What was your musical background growing up in Westborough, MA?
My mom is a rabbi, and she would play guitar and sing in the services. My dad gave me a [Sony] Walkman with a cassette that had Borscht Belt comedy on side A and Billy Joel's The Stranger on side B, and I must have listened to that a thousand times. In a subconscious way I'm chasing The Stranger every day. That beautiful, sad melody that he whistles on the beginning of the title track. My parents got me a Tascam 414 [cassette 4-track recorder] when I was 11, and I’d record myself playing bass over and over again. My friends and I were into De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, trying to make hip-hop on the Tascam or in Cool Edit Pro on the PC. Just goofing around listening to the Jerky Boys, Grateful Dead, and a lot of Miles Davis. Then I went to school for jazz and put recording aside until I recorded with a bluegrass band and asked the studio owner if he’d teach me Pro Tools. We would play loud and hit our instruments really hard. It was aggressive. Then, when I saw the shreddiest players – Sam Bush, Béla Fleck, and Brian Sutton – they were playing so freaking quietly! I started investigating that on my guitar and bass, and it sounded way bigger.
You moved to New York around this time?
Yes, I've been here for about 20 years; starting bands and doing more recording. I was working in a restaurant, and my dear friend, Michael Rains, invited me to his studio. It was in a basement on Rivington and Allen, in the Lower East Side, with a hole in the ceiling. But it was a cool studio built by Dave Snyder of Guilford Sound that was being used as a rehearsal space. There was a control room that wasn’t being used, so I learned how to install DB25 cables and I got it wired up. Now I could record my band. I could record my friend's bands. I ended up taking over the operations of the studio and converting it from a rehearsal studio into a shared studio space. It still operates today as Rivington 66, and there's a session happening there every day. It's a humble space, but now it has a Studer console and it's really vibey. It's super quiet down there, remarkably.
What led you from Rivington 66 to Figure 8 Recording in Brooklyn?
Shahzad Ismaily [Tape Op #151] took a share at Rivington with us and meeting him was a big deal. He's very gregarious and inclusive, and he wants to make things happen. He’s become one of my dearest, closest friends and mentors. One day he called me at my day job and said he’d bought a building in Prospect Heights [Brooklyn]. The company I worked for imploded and all of a sudden I didn't have a job. The next thing you know, I was helping build a studio. Luckily, Shahzad brought in Eli Crews [#88] who came from New, Improved Recording in Oakland, California. He and I built the studio together and lived in the building. Shahzad really trusted us; he was very hands-off on the build and the design, and kind of just showed up when it was done.
And he was happy, hopefully?
He was so happy. I remember the first time we sent a signal through the studio: We had a Neumann M49 [microphone] going through the Neve 53 Series console, and he just sat in front of it and rubbed his hands together. For those who don't know Shahzad, him rubbing his hands together is like a symphony. [laughter] He rubs his hands together and you hear the music of the cosmos. From that day on I just became a full-time recording person, through Shahzad kind of pushing me, "You can build a studio, right? And then you'll make records here." I was like, "With who?"
At Figure 8, you recorded [Marc Ribot's] Ceramic Dog, and engineered for Damien Rice, Cass McCombs, and many others. What were you learning about production there?
Eli is such an incredible engineer and really knows the best practices. I learned everything from Eli on that technical side. Shahzad taught me how to interact with musicians and artists, and I think one of his gifts is he knows how to navigate the emotional, interpersonal landscape of a session. Because I lived upstairs, he would ask me to come work on all sorts of sessions. He'd bring musicians in from all over the world for two hours to improvise. Watching him interact with them gave me tips on what to say, or what not to say. I engineered this record by Anna Ternheim, and I thought I had done a bad job, so I kept apologizing. At the end of the session, Shahzad said, "Just so you know, you don't apologize in the studio. They don't know it's a mistake until you tell them it was a mistake." I believe that the only way you learn things is with stakes, and he was so beautiful at always creating those for me and helping me learn and get better. One day he asked me to come record him improvising with Sam Amidon and Damien Rice. Afterwards I went up to Damien and asked for his email address so I could send him a bounce, and I ended up working with him for four years.
What led you from Figure 8 to create Sugar Mountain here in Bed-Stuy?
We had a beautiful run at Figure 8, like a recording utopia. Michael Coleman was the studio manager. Sam Owens, who records under Sam Evian, was also involved. After about five years, Shahzad needed my apartment for his family, and it was like the mother bird kicking the baby bird out of the nest – in a loving way. I finally found this little, weird house that's in a row of ten small brick houses. It’s on a pedestrian-only street with no traffic, so it's really quiet. This is a soundproof room that we're sitting in, but it's quiet upstairs too. I moved in here in January 2020, and this space was just a cellar. Then the pandemic hit, and I was able to get an EIDL loan. Thankfully that was enough to build the studio. Heba Kadry [Tape Op #139] had posted a picture of this beautiful mic locker built by Jim Keller [#142], who has a company called Sondhus. He’s unbelievable. He's just finished Juilliard and Jamie Lidell's [#129] room. He's got it all: Master designer, furniture builder and craftsperson, and a great acoustician. His team was amazing. I started doing sessions in June 2022, and then it was like, "Okay, now I have my own studio. I hope that people want to come here.”
Your recent credits with Adrianne Lenker [Songs, Instrumentals, Bright Future] must have helped with that?
The Lonnie Holley record [Mith] got really good press, and I worked on Buck Meek's first record [Buck Meek]. All of Big Thief have been very close friends of mine, and I toured with them as a front of house [mixer] and tour manager. They would crash in my spare room at Figure 8. When the pandemic hit, Adrianne called me up and said, "Why don't you come out to Massachusetts? I'm staying in this little cabin. There's nothing to do. I've got a bunch of songs. Collect some gear and we'll record these songs and see what happens." Adrianne drove down to New York in her pickup truck, we threw all the gear in the back, set up, and recorded that record [Songs] out in this little cabin. That record did very well, and I was getting a lot more requests to work on records. I’d have to tell people, "Well, okay. It won't sound like Adrianne Lenker's record, but we can definitely make something."
Listening to Songs and Bright Future is where I picked up on your penchant for tape. "Fool" opens with that classic sound of the tape machine starting up.
I like working on tape, but I'm not a tape freak. Both of Adrianne's last two solo records were AAA records [Analog multitrack to Analog mix to Analog lacquer] Recorded to tape, mixed analog to tape, and then mastered from tape – analog to lacquer. Most of that was done on this Otari MX-5050 8-track, 1/2-inch machine, and I mixed the album Songs down to an Ampex ATR-102 at 30 IPS through the Neve at Figure 8 Recording. I mixed the last record, Bright Future, down to my 1/4-inch Otari MX-5050 Bii 2-track at 15 IPS. Surprisingly, I feel like the new one sounds more hi-fi than the last one, but they both sound pretty weird. [laughs]
Were you mixing it on this Studer 962 console?
Bright Future was mixed on this 16-channel Studer 962 here at Sugar Mountain fairly recently. For Songs, I carried the Otari-8 track over to Figure 8, put it up on a stand, and then mixed off of that to the ATR. I also mixed Adrianne’s record, Instrumentals, digitally in 30 minutes. I mixed it in the time it took to listen to it. Adrianne would record an instrumental at the beginning and end of each day during the sessions for Songs, and she wanted to make a cassette for her partner at the time. While Adrianne was cooking lunch, I had transferred them all into the computer. I’d just lined them all up in a sequence I thought made sense. I was on my laptop trackpad, pulled up [FabFilter] Pro-Q 3, and just rode it for the length it took it to play down while it was also recording to a cassette tape. She took one listen and was like, "Love it. Perfect. Send it." But it was only 20-some minutes long, so I did make one more piece, "Mostly Chimes," while the record was being mastered. We had put the binaural head (named Larry) outside and recorded the wind and the chimes, and sometimes Adrianne would be playing guitar. That's hyper edited. I transferred all those cassettes in, and it probably has a thousand edits. It's actually the most edited thing I've ever made.
You made up for lost time. I also love the production on Theo Katzman’s Be the Wheel. I read that he was shocked by how close you placed the vocal mic to the drums.
I wanted him as close to the drummer as possible, because I want everyone to know what's about to go down. If you're going to hit that cymbal it better be right, because that's going in the vocal mic. I want everyone to see that the vocal mic is right next to them, and that's going to change the way they play. It's going to make you play quietly, and I think playing the instruments quietly is how you get bigger sounds. The harder you hit an instrument, the more choked it becomes – especially drums – and the smaller the sound is. It's like over-compressing. If you compress something super hard – a really fast attack, a really slow release, and you have the needle pushed all the way – it sounds small. Hitting an instrument hard also makes it sound small, whereas with a soft touch you get all that big resonance. If you mic it right, and the performance is right, it can sound humongous. When I listen to Jay Bellerose's drums on Raising Sand, the Alison Krauss and Robert Plant record, those are humongous drum sounds. I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing to have a sound that big you have to hit pretty soft.
Was Be the Wheel also recorded to tape?
