How did growing up Lebanese in Pennsylvania inform your musical journey?
My parents encoded me with the music and legends of Lebanese singers Fairuz and Farid al-Atrash, and both had a deep sense of melancholy. al-Atrash's younger and more famous sister Asmahan [Amal al-Atrash] was killed under dubious circumstances, and that really affected me as a kid. Fairuz's career was held hostage by her husband and his brother, aka the Rahbani brothers [Assi and Mansour], and that despair came through in her music. I would also space out in the pews at church and take in the medieval and Dorian modes of Catholic hymns. When you put that on paper, it's basically heavy metal. My work ethic comes from my parents. They took a huge gamble to open a Lebanese deli in Easton, PA, at a time when ethnic food was far from popular in our area. They worked their asses off for me and I always echo that mentality, even if at my core I just want to have fun.
Did you go to school for recording?
I had so many bad experiences recording in bands that I took classes at community college to learn enough to avoid going back to studios. I later attended the audio program at Temple University, but it was difficult to absorb that hands-off knowledge without going through the wringer at a studio. At that time, I was more focused on being creative than learning anything technical. Now, I go back and read those textbooks and try to up the ante a little bit each day.
How did recording the self-titled War Hungry album with Will Yip come about?
War Hungry were friends of mine from college, and I joined them when they needed a guitar player. Will was a semester ahead of me and was recording Title Fight at Studio 4 [owned by the Butcher Brothers, Phil and Joe Nicolo]. They told us that Will had been recording hardcore bands there on a Neve 8048 [console] for cheap. So, when Title Fight came to record with Will in Studio A, I would be in Studio B making sound design for our record.
What did you learn from working with Will?
I would always ask him, "Why are we doing this?" Or, "Can we try this?" and he would take the time to explain everything. He was open to mentoring and taking my calls, which can be rare in this industry. I was always pushing him to do crazy stuff on our records, and that's how he knew I could be a great producer. He also taught me that volunteering your time to other engineers in the studio is the quickest way to rise up. Since then, he's mixed a number of projects that I tracked, and we worked on Code Orange's Forever together.
How did you begin acquiring your first production credits?
I started to travel to people's rehearsal places with a $100 Carvin mixing board and worked tirelessly with any bands who were playing shows. My friends and I then moved into a rowhouse near downtown Philly that we called the Mansion, and I had a bedroom studio on the fourth floor named Solomon's Gate. It was a four-story building, with tall ceilings, eight bedrooms, a hot tub, and disco balls. It may have been a former coke mansion. [laughs]
Blake Ibanez from Power Trip seemed quite taken aback by his first visit there.
Recording their first album, Manifest Decimation, at the Mansion was so fun, because I was using such cheap limited equipment and we spent most of our time pushing each other to the max. We taped microphones to the ceiling because I wanted the snare to sound like the first Metal Church album [Metal Church]. I was chaining together ancient Sunn mixers, ART reverbs, and cheap, live sound dbx compressors up across four floors, and it was pure chaos. But somehow, when all the faders were up, it sounded exactly how I imagined it. Over the next year, we took it to the next level with sound design, touching up parts, and learning what it took to do a full-length record for a real band, on a real label.
That album found its way to Max and Iggor Cavalera [ex-Sepultura], and led to you producing Psychosis for their group, Cavalera Conspiracy.
Yes, I was drum tech-ing for Iggor in 2016 for the Return to the Roots tour, and they were both blown away by an unfinished copy of Power Trip's Nightmare Logic. After the tour, they invited me to Arizona to work on the new album at The Platinum Underground studio in Mesa. The demos they gave me were insane, and everything was so raw, but these classic Max Cavalera riffs would keep popping up. I was like a kid in the candy store, picking out my favorites and organizing them in the studio with the guys. We would take these reassembled riffs, and record Iggor right there in the studio, adding transitions and noise. I went to Max's house before we started recording, and we sat and talked for hours. Getting to know a band that you're recording is probably the most important thing a producer can do. Knowing what their favorite all-time and current records are, trying to understand where the parallel is, and using it for inspiration when we hit a rut. Luckily for me, for most of the records I've done, the references are all ones I know and love.
Speaking of parallels, didn't you sit in on Ross Robinson [Tape Op #79] producing Sepultura's The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart in 2013?
I was recording another band in L.A., and my friend Andrew Kline [Strife] invited me to Ross' studio where he was recording Sepultura. I would sit in the back and whisper to Andrew, "Yo, that EQ is $5,000." Ross would turn around in the middle of mixing and say, "Oh, you mean the Pultec?" He'd be on the floor switching up guitar pedals in between takes and running sounds parallel through different chains. There's no big setup, it's just him on the floor playing like a kid, and there are his gold records on the wall. I'm thinking to myself, "This guy pioneered a whole genre of music. If he can do it and have it turn out so sick, why can't I?"
Is this where you discovered parallel processing?
Yes. "Parallel crappening" it's been called. After seeing what Ross was doing, I started running two amps. One amp will be a clear, buttoned-up "proper tone," and the other one (often a Peavey Rage) is all depth and sonic dog crap. I'll fuse them with an ART digital rack reverb and different combos of chorus and delay. Those two signals will go up and down in the mix, or stay all together; whatever works. Finding the balance of good and evil is what gives personality to the tones.
How did you hook up with Ghostemane for the N/O/I/S/E album?
Fast forward a few years, and I was playing in L.A. with my band, Sumerlands. Eric [Whitney, aka Ghostemane] reached out to have dinner, and we hit it off. The first thing he sent me to work on was a single that Travis Barker drummed on. It was only a 0:30 section, but afterwards he asked me to mix the whole record. I went out to his place in L.A., and we recorded the entire N/O/I/S/E album in three days. We were on the same wavelength immediately, and it turned out to be a huge album. It was his breakthrough into heavier music scenes beyond SoundCloud rap, because of the genre-bending of hardcore, rap, noise, and industrial. That album was a massive success, but in a way he's still unknown and cult. I learned that it's possible to do a successful record with almost no gear. Everything was tracked with a single [Shure] SM57 and mixed in a little rehearsal studio on KRK Rokit 5 monitors, and yet we had millions of listeners almost immediately.
That must have given you a huge boost.
