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Album dossier / 1983

Murmur

R.E.M. · Jangle Pop/Alternative

Made on a budget under $15,000, Murmur was co-produced by Mitch Easter and Don Dixon, largely at Charlotte's Reflection Sound Studios after an earlier IRS-arranged 'audition' session with an unnamed, more conventional Boston producer went badly -- drummer Bill Berry was pushed through hundreds of takes and told he might need replacing, shaking his confidence and hardening the band's wariness of outside producers. R.E.M. arrived militantly anti-synth and guitar-distortion-averse; Easter recalled using an Electro-Voice EV 635A omnidirectional mic to keep Peter Buck's arpeggiated guitar clean without sounding 'prim,' while the famous cavernous snare sound on 'Radio Free Europe' came from mic'ing an entirely different snare drum from roughly 15 feet away in Reflection's small 'Tiki Hut' drum booth after the original kit's hi-hat kept swamping the recording. 'Perfect Circle' evolved in the studio from a bare-bones live arrangement (just vocals and a Casio) into two pianos played simultaneously by Bill Berry and Mike Mills, with Dixon overdubbing bass himself. Recorded with almost no synthesizers and minimal overdubbing -- the band mostly played live together until they got a take they liked -- Murmur became the album that, alongside acts like the dB's, effectively launched American college rock as its own movement.