“The inspiration struck from a very unusual place. I have a studio at my house, but I don’t know how to use it, and there were no engineers coming due to COVID protocols. It wasn’t like, ‘Wow, I’m gonna make a double-album.’ It was like, ‘I’m trying to make it through Tuesday’, you know? And that led to the unorthodox way that I was recording. “I began making these records to preserve my sanity. “The Atlas Underground Fire and Atlas Underground Flood records were plague-era albums,” he explains. The question does beg, given that he’s talking to us from his well-appointed home studio, why he took such a DIY approach to recording? “Sitting on that folding chair right there! And there’s no engineer so it’s like, ‘Should it be six inches away? Should it be two feet away? I don’t know!’” “I’d have the phone like this, hitting the red button on the voice memo, sitting on a folding chair, right over there…” he turns the camera round and sure enough, there’s a metal folding chair sat in front of the Marshall 2205 the guitarist has used since the earliest days of Rage Against The Machine. “On the phone, dude!” he exclaims, holding up his old iPhone to emphasise. Hold up though, did he just say the voice memo on his phone? Not like Garageband or any of the other awesome phone-based recording solutions that are available? “I recorded 95 per cent of the guitars into the voice memo of my phone,” the Rage Against The Machine legend states matter of factly over Zoom from his home studio as we sit down to chat about The Atlas Underground Flood, the second of two solo Atlas Underground albums the guitarist has released this year. READ MORE: Tom Morello – The Atlas Underground Flood review: Morello’s wildly brilliant guitar playing shines on an album lacking coherency.But if you’re Tom Morello, it stands to reason that you’re gonna push things beyond the limits of what a normal person would do, right? The sheer amount of power inside that little black rectangle allows you to do all sorts of things at the drop of a hat that would never have been possible even a few decades ago. Chances are, you’re reading this on a mobile phone of some kind, and it’s easy to forget what a marvel of modern technology it is that you hold in your hand.
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