Charm of Finches off on tour
The enchanting indie pop sister duo Charm of Finches released their third album Marlinchen in the Snow about a month ago now. Filled with bewitching melodies and soft laid-back drums, the album takes you on a whimsical journey that’s inspired by the frozen beauty of the landscape in which it was created. The girls toured throughout the UK and Europe back in 2022 and found themselves nestled in the cozy studio of Canadian producer Daniel Ledwell for a month of the winter in Nova Scotia. Today we have the pleasure to share some of their favourite memories of the four month long tour and finishing off recording in Nova Scotia, we suggest to have a read and listen to their new album, enjoy.
We had a wonderful first show of the tour in Oxford playing in the Holywell Music Room, which is the oldest concert hall in Europe! We penned lots of the songs from the album while on tour in green rooms and hotel rooms.
We spent 2 weeks touring in Sweden from the bottom to the top - we got as north as 200km from the Arctic Circle in a place called Piteå! It was summer when we were there and when we were way up north, the sun was up at 10pm and it felt more like 4pm!
One of our favourite gigs in Sweden was at Alma Low - a modern art museum. It was magical and disturbing at the same time. You walk into different rooms and installations would animate - playing soundtracks and whirring around. There were pavilions in the fields with installations like a blood red Hansel and Gretel house with a manic narration of the fairytale playing in Swedish. It was a truly surreal experience!
We loved the canals in England and the cute little house boats along the edges. It was magical watching the sunset, mist hovering over the water and smoke rising from the chimneys of the house boats!
When we first arrived at Daniel Ledwell’s studio we were so in awe of the beautiful wintery landscape. This was the first frozen lake we’d ever seen and of course we took photos of us slipping and sliding on the ice.
Here we are mixing or comping vocals in the studio and drinking Bubly - cans of flavoured mineral water haha. We drank lots of those.
It’s so wonderful working with Dan. He’s so much fun to work with and brings an extra different musical perspective which makes musical exploration so interesting! He’s amazing at finding that sound that you can only vaguely describe from your imagination.
We arranged and recorded all the string parts on the album ourselves. Violin and cello are both our first instruments.
Mabel getting in the zone laying down some washy guitar tracks with our producer Dan pondering deeply in the foreground.
We went into the studio with most of the songs already written but the title track Marlinchen In The Snow was directly inspired by the snowy landscape which to us was like it was from a fairytale. It reminded us of a Grimm’s tale called ‘The Juniper Tree’ which we were told when we were kids. It tells of how a girl, Marlinchen, discovers the death of her stepbrother at the hands of her mother. Marlinchen then plants her brother’s bones underneath the juniper tree which transforms him into a phoenix.
The frozen lake makes a really haunting sound when the ice cracks somewhere and it reverberates through the lake - it’s called a “frost quake”. It’s hard to describe the sound and we couldn’t really capture a recording. We tried imitating it with our voices but that didn’t really work either!
Bird Dog, (named from the Everly Brother’s song) is Dan’s family dog. He is the sweetest little thing and loves to play fetch with snowballs.
We bunkered down in the studio for a whole month. We slept in the studio on the sofa bed and we cooked on a little electric stove underneath the keyboards and guitars hanging on the walls. Apart from one trip to the shops every we spent our time in and around the studio, really immersed ourselves in the creative process.
Here we are with Dan after finishing the record! What a fun month it was!