Christian Northover, drummer of eclectic inclinations and former member of the defunct Monoliths, has leaned fully into experimentation with his latest project. Wizards Made Me Do It, out October 25, 2024, is a wild dive into what happens when an entire album is crafted with drums and guitar FX pedals alone.
In an age of formulaic production, this release abandons any conventional structure, exploring “new sonic landscapes from the drums, blending eclectic rhythms with evolving textures” as Northover explains, creating a 22-minute work that’s as unrestricted as it is intense.
This album’s origins trace back to an impromptu collaboration at Nashville’s Porter Rose Studio. It was Alex Sanchez who reached out, wanting to try new micing techniques inspired by some experimental drummers and Instagram experiments.
Together with his former bandmate Rob Stewart, they set up the mics “and it was absolutely magical,” Christian recalls. “The sounds made as a guitar pedal tries to extract something, anything, from a drum was intriguing.” The initial sessions led to a clear decision: these experiments needed to be recorded properly.
On recording day, they embraced spontaneity. Instead of going in with fixed structures, Christian crafted 10 improvisational “pieces” on drums, each run through an unorthodox mic setup—a haphazard mix of guitar tuning, water jug reverberations, and even a bathroom mic.
The result was “raw… no punch-ins, no quantization,” and each take bore a singular, untamed energy. Christian says, “It cemented the idea that there were no wrong answers.”
It’s easy to hear the influence of his diverse musical background on the final tracks. The unorthodox recording approach allowed Christian’s hardcore roots and jazz inclinations to filter through, bending in strange, sometimes dissonant directions. Drums resonate with strange pulses, echoes filling the space unpredictably. Pedals, manipulated on the floor over 12 hours, transform each track into an experiment of layered feedback, distortion, and rhythmic clashes.
Each track has its own story, and Christian speaks candidly about the process:
1. Get In Loser – This was one of the last songs we made the pedals for., so we had done a lot of experimentation already that day. We had just done the song Stone Bits and fallen in love with the Bit Crusher. Trying things out we had the bit crusher on and hit the delay pedal. The delay created this beefy tone. We ran the track and I turned the delay on and off, creating that bass groove. The rest of what you hear is just the bit crusher when the delay is off. This is one of 2 of the songs that only have drums and 1 recorded pedal tracks.
2. Siren’s Abyss – Rob stumbled across an actual note early on in working with this one. Messing with some parameter allowed for the note to be changed. He did a number of takes to achieve these chords which to me sounded quite aquatic. This made me want the drums to be mixed in the beginning as if they were underwater. This informed how we treated all the other instruments. for example you can hear the bit crusher hard panning, like some weird submarine noise.
3. PRAWNG Instead of a click for this one I had a loop I created. The vibe was definitely different in recording. The loop is in five and a happy uplifting sounding thing reminiscent of And So I Watch You from afar. This one definitely exemplifies how much things can change.
4. Experiment 2 – this was my least favorite one after the pedal day but over the course of the mixing process, it quickly became one of my favorites! You can really hear the guitar mic in this one. It creates this feeling as if your floating. The delay has a really nasty slap-back effect that makes it groove real hard.
5. Stone Bits – We found the Geiger Counter and a setting made the bongos go “SKRRRT”. After that, not much was needed. We just set it and let the Bongo mic get bit crushed.
6. Prowlin’ On a Dream – This is based on an evolving Afro Cuban rhythm. There is an A section and B section that gets repeated, each time with a new element added. The pedals made me visualize a jungle cat. There was something oddly romantic about the title prowling on a dream that made me laugh.
7. Now Arriving At The Planet of Bees – one of two songs that were not recorded to a click but with a loop. The loop that I recorded to was inspired by Cygnus Vismund Cygnus by The Mars Volta. Obviously this is not that but this is what came out. Listening to the song that’s what ended up coming to mind. This is in 9 and is just fun for me. This is one of the few tracks where I was riding one of the pedals as if it were an instrument. Creating a lead line throughout he whole track.
8. Augmented Insanity– This was the first of the pedal tracks we tackled and was originally going to be the start of the album, but it got out of hand fast. We did not try anything twice, just leaving chaos in our wake with each take. We kept this energy in the final mix. The Rainbow machine creates many of the important textures here, making this sound like a wizards bad trip.
9. Cymbals Mysterioso – Cymbals Mysterioso was an inside joke with a childhood friend. I recorded this for him because why not? It was only cymbals for 30 seconds then I wanted to use all of the pedals. Every pedals was used and the ending 2 minutes are just pedals feeding back through each other forever.
Despite the complexity of these tracks, Wizards Made Me Do It retains a rawness that’s more animated than high-concept.
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The cover art, featuring Christian’s two cats, Abbot and Charley, as wizards, completes the surrealist vision. “So much of this felt like total happenstance, like there were just forces willing me to do this. Hence, Wizards Made Me Do It.”
