Devin Townsend began recording Ocean Machine in 1996, and every afternoon he'd be kicked out of the studio so the owner could get drunk with actor Antonio Banderas.
Townsend doesn't name the studio in his interview with Teamrock, but he does say it's in Malaga, Spain, and affectionately refers to it as "Shithole."
“Antonio Banderas plays guitar, and it was a small town that they lived in, so he would go in at night with his buddies and they'd drink brandy and bash on these acoustic guitars until six in the morning. As much of a cool story as that is, for a 24-year-old kid that was going crazy trying to get this impossible project done, with no money, I was just like, ‘Fuck off’, you know what I mean? Just give me my studio, I've got to finish this stupid record! Daniel and I went crazy trying to get this thing done.”
Townsend also admits that due to "biblical storms" at the time of recording the album, he couldn't quite get a good drum recording. So he did the next logical thing – sample the opening snare hits from Metallica's "Sad But True" and use 'em.
“If you listen to Ocean Machine, every snare hit has got that guitar behind it going, ‘Chunk.' I kind of wanted it to sound like a Metallica record at the time, but we couldn’t make it work, so we just pressed play on the CD.”
Oh, and to top it all off, Townsend had a serious argument with the studio owner toward the end of the recording and the dude wouldn't give him the masters. So Townsend went in at night, made copies of the masters and bailed.
Dude should've known not to fuck with the man who shoved Jay Leno's phone up his ass.
