Singer-composer Juliette Commagére is best known for her vocalizing and Keytar-slinging with Foo Fighters, Avenged Sevenfold, Puscifer, and her own Hello Stranger band alongside her husband, drummer Joachim Cooder. Commagére's new album The Procession (Manimal Vinyl), the followup to 2008's achingly gorgeous solo debut Queens Die Proudly, is another luminously orchestrated pop jewel built on classically designed song structures and sensual '70s synth stylings.

Commagére's albums are an immersive dip into a yearning reverie, given a tasteful opulence with the aid of producer Martin Pradler, at whose home studios in Los Angeles both records were not just recorded but virtually painted with sound.

Pradler's studio "Is just a room with all the junk in it, and no control room," he says. "There's no board; Pro Tools will always be the mixer, and at the front end there are just pre's from all over the place, a few Neves, ATIs and Siemen stuff. Along with some outboard gear, that's pretty much it."

But then there's Pradler's Eventide H 8000 outboard effects processor, whose 230 effects modules and 24-bit analog I/O is most responsible for the album's entrancing sonorities.

"What I like about it is that I have no idea how to work this thing at all," he says with a laugh. "It's way too complex, but you just put something through it and it makes a big deal out of something very little. A lot of the vocal reverbs were done through the Eventide; I would just print sections with a certain reverb, and then do something slightly different in the chorus, and just keep printing them, and have tons of stereo tracks to work with."

You'll hear the power and glory of the H 8000 on "Procession," a chillingly beautiful track in which Commagére's soaring voice builds atop enormous, hugely satisfying waves of 12-string guitar and synth tracked through the Eventide. According to Commagére, the track's sweeping ssssshhhhs are created as a result of the unit's tendency to add "extra creepy frequencies."

"It creates something interesting harmonically, not chords so much, but octaves and delays and probably a million processes going on at the same time," says Cooder.

While the resonantly rich textures of The Procession are the result of a million post-recording processes as well, another key ingredient was Commagére's Sequential Circuits Prophet T8, as heard on the electronically pulsating "Glass."

"The Prophet is my favorite keyboard in the world," she says. "There's something so rich and melancholy about that tone. It has a wailing quality to it and sometimes you want that sound."

Juliette Commagére in Bluefat Archive