A few years back he built his dream studio, Higher Power Recording, in upstate New York in a decommissioned church, only to return quickly to Brooklyn where he is now the producer in demand. I caught up with Bryce — tall, bearded and always very focused — in Trout Recording in Park Slope — 3rd Avenue off Flatbush Avenue to you and me. Zelda the very large wünder dog, an Akita huskie, sat peaceably under the large Neve console as the interview began.
How did you start working in studios and stuff, or was it through a band?
Well, when it came time to pick a career or a college, I went to SUNY Fredonia and enrolled in their Sound Recording Technology program there and wound up in a studio by choice. Dave Fridmann came out of there. Dave Moulton, who went to Berklee, wound up being the head of the Tonmeister Studies [Sound Recording Technology] when I was there. It was an interesting program — you spent two years as a music major, did some physics, acoustics, electronics, computer science, like a mélange of stuff, as well as five or ten hours in a recording studio.
When you graduated from Fredonia did things start to happen right away for you?
I had a friend who ran an instrument cartage company. I was schlepping gear for studio musicians. So I had my head in and out of lot of recording studios in New York for about six months. One day I was schlepping Steve Holly's [Wings drummer] drum kit around, and he mentioned that a new studio was opening up and they needed some bodies there to work. It was a place called Sound On Sound. It was an excellent facility to be starting out at just because the equipment was world class but there wasn't a lot of work going on there. The head engineer of the studio was this guy, Mike McMackin. He worked with Bitch Magnet, Codeine, and a bunch of other people later on, but at that point he was getting his chops together as well. The facility was down most nights and weekends and the owner Dave Amlen was generous enough to let all his staff experiment with recordings. I had a bunch of friends that I had gone to college with who were living close by, so I did a lot of experimental jazz recordings with them. In the evenings I was also able to work with a guy named Steve Kilby from the Church on a project he was working on with Donnette Thayer from Game Theory. The project was called Hex. There were also a lot of talented engineers who came in and out of that place: Alec Head, Joe Ferla, Ed Stasium, Paul Hammingson, Lenny Kaye. I got to peer over the shoulder of an awful lot of world-class engineers and producers.
Who's your biggest influence in your approach to recording?
I was influenced by Ferla and Head in terms of their simplistic approach to recording — doing a lot of work with mic placements and not much work with EQ. I was inspired by [Steve] Lillywhite [Tape Op #93], [Daniel] Lanois [Tape Op #37 & #127] — by their earlier sort of reckless disregard for convention, which I thought was kind of fun.
What do you think was your first break?
That Hex project. It got me a position in a studio called Baby Monster — a little bit of a slummy kind of studio compared to Sound On Sound in terms of equipment that was there and the rate. It was a great opportunity for me because it was a couple of blocks away from the Knitting Factory. John Zorn had just dragged everybody in the Knitting Factory to do a record he was working on. Doing ten records with Elliot Sharp over the course of three years, as well as with Zeena Parkins, Marc Ribot, David Shea and Christian Markley. A lot of eclectic interesting downtown composers like Guy Klusevic. All these composers and musicians didn't work in kind of a conventional way. Elliot would come in with charts with hieroglyphics on them. There was so much improvisation. For me it was really exciting — a great way to experiment and get your chops up. I would get thrown the oddest instruments in the world. Like slabs were one thing Elliot recorded a lot — they looked like literally pizza pans with strings strung across them. Anthony Coleman would come up with the most weirdly distorted keyboard sounds. It would seem very caustic but then you could get them to work in context to make a recording very, very exciting. Everybody was pushing the envelope of their sound.
So from that how did you start meeting the underground alternative rock bands like Pavement and The Lemonheads?
There was this woman, Janet Billig, who was managing Nirvana, The Lemonheads, and was trying to... I wasn't sure how heavily she was pursuing Pavement, but she was at least advising Pavement — helping Pavement out during the recording process. She had sent Evan [Dando] down to Baby Monster to do a couple of B-sides with me and had recommended that Pavement use me to mix Crooked Rain. So I did one mix for Pavement and they kind of liked what I did. And I ended up mixing the whole record for them. Once Crooked Rain came out I had a name at least.
They liked it so much you ended up dong three records with them...
I ended up mixing Wowie Zowie with them and tracking and mixing Brighten the Corners with them. When they came to me with Crooked Rain there were no track sheets — there was no documentation. There was no leader between anything. There was line hum on the lead vocal and stuff. There were certainly a lot of technical problems with that recording. I guess I recognized the energy that was on that tape, and just tried to ignore those technical problems — fix them the best I could. But I specifically remember working on stuff for hours and then going, 'The drums are not going to get any better than they are right now.' I couldn't push them to the fidelity I thought was conventionally necessary at the time. But it wound up being sort of a blessing — it wound up having a unique sound. There wasn't really anything homogenous about it. And I think part of it was the ropy recording techniques. It's also the groove of Pavement, which was always pretty incredible. I remember when I was working on Brighten the Corners, they were jamming out — we were recording at Mitch Easter's [Tape Op #21] Fideletorium in North Carolina. They were upstairs in this small room, and I was downstairs in this other living room space. So I couldn't see them, but I had all the mics up, kind of tweaking up the sound. They just had this very weird and interesting groove that they all did together. I guess Westy was keeping it all together. Everybody was pulling against him in an interesting and exciting way and it felt sort of bouncy and lively.
Did you find yourself trying to give direction to the band, or was spont- aneity what that band was all about?
I definitely feel like Malkmus was driving the sort of production ship through most of that. He would come up with an idea, and I would be like the executioner. He would say he wanted stuff to sound like Odyssey and Oracle. Throw out a few ideas. And I would kind of pick that up and push it along in a direction so that it actually became that. It was really a stream of consciousness way of working that we all kind of got. I felt at the time I was making orchestration decision about guitar parts and stuff. But Steve would pick up the ball. I would pick up the ball. We had a symbiotic relationship. It didn't feel like we would get to a crossroad and then fight about where to go. There was a pretty clear path and we were all going there.
And when you were working with Mitch Easter was it the same way?
It was Mitch's recording studio, and Mitch was a very helpful guy down at his studio. To navigate somebody else's studio would be very tedious. He stayed in the periphery pretty well when I was there. I tracked Brighten the Corners for about two weeks and I had to come back to New York to work with Bettie Serveert on their new record. So he spent another week down there recording some guitars. He was a fun guy to hang out with.
Was it Steve's idea to go down to his studio?
I think Mitch was wooing him. Steve definitely liked to mix it up when he was recording. He would always try to go to another recording facility to figure his band in a different way. Brighten the Corners was probably the first proper Pavement record where the whole band played a lot of the songs together. I remember when we were sequencing Crooked Rain, Steve turned to [Mark] Ibold and said, "You'd better listen to these parts because you're going to have to play them live." [laughter] I recorded a bunch of vocals and played some piano on Crooked Rain — but the lion's share of the recordings were done by the time I got my hands on them — by a guy named Mark Venitzia. A lot of the vocals that we cut on Crooked Rain and Wowie Zowie were pretty much improvised. I mean he had some ideas jotted down on a piece of paper, and would work off of them. For the most part, it was first take material. Sometimes we would take a second pass. It was not really a concern for performance but for lyrical content. It's certainly a very exciting way of working in this day and age of pop music.
What I admire about your recordings is that there is a lot of exuberance and it's natural sounding.
Well, I kind of approach most recording with a respect for the acoustical event that's going on. I try to keep engineering out of it as much as possible. I have a good grasp of what the frequency responses of mics are and what the mic pres I'm using can do to it. What I'm out to do is to accurately reproduce that event. I feel that's more interesting than all the processing in the world. I guess I do get bored of hearing the same outboard kind of effects approach to stuff.
So no gated reverb finds its way in?
No, it does as an effect or a statement, not as a matter of course. I personally think gated reverb is a sound that can enhance and make you feel in a certain way. I don't really feel that one should be strictly limited to not use effects. But one shouldn't feel obligated to use it all the time. It's just what textures are going to work, and what will make the song more musical and more exciting and get the artist's vision through. I guess I must be imposing my aesthetic on most of the stuff I'm working with, but I generally find myself working with people who have a similar aesthetic.
Do you have any favorite techniques or mics that you like to use on a kit, or does it always vary?
I definitely like rotating stuff. The other day I picked up a set of tracks I recorded about ten months ago. At that point I was using these Lomo 19A19 large diaphragm condenser microphones. Inside they use a C12 capsule, so they pretty much sound like a C12. They're a little bit more cardioid, more directional. I thought they sounded really kick-ass. But about five months ago, I kind of got bored with that and was working with combining a ribbon and a small diaphragm condenser. A Coles 4038 and a 451. I started with a 4038 and the 19A19, but the two colors were so similar it was almost redundant, whereas this 451 and the 4038 had all this spectrum to work with. I really do like the midrange that the cymbals get with a ribbon microphone. But there is something very satisfying about the crack that you get with a small condenser microphone. I'm now using a B&O ribbon microphone for overheads. I kind of frame my kit around my overhead's sound. I'll use a large diaphragm condenser microphone on the kick drum if I can. It kind of depends on how much rattling around there is going in terms of whether or not I can put a tunnel up, or whether or not there is a lot of cymbal leakage. How the tone of the kick drum is. Sometimes if you're using a single headed kick drum, it's just too fast. A large diaphragm condenser gives you too much high frequency information, and it all sounds very scooped. Then I'll stick a D12, or a D112, or something as conventional as that on the kick drum as well. I was listening to some tracks from that guy that does the Ween stuff, and he was using an RE20 on the beater side of the kick drum. I was digging that for a while. I kind of get bored with any one method of recording, so I try to rotate my mics. Sometimes it's by choice, or I have somebody's microphone for six months and I'm just using it, and then all of sudden they want it back.
For guitars you kind of get the quintessential 'alt-rock' guitar sound.
