media makes me feel every time I go to post though... but we all know social media is far from genuine.

I am very grateful to the friends who lent their time and skills to the additional instrumentation: the strings, the horns and the wind instruments. All incredible musicians. I am lucky to know them.

The mastering was done at King Willy Sounds and when I told William Bowden what the album was called, he told me his father was a scientist who's field it was to know a lot about Magnetic Resonance Imaging. I named the outro song after the title of a paper that Williams dad wrote.

The artwork is something to speak about too. Fellow mum and artist May Bluebell did a photo shoot with me and made the back artwork and then she created a work that was made out of rocks and magnetic elements for the cover. She and I would get together and work on our respective creative projects while our kids would create their own kind of special creative project called 'pull out the dress ups and chuck them everywhere'. The final layout was done by a father Joe Kapiteyn who also has a powerful partner who creates her own musical magic.

Over the four years fo making this record, regular human life things happed too. I became a mother and my identity metamorphosed. Some friends moved out of my life and took their kindness with them, while other friendships flourished like a plant near a stream of water. I learnt and I changed while still remaining intrinsically an unequivocally me and I think you will get that when listening to this record.

It is with that I say to these songs good luck out there. Go forth and make good friends.