Auctioneer and The Walls Of Sounds.

Text by Nikki Volpicelli. Image by Kate Harrold.

It’s a dimly lit studio in the basement of a hive of recording spaces that sit on American Street, in an unassuming warehouse that acts like a peninsula of life beside a wide plain of nothing – cement, road, an office building that’s been closed for hours. It’s spacious.

“You laugh so hard,” frontman Craig Hendrix tells keyboard player Jesse Moore, who roars with laughter.

Then, they launch into “Devil is a Mockingbird” with the rest of their indie pop band, Auctioneer, which also includes bass player Todd Erk and drummer Tommy Bendel. The studio is cavernous – it makes everything a little more huge – and you can hear Moore’s belly laugh through the sound of their playing.

“With Craig, he’s always thinking about space and sound and how to push yourself to write new music,” Moore says. “I always feel like whenever we start working on music, no matter how grand or simple the song is, the theme that’s always there is that it’s very composed. It’s very considerate.”

Their last album, Future Faces, was no different – louder and wider than the band’s 2011 self-titled EP, for which Hendrix adopted a more stag songwriting technique. He says Future Faces, which dropped last June, was a “band” record, crafted with super-sonic deliberation, marking out each musician’s deep strengths with a variety of paced arrangements.

“I do think I’m learning not to cram too much shit into one song, which I’ve definitely tried to do,” Hendrix says with a grin and then trails off.

Moore laughs and so does the rest of the group, all-knowing-like.

“Density was paramount to songwriting in my opinion for a long time,”  Hendrix goes on to admit. “It was always like a Crayola 64 box, taking them out all at one time.”

Space – in music, in location – it’s an instrument in itself.

Anything you do within a space, whether you’re practicing, writing, recording, sharing – it has an effect on that thing that you’re practicing, writing, recording, sharing. It’s a consideration that goes lengths in songwriting, as well.

“I think any time you record music, the place that you record it incorporates itself with the sound that ends up in the final project,”  Hendrix explains. “Our current space will contribute in that way. Whenever I listen to whatever we record in here, for the rest of my life, I’ll be able to hear the space. I’ll be able to hear the room, which was how it is with Future Faces and how it was with other recordings we’ve done.”