David Minehan

BY JASON HATFIELD

David Minehan played guitar, sang and wrote songs for the Boston punk band The Neighborhoods from 1979-1992. After the 'Hoods he played guitar with Paul Westerberg on the 14 Songs tour and even filled in for Brad Whitford of Aerosmith. At his Wooly Mammoth Sound Studio in Boston, which he shares with musician/producer Dave Westner, he has recorded many great New England artists including Scruffy the Cat, Salem 66, Gang Green, The Freeze, Mark Cutler, The Figgs, The Shelley Winters Project, The Gentlemen, Lucky 57, Jabe, The Kickovers, Asa Brebner, Robin Lane and the Chartbusters, Natalie Flanagan and Willie "Loco" Alexander and the Boom Boom Band.

Jay Bennett: Wilco, Bennett & Burch, more....

BY ROBERT LOERZEL

While listening to mixes at his new Chicago studio, Jay Bennett rolls his own cigarettes, then smokes them with a Hunter S. Thompson-style filter. "It's a good prop," he says. "I have a certain mad scientist reputation that I have to uphold." Bennett earned that reputation largely during his six years as a member of Wilco. Not only is Bennett talented at playing guitar, keyboards and virtually any other instrument he touches, he is also an engineer and producer, with a knack for fixing electronic gadgets. Bennett took on some heavy recording duties in 2001, during the making of Wilco's album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, documented in the film I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. He co-wrote eight of the eleven songs with lead singer Jeff Tweedy, played various instruments and co-engineered the record with Chris Buckley. Bennett says he was wearing "too many hats," causing tensions that culminated in Tweedy asking Bennett to leave. Out of Wilco, Bennett wasted no time teaming up with Edward Burch to record The Palace at 4am (Part I), taping much of it (120 tracks at times) in the basement of Bennett's home in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights. Over the past year, Bennett has recorded music by the Sun, Staggered Crossing, West of Rome, Brie Stoner, Mark Eitzel, Oh, the Stories We Hold by Anna Fermin's Trigger Gospel and others, while releasing an acoustic version of the Bennett-Burch album, Palace 1919. This spring, Bennett moved his Pieholden Suite Sound studio into an industrial loft on Chicago's northwest side, where he shares space with producer Alex Moore. Bennett is in the midst of several musical projects: a new solo album is out (Bigger Than Blue), a limited-edition Bennett-Burch tribute to the music of Rockpile, and an album with Michigan singer-songwriter Dave Vandervelde.

Jimmy LaValle: The Album Leaf Goes to Iceland

BY LARRY CRANE

In issue #28 we interviewed Jimmy LaValle, the man behind The Album Leaf, about his home recorded instrumental albums that we really enjoyed. Now Jimmy has had the opportunity to record his new album, In a Safe Place, in Iceland at Sigur Rós' studio with input from the band themselves. What a lucky guy. We sat and listened to the record as I picked his brain.

Russell Frehling: Deep Listening Engineer

BY STEVE SILVERSTEIN

While Tape Op has covered countless recordists with low-budget, grass-roots backgrounds in rock recording, we've talked to very few grass-roots engineers in the avant-garde music world. Russell Frehling, who now runs the house studio at Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening Space, is one of the most experienced. He's done everything from recording punk bands to the Jim Carroll Band to developing underwater sound fences for dolphins with Greenpeace in Japan, and his own creative pursuits involve large-scale sound installations. He's best known for his avant-garde recordings, and it's this experience that's led to his role in Oliveros' nonprofit foundation and its studio.

Russell Frehling: Deep Listening Engineer

BY STEVE SILVERSTEIN

While Tape Op has covered countless recordists with low-budget, grass-roots backgrounds in rock recording, we've talked to very few grass-roots engineers in the avant-garde music world. Russell Frehling, who now runs the house studio at Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening Space, is one of the most experienced. He's done everything from recording punk bands to the Jim Carroll Band to developing underwater sound fences for dolphins with Greenpeace in Japan, and his own creative pursuits involve large-scale sound installations. He's best known for his avant-garde recordings, and it's this experience that's led to his role in Oliveros' nonprofit foundation and its studio.

Sigur Rós: Recording in a swimming pool

BY LARRY CRANE

The Icelandic combo known as Sigur Rós create some of the most haunting otherworldly sounds and songs. Their third album, known only as (), clocks in at 70 minutes with eight tracks and no liner notes! Plus it was recorded in the band's own studio, a converted swimming pool in the Icelandic countryside. We interviewed guitarist/vocalist Jón (Jónsi) Birgisson on the band's tour bus when they played Portland. Jónsi had been a musician and full-time studio engineer before starting Sigur Rós in 1994. One can't help but wonder if his knowledge of the recording process and boredom with traditional "rock band" sounds had a huge influence on his band. Jónsi's use of large reverb sounds on his guitar, a cello bow-guitar technique and ethereal choir boy vocals in Icelandic or Hopelandic (i.e., not a real language) combined with the band's sense of space and compositional development sounds like nobody else. The other members of the band are Kjartan (Kjarri) Sveinsson on keyboards, Orri Páll D 'Rason on drums and Georg (Goggi) Holm on bass. The Portland show was transcendent, with a sold out crowd sitting in rapt attention as the band, accompanied by the Amina String Quartet, created the same magic vibe live that they pull off on record.

Three Practical and Personal Primers #1: Microphones

Tony Maimone: From Pere Ubu to Soul Coughing and more

BY JOHN DYLAN KEITH

A consummate populist, Tony Maimone first caught my attention lecturing eloquently in defense of the women's-only swim time at the Metropolitan pool in Williamsburg to a grumbling bunch of men in the locker room, immediately after we had all been booted out at 10 AM one Monday morning. Only afterward did I realize that he was the bassist I'd marveled at on Pere Ubu's Dub Housing and Modern Dance. It turns out his Studio G is two blocks from my house, so once we met, he invited me to drop in. I jumped at the chance. Besides playing bass with Pere Ubu, Maimone played with The Mekons, They Might Be Giants, Frank Black and Bob Mould. He's set up a nice, small studio since cutting back on touring, where he and partner Joel Hamilton have worked with Cordero, Soul Coughing, Zeena Parkins, Frank Black, Martha Wainwright and Early Edison, among others. The scene at the pool may seem unrelated, but after getting to know Tony, I realized it was illustrative of something important about his character, and probably accounts for the demand for his services as a bassist and producer/engineer as much as his musicianship does. He is a true team player, with an infectious enthusiasm for people and their ideas. The day we decided to formalize an interview turned out to be the day their new Auditronics console was arriving. While waiting for it to arrive, I sat around with Tony and Joel and we talked about everything from the old days of recording in Cleveland to digital audio to Tony's favorite bass recipes.

Tony Maimone and Studio G

BY JOHN DYLAN KEITH

Walter Sear: The Recorded Sound Sucks...

BY BREN DAVIES

It was a wet, shitty late November afternoon as photographer Brian Silak and I made our way across Manhattan's West 48th Street to the legendary New York recording institution known as Sear Sound. In case you're not familiar with Walter Sear and his famously firm crusade against bad digital recordings, you are in for a treat. Combine "Mr. Analog's" lifelong experience as a professional orchestral tuba player and designer, composer, music copyist and arranger, Theremin builder, early Moog modular synthesizer design and marketing collaborator, keyboardist, filmmaker, and (of course) engineer and producer with his vast knowledge and strong opinions pertaining to the history of recording as well as the current state of the industry, and the reader will be left with a true sense of one man's overwhelming passion for the art of recording. In order to focus on Walter's own personal engineering and production philosophy, I have elected to leave out the intimate details of his incredible collection of over 235 classic microphones, in addition to Sear Sound's veritable museum of vintage, mainly vacuum tube, gear — for which Walter is justifiably famous in our circle. But what you will read here will make an impression!