Stillness Studios

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, Christian is already the archetypical self-made man, with five years of full-time engineering to his credit. What I like most about Christian is that he's more likely to entertain you with a Samuel Beckett quote or treat you to a glass of bourbon than make you play to a click track. Of late, Christian has been busy recording new releases for the likes of Royal Trux [#11], The Make-Up, Flin Flon and Edith Frost. We sat down for sushi and conversation in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of D.C. in late January 1999.

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, Christian is already the archetypical self-made man, with five years of full-time engineering to his credit. What I like most about Christian is that he's more likely to entertain you with a Samuel Beckett quote or treat you to a glass of bourbon than make you play to a click track. Of late, Christian has been busy recording new releases for the likes of Royal Trux [ #11 ], The Make-Up , Flin Flon and Edith Frost . We sat down for sushi and conversation in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of D. C. in late January 1999.

How did you get into recording and how did Stillness evolve?

How I got into it is fairly relevant; I've always thought in visual terms. The way I mix and the way I approach placing microphones is to capture a cogent, believable space that is easily visualized. When I started recording music as a teenager I was mainly preoccupied with visual art. I always listened to music when I painted and it occurred to me that I was cheating, because I had this silly idea that the music was influencing me and that wasn't right and that I needed to make my own music to listen to when I painted. I decided to set out and make some of my own recordings rather than playing with other people. I got a hold of whatever instruments I could and whatever happened to be around the house. I just started rigging tape decks together and bought a little 4-channel Radio Shack mixer. I had gotten pretty good at doing the multiple cassette players thing, so I picked up a couple of 1/4 inch stereo machines in pawn shops or thrift stores for $20 and started doing the same thing with them. Then next it was a 4-track cassette. At my first job away from home, a co-worker, who was a musician, had a 1/4 inch 8-track studio in his basement, which he invited me to use. He couldn't really be around much to help, so it involved me figuring out what was going on from what little I knew and what basic knowledge of electronics I had. I ended up renting all that gear from him and moving it into my basement where I started recording my band. Those recordings got around and people started asking me to record them. I decided it was time to start charging. By that time I was about 20. From that point on this is all I've done.

When did you move Stillness into its current location?

Three years ago. The sound of the rooms pleased me and I decided, well, this is it, wood floors, plaster walls, high ceilings. I don't like to do a lot of acoustic treatments. I like to find a place that just sounds good inherently, so if I want to use it open I can. If I want to close it down I have all these resonator sound absorbers that I can move around to tailor the acoustics. I find that, when using the fundamental character of the room sound, artificial reverbs become much more believable. Basically, what you're doing in that process is making rooms bigger, rather than totally altering the character of the sound. With the new Stillness, I went for a much more natural atmosphere. I tried to keep it, for a lack of a better word, homey. I think that the concern of any competent engineer is not just getting a clean sound on tape and saying "Well I did my job," but also creating an environment which is comfortable. People can relax and disconnect themselves from the fact that they are recording, because recording isn't necessarily a terribly good experience for a lot of people.

How long are your recording days?

It really varies from project to project. Generally I prefer 6 to 8 hour sessions. A lot of the records I've done have been recorded in 5 or 6 consecutive days, so we need to put in pretty long days to do it right and that turns into 12 or 14 hour days pretty easily. It depends also on who else is involved. Usually when I work with Neil [Hagerty] and Jennifer [Herrema from Royal Trux] it turns into very long days. Sometimes I'll get started with the band around noon and then Jennifer and Neil might show up around 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. and will want to work till about 4:00 in the morning. So we'll be working on basic tracks or overdubs that we know we need to do or vocals that we know we need to do and Neil and Jennifer will get there and listen to everything we've done and evaluate it. So doing the Edith Frost record [ Telescopic on Drag City] was sometimes 16 hour days.

How do you feel about the analog versus digital debate?

While the bulk of what I do happens in analog, I work in a hybrid environment where both are available and very frequently working in tandem. Sometimes tracks that have been recorded in analog will be flown over to the computer, edited and moved back. I generally keep drums and electric instruments on analog and if all 16 tracks have been filled up with that activity then vocals or perhaps acoustic instruments will end up on ADAT or on the computer. I don't very commonly record directly to the computer. The bulk of what I do can and does happen on 16 tracks, but if there's time I sometimes end up using both anyway, because I've been doing more and more redundant micing and stereo micing.

You have a 1" machine right?

It's a Tascam MS-16 1" 16 track which runs at 30 inches per second and I don't use noise reduction.

Often arguments in favor of analog revolve around the assertion that the equipment is better.

The equipment itself is generally built better. The best analogy for the analog versus digital debate is film and video. Video is cheaper, you can edit it much more easily, you can do things with it that you can't do with film, but film is much more believable much richer looking. There have been great movies shot on video and there have been bad movies shot on film, so the medium doesn't decide it. I think it's good to have a big technological vocabulary as well as a good understanding of acoustics and natural spaces. If you don't have a choice then do whatever you have to do on whatever you've got. But if I had to choose only one format it would be analog.

Let's talk about your drum sound.

My favorite reverb processing unit is my bathroom. The bathroom is adjacent to the drum room, so I just open the door and put a mic in the bathroom. Sometimes it gets used throughout as part of the sound, or sometimes it's just brought in for certain sections of music to expand the sound. For every foot the microphone is from the source, there's a one millisecond delay. With the way that the bathroom is situated, the sound has to bounce around a number of times before it actually gets in there, so you get something along the lines of a 40 millisecond delay and this very colored reverb with a short duration. The more dense the music is, the less that works.

When you're recording, how assertive are you with aesthetic ideas?

I try not to put my stamp too much on things. I don't tend to repeat things terribly often. I use the bathroom fairly commonly, but usually in different ways. It sits in the mix differently or it's applied differently or the sound that I'm getting from that room is treated differently, so it has a different characteristic overall. Very frequently the stimulus is actually the band. Sometimes it's just responding intuitively to what bands are trying to suggest no matter how vague. Other times it's just like,"This is something I've thought about and I think I'd like to try it on this track. Do you mind?'

Could you fill in some details on your recent discography?

Actually, I should explain the connection with Jennifer and Neil. It's kind of a weird one. They live fairly near to Warrenton. A lot of my bigger projects outside of Teenbeat has been through them. What had happened was that I was out at the Jamesway in Warrenton (it's like a K-Mart). I was just getting some stuff and these two guys approached me and they were like "Hey, is there a music store around here?" I told them that my studio was attached to it. That was one of the early studio arrangements. I was in casual partnership with this music store. So it was the drummer Chris Pyle and a guy named Robbie, who played percussion with Trux briefly. He played on the Thank You record. Chris Pyle and I ended up hanging out a bit and he played on some of my stuff. I guess Jennifer and Neil heard some of it and they were impressed with the way it sounded, or Chris recommended me. Then the Make-Up approached Jennifer and Neil, wanting them to produce a record and they told them "Yeah, but we don't want to record it." So they contacted me. So that [ In Mass Mind on Dischord] was the first record that I did with Jennifer and Neil. A little bit before that I had started working with Mark Robinson [ex- Unrest, ex-Air Miami]. The first thing was a single remix for the Merge Records/Mark Robinson remix record [ MRG 100 ] It was a band called Spent.

How did you meet Mark?

Mark was actually referred to me. The Spent tape was on a somewhat unusual format: 1" 30 inch per second analog, which isn't real common around here. There are a lot of 15 inch per second machines, but not too many 30's.IhadmetMarkbefore,butIhadnever broached the topic of the studio. So Rob Christiansen [from Eggs/Viva Satellite] recommended me. And that was the first thing that we did and Mark liked the product, so the next thing we did was Phil Krauth's record One Two Three . Then next was True Love Always, which was a couple of 7 inches; one for Teenbeat and one for Motorway. Following that was Flin Flon [Mark's band], the 7 inch ["Swift Current"] and then the record [ A-OK ]. The most recent thing for Teenbeat is a Phil Krauth track for Teenbeat's yearly [1999] compilation, which just came out. After the Make-Up record was done, Drag City wanted Jennifer and Neil to produce Edith Frost's record and they called me to do it. The relationship with Jennifer and Neil has been very fruitful. We understand each other pretty well, so work goes very smoothly. Another recent record which is quite good is the Tarot Bolero record [ Vaudeville Rising on Ace-Fu]. It's Myra Power from Slant 6 and Aaron Montaigne from Antioch Arrow. That's a cool record.Wediditin6days.Igottoaddto the arrangements a good bit. As with the Edith Frost record, I brought in Jean Cook and Amy Domingues to play violin and cello, respectively, who added a lot to it.

What kind of producing do Neil and Jennifer do? For example, when they were at Stillness with the Make-Up [for In Mass Mind], what kind of suggestions were they adding?

I think that the Make-Up was the first time they had produced someone other than themselves, so that was probably a learning experience for everyone involved. Their role in that was on the fly, working, helping to get sounds and assuring that there was a good performance; making performance suggestions, just trying to get as much out of the band as possible, as quickly as possible. They also had a lot of ideas about effects. One of the songs on the record was actually suggested by Neil. It's a recent Anita Baker song, which the Make-Up hadn't heard. And Neil brought in a chord chart and the lyrics and didn't play the original for them until after they had recorded it. The song is called "Caught Up In the Rapture." I think Neil was far more prepared for the Edith Frost record. He had heard demos of all the songs and had very specific ideas worked out in advance. Some of the structures of the songs were fairly radically changed. Generally the basic linearity of the vocal portions was unaltered, but what was happening underneath, in some cases, was very dramatically changed.

Have you worked with any other producers?

Well, Mark Robinson, but that's it. Usually, I produce the bulk of what gets recorded in my studio, but at the same time it's not the most high-profile stuff.

How assertive is Mark in the producer's role?

Mark has a pretty specific idea of what he wants. I like the way the Flin Flon record sounds a lot, but it's not characteristic of the way that I usually record. It's far more closed in, but ambient in strange ways. The drums are not ambient at all. We built, basically, this sound absorber and sleeping bag tent over the drum kit. Also all the drums are pretty tightly gated. It's a totally dry drum sound. The bass, however, was recorded with a slightly more ambient approach. It was a close mic and an ambient mic in the main room and it was very loud, so it really set the room off.

Where did the idea of the drum sound come from?

I think Mark is not into, in general, quite as much ambience as I am. He liked my approaches for Phil's stuff and for True Love Always, but he wanted to do something different for the Flin Flon record. As he put it, he's getting into records that sound really weird, that have elements that seem out of place and strange. He just listed elements like really dry drums, but still natural sounding. Typically there is far more ambience on the drum kit, be it natural or artificial, than there is on the bass. Whereas in this case the bass is pretty ambient and live, so it's a fairly strange juxtaposition against the dry drums. In some cases we would only use certain microphones in the mix for a certain drum part, which we would have super tightly gated and it would sound something like a drum machine.

I know that Miles Davis' In A Silent Way is one of your favorite records. Because Teo Macero's production on that record is pretty studio intensive, I was wondering if there were any particular records you heard growing up which inspired your engineering techniques?

Absolutely. Early through The Final Cut Pink Floyd stuff. I very much like the drum sound of Animals -era Pink Floyd. And then their earlier stuff too, which was a little weirder, a little smaller. The Beatles, definitely. The George Martin/Geoff Emerick [ #57 ] combination was amazing. I was also around a good bit of classical music growing up because my father was a piano technician, so I heard plenty of piano. And of course in classical recordings it's pretty much the unadulterated sound of the instrument, to whatever extent possible, and that definitely informed my ears. I tend to like things that are either very interestingly effected, there is no question of something being honest sonicly, or are just very pure and realistic sounding.

Are there any more contemporary engineers that you admire?

Locally, Geoff Turner [WGNS] and Trevor Kampmann [Sea Saw/Holland] are doing some very nice work. I also like Steve Albini's work. Like any musician/engineer, I think he's best at recording his own band. Warren Defever is another interesting engineer. His approach has always been very interesting to me — all the His Name Is Alive records and Liquorice and Grenadine. He does much better work on what he has than many people do on much, much better gear.

He's not a gear-whore like you.

Right! I don't get the impression that he's a big engineering geek at all. He just has a very musical sensibility. I think some of Daniel Lanois' [ #37 ] work as a producer is amazing. The Emmylou Harris record Wrecking Ball is pretty amazing sounding. Another is Tim Friese- Greene. There is a Talk Talk record called Laughing Stock , that he did which sounds incredible [see the interview with Phil Brown in this issue, -LC] . I'm not sure to what extent he was involved in the engineering of that record, but the production approach is beautiful. One of the most impressive sounding records that I've heard recently is the Masada album Alef , which was recorded at RPM in New York. I also like some of Kramer's records. I think my favorite is the Grenadine record [ Goya ]. I think the Low album Long Division is a great record. Again it's all a matter of adapting your approach — everyone has habits, but I think it's wrong to be like "This is my sound!" I know that some people go to certain engineers and producers for a specific sound and so that's how that happens, but at the same time I kind of want to avoid that. I try not to make the same record twice, as far as the sonic character of the recording.