Pipeline: the scrapyard session they had to do twice

The part that went wrong

The making of Pipeline contains a wonderfully human interruption. In a 2011 Red Bull Music Academy lecture, published as an edited feature in 2013, Gareth Jones recalled collecting sounds around a Shoreditch scrapyard with microphones and two recorders. Back at the studio, he discovered that he had set his recorder incorrectly. The recordings were unusable enough that the team went out and did the work again. ^[1]

An unlikely beginning

Jones also remembered initially resisting the prospect of working with Depeche Mode because he associated them with radio pop. John Foxx encouraged him to meet them. The sessions at Foxx’s Garden studio became Construction Time Again. His account of Pipeline describes mixing close and distant recordings into early samplers, committing parts to tape and then clearing the machines for the next sound. At the mixing stage, he proposed leaving out added reverb, compression and EQ. ^[1]

Space was already in the sound

The important distinction is between a recording without added reverberation and a recording without acoustic space. A microphone some distance from a struck object hears its surroundings as well as the impact. That distance can become part of the musical material before any studio effect is applied. Jones’s account makes the choice of microphone position as interesting as the choice of instrument.

Our reading is that this helps explain why the story feels bigger than a collection of unusual percussion sounds. The recording process admitted a place into the arrangement. Editing could organise the events, but it did not have to erase every sign of where they came from.

A mistake worth keeping in the history

Retrospective accounts often make a finished record sound inevitable: an inspired idea, the right machine, a breakthrough. Here the memorable detail is the return journey. An unsuccessful first attempt did not disprove the idea. It meant the idea mattered enough to try again.

Next time you play Pipeline, listen for the distinction between the attack of a sound and what remains around it. Some events feel close enough to touch; others seem to occupy a larger room. That is a listening invitation, rather than a claim that we can identify every object in the mix. The surprise is how much musical character can exist before a conventional instrument has entered the story.