Interviews | No. 175
By Sam Retzer and Sam Retzer
Ever since Rostam Batmanglij burst onto the scene as a founding member of Vampire Weekend, he’s been known for his penchant for baroque and leftfield sounds in pop-leaning indie music. Fresh out of college, he handled production for the first three Vampire Weekend albums (Vampire...
Terroir is a term often used in the worlds of food and wine to describe the geographical and environmental conditions of a region, and I would argue that it also applies to music. Not just the way a room sounds, but the geographical and social surroundings around an artist as they write...
By 2014, I'd already been transitioning for more than five years from working in traditional studios to almost exclusively doing field recordings overseas. As a result, I'd had some success with groups like Tinariwen, Malawi Mouse Boys, and The Good Ones. At that point, the...
Yves Jarvis is the moniker of Canadian musician Jean-Sébastien Yves Jarvis. His latest release, All Cylinders, won Canada’s Polaris Music Prize for best album of 2025, a record on which Jarvis wrote and performed all of the 16 tracks. Made entirely using Audacity and a half-broken...
In the mid-1950s, Seattle was host to the little-known music recording legacy of Jay F. "Joe" Boles. A fraction of his discography includes The Ventures, The Wailers, Cab Calloway, Big Jay McNeely, Buck Owens, The Fleetwoods, Robert "Bumps" Blackwell, Ella...
Melina Duterte began recording her own music armed with little more than a laptop, a budget mic, and a fascination with how records are made. As Jay Som, she crafted a distinctive sound defined by textural, layered guitars, and soft, intimate vocals. Since then, Duterte has expanded...
Although I had heard of Floating Points, the project of London-based musician Sam Shepherd, it was the 2021 album Promises – made in collaboration with Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra – that captured my attention, and I wrote about it in the End Rant ("One...
Since early in her career, Sharon Van Etten has been refreshingly open about her recording process and the lifelong learning aspect of it. This generosity has shown up in episodes of the podcasts Song Exploder and Life of the Record, as well as a companion documentary providing a...
In issue #149 of Tape Op, I was lucky enough to interview Catherine Anne Davies about her musical career as The Anchoress. We've kept in touch a little bit since, and when her new album, As We Once Were, was announced she dropped a line and suggested another chat. I think we should...
People always ask me what’s behind a song. How I captured the instruments. Why I arranged it that way. For "Don’t Dude Me," the answer starts in my home studio here on the “Island of Magic,” Florianópolis, Brazil. I recorded the whole track from Nerthus at home. It...
Philadelphia’s Poison Ruïn emerged from the shadows in 2021, with two demo tapes of nervy and angular “dungeon punk” crudely recorded on budget gear. The brainchild of Mac Kennedy, the sole recording member of the band, they soon found a home at Relapse Records, and followed up with...
Drawing from a wide-ranging pool of influences – from punk and hardcore to authors like evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and ethicist Peter Singer – José González has forged a unique place for himself in the music scene. He has released records by his band Junip...
