With roots in Toronto, the most populated and diverse city in Canada, Alfio Annibalini has been working steadily in recording, mixing, teaching audio, producing albums, and playing as a musician – currently with Rush's Alex Lifeson in Envy of None. He has an amazingly wide range of credits; from Danko Jones, to Big Wreck, to Voivod, to Philip Sayce, to the Arkells. He's a solid character and a survivor of an ever-changing music business for 25 plus years, with his skills always in demand. I first met him in 1995, during the production of the cult underground stoner/doom album SpaceJumboFudge by Sons Of OTIS. He has always long been on my "to interview" list, so I dropped him a line. Turns out he's lived in the same city I do, since 2018; the working class, musically rich-meets-gentrified city of Hamilton, Ontario, an hour west from Toronto and an hour northwest of Buffalo, NY.
Where are you from?
I'm from Northern Ontario. I'm from Espanola, Ontario, which is this weird little town. There was nothing going on, so either you played hockey or you did music, so I started doing music when I was around 13 or 14. I moved to Toronto and went to Humber College. I was not the best student; I did the first year and then transferred over to the Harris Institute. I didn't have the discipline to become a guitar player on that level. I wasn't interested in playing somebody else's music. I met Daryn Barry at the Harris Institute. We got along famously. Then I went from there, and my first job was at Wellesley Sound. It was just off Queen Street in Sherbourne; it was a nasty neighborhood.
Near the Salvation Army men's shelter?
Yeah. At that time, that was like studio alley. Sounds Interchange, Manta Sound, and Wellesley were there. I started working there, and immediately went from sweeping floors to finding out that one of the engineers who worked the midnight shift didn't have an assistant. He was doing rap, and nobody else wanted to do rap. I thought, "This is a great way to get my hands on some equipment, and also a great way to get some credits." It turned out he was working with Dream Warriors [King Lou and Capital Q] and people of that ilk. I went in, made myself available, and became his assistant for the next few years. Paul Raven [bass] from Killing Joke moved to Toronto. This engineer, Walter Sobczak, they hooked up in a club or whatever. Walter was in a post punk industrial band called Sturm Group. Raven came over to Wellesley Sound, and we were doing industrial. It was a cool mix of a lot of different music. I've learned a hell of a lot there, things that to this day probably influence me. We were doing a lot of programming, sound manipulation, and computer programming. Working with tape, computers, analog consoles, and with the first digital workstation, the 2-channel Studer Dyaxis 1 [Digital Audio Production System].
I remember using it. Great-sounding 16-bit converters, but an awkward, challenging onscreen interface.
That thing was so clunky. We would do an edit on something, a crossfade, and we'd have to go home and come back in the morning to wait for the crossfade to be done. It was so slow! The hard drives were huge – you fired them up and it sounded like a car starting. From there I went to Hypnotic, around the time I first met you. I started working out of Hypnotic for Tom Treumuth and doing sessions for his label and his recording studio. That's where I went from working alone on all of this rap music to working on purely metal, more than anything else. There were a couple alternative bands in there too. Daryn Barry and I did a Made record [Bedazzled] for MCA [Records].
I totally forgot about that one.
We produced that. That record was almost the death of me, in terms of my career. It had all kinds of hype; it came out, and it absolutely did nothing. It was hard to get a gig after that for a little while. But Tom was cool. Tom gave us the rein of the place and said, "Here, go nuts."
Hypnotic Records and Studio was like a one stop shop, right? Everything's there, plus artists coming in.
Exactly. No other label on the planet would have done a Sons Of OTIS record [SpaceJumboFudge]. It wouldn't have happened. Not at that time, anyway. I did a podcast with Tom, and he was talking about how [the group] Big Sugar changed his whole thing. He signed Big Sugar, and then they went on to greater things. He did quite well with that. That funded Voivod [Negatron], Sons Of OTIS, and the other records that are a little bit more edgy.
There were a lot of heavy artists there. Were you prepared for that style beforehand?
The two things that saved me was I always had a love for metal and a soft spot for metal. I liked big, distorted guitars. I...
