What was your musical background growing up in Westborough, MA?
My mom is a rabbi, and she would play guitar and sing in the services. My dad gave me a [Sony] Walkman with a cassette that had Borscht Belt comedy on side A and Billy Joel's The Stranger on side B, and I must have listened to that a thousand times. In a subconscious way I'm chasing The Stranger every day. That beautiful, sad melody that he whistles on the beginning of the title track. My parents got me a Tascam 414 [cassette 4-track recorder] when I was 11, and I’d record myself playing bass over and over again. My friends and I were into De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, trying to make hip-hop on the Tascam or in Cool Edit Pro on the PC. Just goofing around listening to the Jerky Boys, Grateful Dead, and a lot of Miles Davis. Then I went to school for jazz and put recording aside until I recorded with a bluegrass band and asked the studio owner if he’d teach me Pro Tools. We would play loud and hit our instruments really hard. It was aggressive. Then, when I saw the shreddiest players – Sam Bush, Béla Fleck, and Brian Sutton – they were playing so freaking quietly! I started investigating that on my guitar and bass, and it sounded way bigger.
You moved to New York around this time?
Yes, I've been here for about 20 years; starting bands and doing more recording. I was working in a restaurant, and my dear friend, Michael Rains, invited me to his studio. It was in a basement on Rivington and Allen, in the Lower East Side, with a hole in the ceiling. But it was a cool studio built by Dave Snyder of Guilford Sound that was being used as a rehearsal space. There was a control room that wasn’t being used, so I learned how to install DB25 cables and I got it wired up. Now I could record my band. I could record my friend's bands. I ended up taking over the operations of the studio and converting it from a rehearsal studio into a shared studio space. It still operates today as Rivington 66, and there's a session happening there every day. It's a humble space, but now it has a Studer console and it's really vibey. It's super quiet down there, remarkably.
What led you from Rivington 66 to Figure 8 Recording in Brooklyn?
Shahzad Ismaily [Tape Op #151] took a share at Rivington with us and meeting him was a big deal. He's very gregarious and inclusive, and he wants to make things happen. He’s become one of my dearest, closest friends and mentors. One day he called me at my day job and said he’d bought a building in Prospect Heights [Brooklyn]. The company I worked for imploded and all of a sudden I didn't have a job. The next thing you know, I was helping build a studio. Luckily, Shahzad brought in Eli Crews [#88] who came from New, Improved Recording in Oakland, California. He and I built the studio together and lived in the building. Shahzad really trusted us; he was very hands-off on the build and the design, and kind of just showed up when it was done.
And he was happy, hopefully?
He was so happy. I remember the first time we sent a signal through the studio: We had a Neumann M49 [microphone] going through the Neve 53 Series console, and he just sat in front of it and rubbed his hands together. For those who don't know Shahzad, him rubbing his hands together is like a symphony. [laughter] He rubs his hands together and you hear the music of the cosmos. From that day on I just became a full-time recording person, through Shahzad kind of pushing me, "You can build a studio, right? And then you'll make records here." I was like, "With who?"
At Figure 8, you recorded [Marc Ribot's] Ceramic Dog, and engineered for Damien Rice, Cass McCombs, and many others. What were you learning about production there?
Eli is such an incredible engineer and really knows the best practices. I learned everything from Eli on that technical side. Shahzad taught me how to interact with musicians and artists, and I think one of his gifts is he knows how to navigate the emotional, interpersonal landscape of a session. Because I lived upstairs, he would ask me to come work on all sorts of sessions. He'd bring musicians in from all over the world for two hours to improvise. Watching him interact with them gave me tips on what to say, or what not to say. I engineered this record by Anna Ternheim, and I thought I had done a bad job, so I kept apologizing. At the end of the session, Shahzad said, "Just so you know, you don't apologize in the studio. They don't know it's a mistake until you tell them it was a mistake." I believe that the only way you learn things is with stakes, and he was so beautiful at always creating those for me and helping me learn and get better. One day he asked me to come record him improvising with Sam Amidon and Damien Rice. Afterwards I went up to Damien and asked for his email address so I could send him a bounce, and I ended up working with him for four years.
What led you from Figure 8 to create Sugar Mountain here in Bed-Stuy?
We had a beautiful run at Figure 8, like a recording utopia. Michael Coleman was the studio manager. Sam Owens, who records under Sam Evian, was also involved. After about five years, Shahzad needed my apartment for his family, and it was like the mother bird kicking the baby bird out of the nest – in a loving way. I finally found this little, weird house that's in a row of ten small brick houses. It’s on a pedestrian-only street with no traffic, so it's really quiet. This is a soundproof room that we're sitting in, but it's quiet upstairs too. I moved in here in January 2020, and this space was just a cellar. Then the pandemic hit, and I was able to get an EIDL loan. Thankfully that was enough to build the studio. Heba Kadry [Tape Op #139] had posted a picture of this beautiful mic locker built by Jim Keller [#142], who has a company called Sondhus. He’s unbelievable. He's just finished Juilliard and Jamie Lidell's [#129] room. He's got it all: Master designer, furniture builder and craftsperson, and a great acoustician. His team was amazing. I started doing sessions in June 2022, and then it was like, "Okay, now I have my own studio. I hope that people want to come here.”
Your recent credits with Adrianne Lenker [Songs, Instrumentals, Bright Future] must have helped with that?
The Lonnie Holley record [Mith] got really good press, and I worked on Buck Meek's first record [Buck Meek]. All of Big Thief have been very close friends of mine, and I toured with them as a front of house [mixer] and tour manager. They would crash in my spare room at Figure 8. When the pandemic hit, Adrianne called me up and said, "Why don't you come out to Massachusetts? I'm staying in this little cabin. There's nothing to do. I've got a bunch of songs. Collect some gear and we'll record these songs and see what happens." Adrianne drove down to New York in her pickup truck, we threw all the gear in the back, set up, and recorded that record [Songs] out in this little cabin. That record did very well, and I was getting a lot more requests to work on records. I’d have to tell people, "Well, okay. It won't sound like Adrianne Lenker's record, but we can definitely make something."
Listening to Songs and Bright Future is where I picked up on your penchant for tape. "Fool" opens with that classic sound of the tape machine starting up.
I like working on tape, but I'm not a tape freak. Both of Adrianne's last two solo records were AAA records [Analog multitrack to Analog mix to Analog lacquer] Recorded to tape, mixed analog to tape, and then mastered from tape – analog to lacquer. Most of that was done on this Otari MX-5050 8-track, 1/2-inch machine, and I mixed the album Songs down to an Ampex ATR-102 at 30 IPS through the Neve at Figure 8 Recording. I mixed the last record, Bright Future, down to my 1/4-inch Otari MX-5050 Bii 2-track at 15 IPS. Surprisingly, I feel like the new one sounds more hi-fi than the last one, but they both sound pretty weird. [laughs]
Were you mixing it on this Studer 962 console?
Bright Future was mixed on this 16-channel Studer 962 here at Sugar Mountain fairly recently. For Songs, I carried the Otari-8 track over to Figure 8, put it up on a stand, and then mixed off of that to the ATR. I also mixed Adrianne’s record, Instrumentals, digitally in 30 minutes. I mixed it in the time it took to listen to it. Adrianne would record an instrumental at the beginning and end of each day during the sessions for Songs, and she wanted to make a cassette for her partner at the time. While Adrianne was cooking lunch, I had transferred them all into the computer. I’d just lined them all up in a sequence I thought made sense. I was on my laptop trackpad, pulled up [FabFilter] Pro-Q 3, and just rode it for the length it took it to play down while it was also recording to a cassette tape. She took one listen and was like, "Love it. Perfect. Send it." But it was only 20-some minutes long, so I did make one more piece, "Mostly Chimes," while the record was being mastered. We had put the binaural head (named Larry) outside and recorded the wind and the chimes, and sometimes Adrianne would be playing guitar. That's hyper edited. I transferred all those cassettes in, and it probably has a thousand edits. It's actually the most edited thing I've ever made.
You made up for lost time. I also love the production on Theo Katzman’s Be the Wheel. I read that he was shocked by how close you placed the vocal mic to the drums.
I wanted him as close to the drummer as possible, because I want everyone to know what's about to go down. If you're going to hit that cymbal it better be right, because that's going in the vocal mic. I want everyone to see that the vocal mic is right next to them, and that's going to change the way they play. It's going to make you play quietly, and I think playing the instruments quietly is how you get bigger sounds. The harder you hit an instrument, the more choked it becomes – especially drums – and the smaller the sound is. It's like over-compressing. If you compress something super hard – a really fast attack, a really slow release, and you have the needle pushed all the way – it sounds small. Hitting an instrument hard also makes it sound small, whereas with a soft touch you get all that big resonance. If you mic it right, and the performance is right, it can sound humongous. When I listen to Jay Bellerose's drums on Raising Sand, the Alison Krauss and Robert Plant record, those are humongous drum sounds. I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing to have a sound that big you have to hit pretty soft.
Was Be the Wheel also recorded to tape?
Yes, but the tape is not the important thing on these records. It’s just a way to access a workflow. Tape is good because it makes it easy not to cheat. You mostly have to work linearly, and it reduces the amount of edits because the edits are so difficult. You can read Phill Brown's book [Are We Still Rolling?, originally published by Tape Op], and he's doing window edits on Bob Marley records. That's crazy shit, like, "Here's the G on the bass. I'm going to cut that out and then tape in an A." When you’re forced into a linear workflow you will make different music. It's not that you can't make great music working nonlinearly with lots of edits – and I also make records like that – but it's harder. Linear, non-editing environments require (in some ways) a higher level of musicianship, as well as more decision-making and the ability to trust yourself and those you're working with. But if you can get there, I think there's a higher ceiling available. Sure, you can do that digitally. It's just harder to implement those workflows because digital is always whispering, "Hey, man, you want to edit that? Hey, man, you want to comp that in?" Something Theo said about tape was, "I like that it's expensive." He likes that it's got pressure. That puts pressure on the environment, which makes you reduce the amount of fucking around.
The stakes you were talking about, right?
Yeah. It's easy to fuck around on digital. It's free. "Whatever. We'll do it again. I'll take it home and I'll fuck with it for a month." When you're recording on tape, that shit's expensive. We're not goofing around. We're here to make decisions, and that was true for Adrianne's record and for every record I do on tape. I'm obsessed with performance, and anything that's going to cause the performances to be less impactful is to be avoided. That's why I love tape, but there are other ways that I've discovered that you can get the benefits of tape in a digital setting, and most of that involves spill.
What do you mean by "spill"?
The sound of one instrument spilling into another. I like the word spill, and it more accurately describes the sound of something spilling into a mic. Bleed is too negative. We want to avoid bleeding. We cauterize wounds. It's an emergency: Stop the bleeding. I don't like to use that word.
It's what everyone's been doing in audio for 30 years.
There's nothing more boring than a "good sounding" record. It's truly the last thing I'm interested in. I think that if you capture an amazing performance, the sound is good. And if you capture a shitty performance, that sound is bad. If you record with maximum spill, you make it very difficult to edit and you're working as linearly as possible. I still let things go crazy in the mix. You mentioned Adrianne's "Fool" – that's a very complicated mix. We're not just playing what happened on the tape and balancing it. There are dozens of automation moves – all analog – that took us many takes to do. Adrianne and I were in here, both sweating. That's happening live, happening linearly, to another piece of tape, which is expensive. So, recording with maximum spill enables you to get a lot of these tape workflows in the digital domain. That's why I wanted to build a studio that has no isolation. There's a little iso room over here, but no one goes in that room when we’re recording.
So, the musicians are in here with you?
Yeah, that room is for guitar cases. [laughs] I use it as my binaural re-amp chamber, which I use a lot for mixing. But otherwise, everybody's in here, super close. I'm obsessed with dynamic and rhythmic interplay. I believe that when you have the maximum amount of cross-dynamic and rhythmic communication it has the most impact for the listener. If I have three people playing, that’s 27 potential connections. Now, if I have six people playing, it gets deep really fast because 6 factorial is 720 connections. And when you get to seven musicians that gives us 5,040 possible connections. Every time you add a person, you get massive value from that. Now, if I want to have the amount of interplay be as potent as possible, I need those people to be able to hear each other naturally. That means we can't have headphones on, because headphones destroy dynamic response.
No headphones? That's bold.
Headphones are really like dynamic disasters. They're horrible. Obviously, sometimes we have to have headphones on. I record things with headphones on all the time, but I do it knowing that it's not as good as recording without. In order not to have headphones on you need to be able to hear everybody, which means you're going to need to be very close to each other. Given that we're making songs here, the vocal is our North Star, and everyone needs to play dynamically appropriate for the level of the vocal coming out of the singer's mouth. If someone is playing an electric guitar, we just put a Variac or a speaker attenuator on that. You can have a big tone quietly. Playing super quiet on drums is the hardest thing to do. Jordan Rose, who played on the Theo Katzman record, is an incredible drummer so he's able to pull it off. Then, using the tape machine is more about maybe it being expensive, or maybe it is about the sound, or maybe it's just about the romance of it.
There are many cool pieces of gear here. What’s that giant old thing under the cassette deck?
This Collins 26C compressor is one of the very first compressors ever made, commercially. I sent the Reverb.com listing to Matt Wells, one of the greatest techs in the world, and he said something so profound, "Well, it doesn't have any of the original transformers, so it's probably not going to give you the Collins' sound. But when you tell the bass player that they're going through that giant thing, they're going to play differently." That was one of the first times I heard someone talk about a piece of gear as a performance manipulator. And it's the same thing in 2024 if you're rolling tape – it's just special, and so the people who are in the room are going to feel special and play special.
Also, this couch is lifted up off the floor where I’m sitting. Is this for standing waves?
That's just aesthetics, but that's a Jim Keller design so everything in here is acoustically considered. It's designed to be a mixing room first, but it functions well as a tracking room too. This is the deadest zone because it’s the listening position and it has the most amount of treatment. As you move to the edges, it actually becomes more and more live. That's why you see wood on the edge there, and then the next panel set is aluminum-faced, so that's going to reflect more high end. The next panel is the [Owens-Corning] 703 [rigid insulation] face. Everything is moving symmetrically towards a reflective space on the edges. It assumes that you're going to record people in the wings of the room, although I do tend to put the drums right here in the middle. One other thing I forgot to mention regarding workflow and tape is that I don't make bounces or roughs.
Oh, you don't? Interesting.
If you do a real tape session, it's harder to make a rough. What are we making the rough to? If I use the computer, then I'm working on the computer and it’s easy to just hit bounce in Pro Tools. But if we are working on tape, and our computers are off, then what are we making a rough to? A cassette? Then it kind of sounds weird, so often I just don't do it. More importantly, I don't want people listening to a rough mix and falling in love with it. Tomberlin – which actually was recorded digitally – had no bounces ever. The first time she had a file to listen to of that record was a mix version one. There were months between tracking and mixing. Same with Theo and Adrianne – no bounces. It's this amazing unlock I've found to keep everyone’s ears and mind fresh during the record making process.
It's a postmodern loop back to the way it used to be done, with a lot of cool toys in the mix. That's what I was saying about your style earlier. I wouldn't call it folky because it has such a high-impact, three-dimensional sound.
I work on music that's not folky, singer-songwriter stuff, and all this stuff works just as well. I like everything to be as bold as possible. I love recording with my Neumann KU 100 [binaural head microphone]. I use it all over the place. Right up to the singer's face, next to the guitar, over the drums, or into the piano. When it's not in use in tracking it always sits in that iso room as a binaural re-amp zone with a couple of monitors. I call that mic Larry, after Larry Bird, my favorite basketball player. In Pro Tools, I just have a hardware insert named Larry. When I put Larry on an aux and send to it, it sends and returns stereo to the binaural. I can make anything binaural in a mixdown without using binaural rendering. It's actually binaural, which is really fun.
Larry always comes through in the clutch! Let’s see this mic locker.
I love recording to lo-fi tape machines with hi-end mics, like Josephson or a vintage Neumann. I used to record with more "lo-fi" mics, like old ribbons and funky dynamics, and I have a bunch of them. I find that the higher fidelity mics really shine when I’m recording spill. The off-axis coloration is really what you're paying for. If you're recording an isolated vocal, [Shure] SM7s or a[Shure] SM57 work. It all sounds the same – put a fucking iPhone up there. But if you're recording a vocal in a room with a ton of other instruments happening, sometimes those mics break down. The color of the drum coming into the off-axis of the SM57 is harsh and annoying, whereas the color of the drum coming into a Josephson C700, in the omni capsule, might be louder but it's beautiful. As long as it's quieter than the vocal. If it sounds bad, no matter how quiet it is, it's a problem. That's why I tend to record a lot with omni mics, because omni pickup patterns tend to have the most neutral off-axis coloration.
Taking in the solitude of Crown Heights on my walk home, I felt special. Maybe I’d been staring at the Collins 26C for too long but chatting with Philip opened my ears to the power of playing intimately. I didn’t even mention his incredibly patchable pedal board or all of those cool synths! Check out a full list of Philip’s credits and gear at the links below. And remember to get close, listen to each other, and make the quiet parts loud! 
