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Swing open the door to the little wooden shed behind Brian Beattie's house in south Austin and wonder how it all hangs together. The walls are stacked floor-to-ceiling with what looks like a yard sale wanting to happen: There are piles of ancient audio gear and instruments, a bag of "Texas-size" popcorn, a first-place trophy from a karate meet, a bass drum dangling from a coat hanger, and a smooth-hulled contraption that's either a giant kalimba or a rowboat. There's a bare 60-watt bulb in the ceiling and cables snaking through yawning fissures in the cement floor, and — except for two stuffed chairs on the verge of collapse — there's nowhere to sit, and hardly room to stand.

Yet it's here, in this unlikely space, that Brian has crafted beautifully idiosyncratic albums that sound as rich and expansive as the studio is cluttered and cramped. And to watch him at work in this little world, which he calls the Wonder Chamber, is to watch the room suddenly come to life. Hunched over a ten-channel mixer, flanked by glowing '50s-era Ampex preamps, tube Echoplex balanced between his feet, Brian looks like Han Solo in the Millennium Falcon: You get the feeling that only he could fly this thing.

He's calm and assured amid the chaos, coaxing warm, colorful performances out of often-temperamental equipment (and musicians), carefully assembling elaborate arrangements that never quite seem under control. Whether he's recording the world's sludgiest electric guitar or finessing the details of a delicate string part, Brian always seems to know where to put the microphones, how to keep the musicians in a good mood, and why the glaring mistake you just made is the best thing about the whole song.

The first Brian-recorded album I heard was Kathy McCarty's Dead Dog's Eyeball: Songs of Daniel Johnston, a producer's tour de force in which every song sounds as if it's just beamed in from its own oddball planet. By then, Brian was already an experienced producer and engineer, having cut his teeth in the '80s recording his and Kathy's band Glass Eye, fellow art-punks Ed Hall and the inimitable Dead Milkmen (the album title Beelzebubba was his idea). More recently Brian has devoted a great deal of time to recording the legendary Daniel Johnston, whose whimsical, organic Rejected Unknown bears Brian's stamp in every moment, as does its stunning and soon- to-be-released sequel Lost and Found, on which Brian plays almost every instrument. Brian has also worked with the Asylum Street Spankers, Amy Annelle / The Places, and my bands Shearwater and Okkervil River, among others. We spent three months with Brian making the Okkervil record, Black Sheep Boy, and had just finished the final mastering fixes when I came by to pick through the wreckage and peer into the future.

Issue 53 Interviews

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