The release of Capetonian pop trio Beatenberg’s second album, 2014’s The Hanging Gardens Of Beatenberg, was a watershed moment for pop music and has gone on to become a cornerstone release, frequently mentioned amongst the best South African albums of all time. “There's a certain element of chance in the way that these things come together,” the band’s Matthew Field (vocals, guitar, piano) tells Apple Music. “But when it happens and it’s positive, you recognise that it's happening and it's a very real thing, at least to me.” Eight years and seven South African Music Awards later, this album has been given the Spatial Audio treatment, with Ross Dorkin (bass) and Robin Brink (drums) returning to work on the Spatial mixes for its reissue. “This is not a typical remaster,” Ross tells Apple Music. “It will reveal more details than we could have fit into the stereo mix, and I think it’s important to realise that it’s like a new listening experience, and it will show sort of different details in the recording of the songs.” Here, Matthew, Ross and Rob talk us through a few of the exemplary tracks off a much-loved album that remains evergreen. “Rafael” Matt: “I have all of these attempts in my notebooks trying to write this song and I just hated the vibe. Then this one morning, I remember having a strong coffee and being at the computer, and I think Wimbledon was on, so I was watching tennis. And then I was thinking about Rafael [Nadal] and then realised that Raphael is also the name of the painter. Then I remember using a specific font in Text Edit to give myself a vibe. I wrote all the lyrics in bold; I can't remember what the font is called; it was some random font. Then I added the sound of tennis grunts into the percussion. That changed the feel of the song and broke it down in the verse. So it was a combination of having the title, completely changing the lyrics, and really carving into the verse that suddenly I was like, ‘Ah, this feels like a song.’ It was a long and winding road.” “Beauty Like A Tightened Bow” Ross: “This song has a rubber band quality to it—it’s got a really nice tension and release character. So from the get-go, when you start playing the song it grabs people's attention immediately. And then they feel the tension that they're on. It’s like they're on—not a roller coaster because it's a bit much, but like they’re about to get on a slide or something. And so it has this dynamic where the energy lifts and then it drops, and then it's calm, and you can just cruise with it. And then it rises again and again, and by the time it hits the bridge, it's a really beautiful, suspended high moment. I don't know. It's just extremely satisfying and stimulating, I think on a musical level for me.” “Chelsea Blakemore” Ross: “This stands up both as a love song and a non-love song. Also, when Matt first played it to me, it was about my current interest at the time, which was not Chelsea [Blakemore]. And then it got changed to Chelsea's name.” Matt: “I had actually messaged Chelsea, just because I thought her name was cool. At some point when I was overseas studying in America, I remember sending her a Facebook message and saying something like, ‘Could I use your name sometime? Because it's a cool name.’ I don't know what made me think of it, but I remember wanting to use it. And I had another song that I wrote with her name that we never ended up using.” “Pluto” Ross: “After we made this track, it disappeared for 18 months—no one picked it up or played it. Someone told us the story of a radio compiler or host or whatever they were or are—this person was on holiday and our CD of this song was in their car. Then when they went into the petrol station to get snacks or something, the people in the car put the CD in, heard the song and were like, ‘Who’s this? Where's this from? You should definitely play this!’ As much as people talk about it as being really resonant when it came out, and there was such a positive response, it certainly didn't start out that way. It basically was sunk by industry people for whatever reasons. Also, ‘Rafael’ was supposed to be the track that we worked on with DJ Clock, but we played Matt's demo of ‘Pluto’ to DJ Clock and decided that was the one instead. And then DJ Clock came in the next day, and then Pluto was made from scratch. So it's just interesting that also the lineage of ‘Rafael’ coming out, and coming out after ‘Pluto’ was actually the other way around.” “Southern Suburbs” Matt: “This also went through a lot more changes than I think we even think about. It was quite a pain to arrange the song. It had one of those difficult structures; the verse chords are based on Bach's Goldberg Variations—that descending pattern and the way it turns around.” But I think what interests me–throughout this album and maybe throughout music of a certain kind that I make–is the sort of kinship, at least in terms of the feeling I get from a lot of South African pop music, guitar music, and classical music. It’s a specific cadence that sounds quite familiar, I guess, through the church and through all that kind of stuff. And that's definitely evident in the verse of ‘Southern Suburbs’ where it's got those specific voicings in the guitar–it sounds South African to some extent but it's also very choral-sounding.” “Scorpionfish” Matt: “You often see interviews with people who say, ‘Oh, I just wrote this song in 20 minutes or something’. And this is one of the few songs that I feel like a similar thing happened, where I just did almost the whole thing—I think the only thing I didn't have were lyrics for the second verse— in half an hour or something one afternoon, which hasn't happened to me since, really. And there's something about playing it which seems to reflect that ease of it coming out. It's just quite easy and quite natural in a way that I really value.” “Ithaca” Matt: “I remember where I had the idea to write that song. Someone mentioned Ithaca—not the [Greek] island, but rather as the town where the university in America is. I was at UCT at the time, and somehow that feels like so much part of that time. It was a personal thing where I felt a very strong impulse to do this song, and I wrote it quite quickly when I went home that day. It just feels right in the thick of the whole period of my life that the album seems to represent. It's also one that people seem to respond to, and that's also somehow affirming as well.” “Cavendish Square” Rob: “The energy of this song is really cool. I guess as a group, that was always a great moment in our live show that we had going for a very long time; it's a defining moment of who we are as a live band. It felt like we were in a good place, and for a long time, that was always a strong thing. On a lyrical level, it's quite representative of Matt's vibe at the time–which is a contrast of things that are profound and sublime, and then very mundane and basic–and how those things can be inverted. It's all the same.” Matt: “I remember the original title for that song was ‘Green Market’.” “Echoes” Matt: “This is the song that got us the record deal in the first place. It also felt like that was a turning point in the way that we were making music, especially recording music. Whereas beforehand, we'd been playing songs that ended up being interpreted as, or came across as, quite folky and acoustic. This was the first time we made a conscious effort to do something very poppy, and it was quite exciting. So I feel like if we can give a reason, a backward looking reason for why we put it on, it felt like it was the doorway, the pathway to all of the other songs in terms of the production style and the sound and everything.” Ross: “It’s always just something that I come back to as a song because for me, it was the first time I think I felt that I was getting excited about production and the recording process. Because I remember getting the files from Matt and then just putting a whole lot of synths on it.” “The Prince Of The Hanging Gardens” Rob: “On an aesthetic level, I feel like ‘The Prince Of The Hanging Gardens’ ties this album up thematically, and symbolically it's meaningful for the textual level of the album.”