Trioflight

The music industry can be a difficult and often extremely expensive one to break into, especially when it comes to recording and releasing music. Thankfully for Sydney band Trioflight, a unique opportunity presented itself this year when the Cranbrook Recording Studios ran a competition for aspiring musicians with the victor having the opportunity to produce a full length CD release, which they will be releasing tonight.

The idea for the competition came from Roger Lock, the head of the studios, after the Cranbrook School had invested a significant amount of money into the studio and equipment to help raise its profile. Luckily when Nick Southcott of Trioflight heard about the competition the group already had a selection of tracks recorded and ready to go. “I only found out late, so we got our entry in last minute but we had recording of demos from gigs we had done before,” said Southcott.

“I don’t know why but we felt we had a pretty good shot so I almost wasn’t surprised, but I was really happy and overjoyed to have the opportunity,” explained Southcott while remembering the moment they found out about winning the competition. As fathers of two very young children, finding the time and money to put towards a recording session was difficult for Southcott and Dave Goodman. “We’re both pretty run off our feet trying to stay on top of things as it is, and we certainly couldn’t have done a full length CD without the help of Cranbrook,” said Southcott.

From the moment finding out they had won to getting into the studio to record it was a fairly quick turnaround of around a fortnight. “We had to juggle a few things because it all happened really quickly,” said Southcott. As improvisational jazz musicians though, this wasn’t to great of a challenge for Trioflight to overcome because they had always planned to record some “off the cuff” material live in the studio.

“We had about six or seven tunes ready to go and I wrote another just before recording and there’s four other tracks that are purely improvised. That’s the beauty of being improvising musicians, we didn’t need enormous amounts of material,” said Southcott.

The group was also given the luxury of time and creative in the studio with a week to record the album and also choosing to record everything live rather than breaking each individual element up. “There was two days where we recorded the majority of the album over that week because we got to the point where we hit our stride and everything was working. the challenge of recording live is that not everything can be perfect because you can’t go and fix things, but we feel we captured the vibe that we wanted.” (JA)

Dec 3. Foundry616, 616 Harris St, Ultimo. $14-63.50. Tickets & Info: foundry616.com.au