Throughout her career, Ani Difranco has put out albums at an amazing rate, averaging about one release every nine months. Her fourteen albums have all been self-produced, and released on her own...
The Descendents, and subsequently ALL, are the manifestation of what I like about punk rock and music in general: energy, humour, and musicianship above everything else. This group of guys have...
Phill Brown has had a 30 year long career as an engineer, something most of us are barely even capable of imagining. And not only has he been working for a long while, he's worked with some of the...
Fugazi is probably one of the best rock bands on the planet at this point in time. Really. Their new album, End Hits is one of their best, proving that a band can grow over 10 years without...
Howe Gelb has spent the last 18 or so years fueling the Tucson, Arizona band Giant Sand, collaborating and recording with OP8, and has recently released a solo record called Hisser that was...
J. Christian Quick is the proprietor and engineer at Stillness Sound Facility, located on the first floor of a 150-year-old, two-story house in bucolic Warrenton, Virginia. At the tender age of 26,...
On a farm somewhere in Richmond, Virginia, next to the house in an adjacent annex, Mark Linkous (aka Sparklehorse) is wiring up his 16 track studio. He has released two records on Capitol,...
The Unseen is a three-piece band that has split its time between my hometown of Eureka, CA, and Portland, OR. Their sound is largely influenced by sixties pop, notably Beatles, Beach Boys, and...
In Recording Recipes No. 2 (TAPE OP No. 10), I wrote about flying microphones. This time I'll set forth a few recording techniques involving flying (roaming, really) musicians. As with the...
For the last three years TAPE OP was created on a Packard Bell PC computer, a 486 with a small hard drive. It's rather slow with a small memory. With the switch to having Substance Media Works...
If your record collection is anything like mine, you don't own many compilations, and the few that you have don't get much listening time. In My Living Room has become the exception. It actually has a...
This is an interesting compilation, featuring live radio broadcasts from a local Portland show (on KBOO) from 1991 to 1998. Eternally grumpy Jay Bozich engineered most, affable host Brandon Lieberman...
A couple of guys from Los Lobos, Tchad Blake, and Mitchell Froom using all the knobs and toys at Sunset Sound Factory. It's the second record from this collaboration and like the first, all the sounds...
Some people try to use bouncing to squeeze a lot of tracks onto a 4-track recording, to simulate a live band using overdubs. There's even an album called Made on a Teac that explains how to bounce 12...
The Sick Bees are a guitar/vocal and drums duo (with a dash of clarinet and keyboards to keep it spicy) that sounds like the polar opposite of the Spinanes. In fact, their approach is more in tune...
Some of you might remember a band called Sidecar and their frightening studio horror stories in issue #3 of Tape Op. Sidecar, due to someone else using the name, has now become Poolside, and they have...
As you may have read about in the J. Christian Quick interview elsewhere in this issue, this album was recorded at Stillness Sound Facility on a 16 track 1" recorder in the old house that is...
I'm told most of this record was tracked in a basement in Seattle on 1/2" 8 track by David Bazan, who wrote, sang, drummed and guitared all the songs. They are, for the most part, subdued melodic...
In the liner notes of this CD reissue, John Darnielle from the Mountain Goats argues against calling these old recordings "demos", because they're wonderful and fit for release. Of course, he's right,...
Their musicianship and songwriting continue to grow, and although the music has moved further into the pop realm, they haven't forgot- ten their punk roots. Roger Mountenot [known for his work with Yo...
When I first got this CD I gave it a few listens and dug the band's spazz-jazz Beefheart meets Minutemen compositions. Admittedly, I didn't pay a lot of attention to the lyrics expressed figuring the...
