Buried Frequencies / NO. 001
The Washington rock trio built a recording space that gave them time to develop their 2001 double album. Adding parts in the studio changed the songs—and meant recruiting two more musicians to play them live.
By Margin Tone
Unwound built a studio because making a record against a running meter was a poor way to try things out. For Leaves Turn Inside You, released in 2001, the Tumwater, Washington, trio—Justin Trosper on guitar and vocals, Vern Rumsey on bass and Sara Lund on drums—wanted time that belonged to them. They ended up with a double album whose parts required two more musicians onstage.
First they had to make a room. Rumsey recalled putting up walls and getting the space ready in a 2001 Tape Op interview. With help, an empty space could be recording drum sounds by the end of the day. Making the album took about a year. Trosper told CMJ how the cost of commercial sessions could get inside the writing: it was hard to be creative while thinking about the clock.
In their own studio, a song could remain unfinished without another day’s hire coming due. They could add something, leave it and return. But the room didn’t give them unlimited time together. Lund was commuting from Portland and setting aside whole days for music. Trosper remembered scheduling and getting work done as a struggle. The place was theirs; their lives still had to be fitted around it.
What happened to “One Lick Less” shows why they wanted the time. Rumsey told Tape Op that they began with a guitar part and built around it. By the end, the starting part could scarcely be heard beyond the opening. The thing that had brought the song into existence no longer needed to dominate it.
Trosper also described reducing guitar distortion and looking for a broader range of sounds. Much of the material still began with guitar, bass and drums, but the additions were becoming part of the writing. Recording no longer meant only getting down what three people already knew how to play together.
That left them with work to do when they wanted to tour. Original drummer Brandt Sandeno, who’d contributed to the album, joined on keyboards, and David Scott Stone played second guitar. The larger band could cover simultaneous parts the trio couldn’t. It also needed rehearsal time and more room in the vehicle. Trosper and Lund remembered those demands in a 2013 Treble interview.
Trosper resisted the suggestion that the songs were inherently impossible to perform. They needed practice, and they also had to prepare older material for the set. The studio had let them build the record in stages; now five people had to put it together in the same room, at the same time.
The 2001 tour was troubled. In his 2012 notes for the live album Live Leaves, Trosper acknowledged uneven performances. Those recordings preserve another stage of the work, after the choices made privately in the studio had to survive an evening in front of an audience.
Numero Group scheduled a twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Leaves Turn Inside You for October 2, 2026. Returning to the album, Rumsey’s memory of the nearly buried guitar offers a particularly inviting way in. Somebody had played a part the others could begin with. They kept working until it was no longer the main thing one heard.
Listen: Leaves Turn Inside You — official Bandcamp album and track sequence
