What's the origin of the name Uniform Recording?
I was always a big fan of Factory Records; their aesthetic was always great to me. The name felt stark. It's also an ode to Martin Hannett [Tape Op #103], too. I love his production work, and I never outgrew it.
When did you start making music?
I was an only child, and I grew up in a fairly rural area of New Jersey. I randomly discovered music that I thought was interesting through a glass cassette case in a record store that I used to frequent in the mall. Records like Sonic Youth's EVOL and Meat Puppets' Huevos. I got Locust Abortion Technician, the Butthole Surfers record, solely based on the cover. That record alone got me into recording the most, because so much of it is musique concrète and tape manipulation. There may be one song in there that's a straight-up song that wasn't somehow altered by tape, pitch shifting, or whatever. I was fascinated by that record. It seemed like this scary enigma; a treasure that I couldn't totally understand. I started learning to play guitar in sixth grade, and then I started skateboarding and was exposed to so much more music through skate videos. That was perhaps the biggest influence for me, musically. I found so much through skate videos, from The Smiths to Dinosaur, Jr., American indie rock, and early Britpop. I wasn't playing guitar at that point, but I ingested so much music during that period that it significantly shaped my engineering and production aesthetic. You know how you can stop playing an instrument for a while, and when you come back to it, you're somehow mysteriously better at it than you were before? That's what it was like for me when I started recording. I had absorbed all this outside information and developed a background in music that made it easier for me to understand. I started playing guitar again in college in Western Maryland, learning the songs I liked, but I also began experimenting with tunings. At the beginning of my sophomore year, I took a recording class. The teacher had two nice TASCAM 4-tracks and some [Shure] SM58s, and he would let us borrow them whenever we wanted. I was probably the only one who would do so regularly. I was doing weird stuff – at one point I recorded a toilet flushing with a flanger on it, slowed it down, and put it in a track. This is back in the Olivia Tremor Control [Tape Op #17] days. [laughs]
Did you have any sense that you’d have a career as a recording engineer?
No, I had no idea what I was going to do. I was recording other people a little, but I didn't know anything about it as a field. I always considered myself more of a musician than an engineer, and I associated recording and writing with one another because I started doing both at about the same time. I never enjoyed writing songs that I couldn't simultaneously document. I still do that to this day. Every time I'm working with the modular [synth], I'm always recording. I get freaked out by the inability to go back to it as a reference, or miss something good. For whatever reason, I always felt that having a document of it as it was being created helped my brain to compartmentalize everything, if that makes sense. Later, I developed nuance and realized that everything can play into everything else. There's no binary for any of it.
I understand that meeting the Swirlies was a pivotal moment for you.
The Swirlies were easily one of my favorite bands. They had had this aesthetic that was kind of confusing and aggressive, but also really beautiful. I'd finished that record and had cassettes of it. I had transferred to a school in Boston, and I met Damon Tutunjian, the main Swirly, at one of their shows. I gave him a tape and said, "I'd love to record you sometime. I'll do it for free." He left me a message on my home answering machine, "Hey, I listened to the tape. It's pretty good! Sounds good, too. Let's work on some stuff." He and Rob Laakso ended up coming to my house with this ARP 2600, which looked like the craziest thing to me. That was super formative. It was the first "real" thing I ever did, and the first time I'd ever worked with people that I admired.
When did you move to Philly?
After school, and after about a year of working in an office. I hated it and would go home and record at night. Boston is an expensive city, and I wanted to go somewhere where I could work on music. My girlfriend at the time was accepted into Pennsylvania State University's MFA program, so Philly was a really appealing option. I knew some people from The Lilys there. Don Devore, whom I met during a visit, took me under his wing. At that time, building a recording studio and being one of the few people in that smaller scene of more experimental, indie bands was not that common. There weren't many of us at that point. Between that, Don, and the Swirlies, I got an automatic seal of approval. I started building a studio in a loft that I paid very little for, which was in a rugged area at the time, around Fifth Street and Girard Avenue. So much so that Andy Bernick, the Swirlies bassist, had the battery of his truck stolen while he was in the studio with me. Damon from the Swirlies had also moved to New York at the same time that I moved to Philly. When 9/11 happened, he needed to get out of New York and came to stay with me for a bit. We worked on some more music while he was here. I met their drummer, Adam Pierce, who ran this label called Bubble Core Records and is in the band Mice Parade. I randomly sent him a record from my old first band [Relay] and he liked it, so he put it out on Bubble Core [Still Point of Turning]. All of these things are directly related to each other, in an almost unbelievable way. My decision to swallow my nerves and talk to Damon led to all these opportunities.
Were you working another job while establishing your studio in Philly?
When I was still working my corporate job in Boston, they would occasionally give out surprise bonuses. I probably got a couple of thousand dollars or so; it was significantly more than I was supposed to get. I left it in the bank for around eight months, and then I used a fair amount of it to start building the studio. My rent was cheap, so I could survive without working a lot. I started working at a club, helping them build it out. It was this place, North by Northwest, out in Mount Airy. At one point, it was a jam band type of spot. John Legend played there before he was John Legend. It was a real trial by fire doing sound there, because people would be eating dinner while we were sound-checking. We'd have to check as little as possible. I would pray that things wouldn't feed back all the time. From there, I started working at Khyber Pass Pub and a couple of other places in Philly. I worked at DiPintos Guitars, a boutique-style shop where I learned how to work on guitars and other instruments. That was valuable. Then Johnny Brenda's was opening. I'm not entirely sure how I found out about it, but I'm certain I had friends who were involved at that point. This is a bit later; I was in a more comfortable place there at that point. When JB's opened, I started working there as a house sound guy. It was wonderful – that place is one of the best venues I've ever been in, and it's run so well. Everyone gave a shit and still does. Adam Pierce was helping run FatCat Records by then, so I started working for him, tour managing and doing sound for The Twilight Sad and Frightened Rabbit. I had become vaguely disillusioned as a musician and thought, "I want to travel. I want to tour, regardless of what I'm doing." So, I spent the next three years touring with those two bands and working in the studio when I had time back in Philly. It reached a point where I was getting burned out from touring all the time, and I was feeling frustrated because I had abandoned any creative outlet to do so. Projects started piling up in the studio, and I decided to take a step back from doing touring sound. Frightened Rabbit and Kurt Vile, with whom I was also working, reached a point where they needed people to stay with them for an entire album cycle, as opposed to just the U.S. run. I wasn't willing to do that. I did some one-off tours to South America and Europe; those were wonderful, but I missed being home too much.
Do you remember a moment where you thought, “Okay, I’m going to go all in on making the studio work”?
It was when I was with Kurt, and we'd talked about me joining them for the rest of their touring for Smoke Ring for My Halo. I was already working with Adam Granduciel on The War on Drugs material, as well as a bunch of other Philly people, so I told Kurt that I didn't want to do it. I had a girlfriend that I lived with at the time, so she'd be stuck without me there. It was a culmination of all that. I don't know if I can recall a specific point, but it was when I realized that, while it's definitely important to have a dependable front-of-house person, I was ready to stop. Even when you're with a band that is successful, it turns into a grind.
Over the past couple of years, you've shifted more towards mixing than tracking. What's been the impetus for that?
It gradually snowballed. I started mixing records for larger bands, and from that, people began associating me with mixing more. Then Covid hit, and that was the only outlet. Many people were recording on their own and either mixing themselves, or hiring someone like me to mix, or doing a combination of the two. I began thinking about what gear would be ideal for that situation. The whole rigmarole of whether I still need a console – especially with a board that's maybe 30 or 40 years old. Even if it's maintained, things aren't necessarily going to sound the same from day to day. I've transitioned from a console to a Burl B32 [Vancouver] mix bus summer into a Avedis Audio TransDrive transformer into a Kush Audio Clariphonic EQ and Chandler stereo Germanium compressor back into the box through a Burl B2 Bomber. This way I'm capable of doing some analog sweetening without the inevitable pitfalls of intricate recall from a console.
Now that you're doing more mixing, has it changed the way that you listen to or experience music?
Yeah, it has. I think about low end a lot, and I get jealous of records that have really good low end. [laughs] I've geared my ears towards not being afraid of bass, when appropriate. There's also a way to find the good in anything I'm hearing. It can be something I'm not personally into, but there's always some element in there that I can gravitate towards. Like, "That's cool how they put the delay on the cabasa." There's always something I can take from it.
What’s an example of a mixing experiment you’ve conducted with low end?
I've been trying different things out, like creating a crossover with the bass by duplicating it, cutting all the low end out of one track, and then cutting all the high end off the other – low pass, high pass – and then using distortion of both of them, plus adding an original dry track to give it a little more clean definition. The first time I did that I was shocked, because I didn't think it would make such a drastic difference. But it helped, so now I do it all the time. That was a lightbulb moment, for sure. EQ'ing is one thing, but being able to work on it this way makes the distortion react completely differently.
Has the shift to primarily mixing changed the way you approach making your own music?
I've been trying to focus more on bass in that regard, too, and understand how to achieve a low end that cuts through without overpowering a mix. Even when I'm working on modular music. Also, on songs that are a little bit more fast-paced, do I want a ton of low end going on? Or do I want the sensation of lightness? I find myself doing that, trying different voices for parts in the bass range, to see where it would sit best and not weigh everything down. That's why I like the [Fender] Bass VI so much; it sits in the perfect range. On a practical level, having a mixing setup that's always ready to go has allowed me to keep a synth setup always prepared to use. That's been hugely helpful in allowing me to sit down and work on things when I feel like it, without dealing with the process of finding six specific cables or wondering why a power supply isn't working. It's all there to dive into, right away, before my inspiration fades.
I imagine that focusing more on mixing and exploring modular synthesis probably goes hand in hand.
It’s made me think about distortion in a completely different way, like the distinction between saturating something to help it cut through, versus making something audibly aggressive. It's such a strange, fine line. I think a lot about spatialization and trying to hear in more minor degrees. Not needing something to be super wide and deep in order to create a nice amount of space, and getting away from the tendency in modular synthesis to make everything overly vast. I do try also to translate that to a mix of something that's not that type of material – it's an interesting challenge.
How has your concept of the mixing engineer changed as you've taken on the role more?
I used to feel less competent at mixing. Now, I can tackle a wide range of things that, at many points, I would have been unsure about. It's become a source of comfort. There's a process to it that's regimented in terms of routing, setting up certain buses, and so on. That became a nice, comforting thing to have. Over Covid, it was nice to know what I was getting into from day to day, at that point, because everything else seemed so chaotic. That carried over to now, where there are times I find myself mixing until 11 p.m. and then working on synth music until 2 a.m. It's always fun, and that's a new thing.
Have you successfully woven the modular into your mixing process?
I would like to do more than I have. I'll use it for some processing, but not a lot. For no real reason, it never jumps out to me as one of the first solutions for whatever I'm doing. Some people would probably want me to do that, and then other people would say, "What is that? What did you do?" [laughs] It's a flavor that doesn't necessarily work with everything. One thing I have done is take basslines that were somewhat undefined, convert them to MIDI, run them through an oscillator, and reprinted them alongside the original bass to give it more body.
Have you made any other gear discoveries while diving deeper into mixing?
The Hughes Sound Retrieval System [AK-100]. Howard Hughes owned this company, which is wild, and supposedly they were tasked with making better-sounding headphones for planes – the free or cheap headphones that they used to give you on a plane ride. They failed, but they started an offshoot where they were making these surround sound, spatial alteration boxes. They became popular in the hi-fi world. So, they created the Sound Retrieval System 3D audio, which essentially involves manipulating time and phase to create a strangely wide sound effect. [laughs] But, it's awesome! If there's anything you want to accentuate, it's great for that. I love running strings through it, especially cello or Mellotron, as well as synth pads – like the [Roland] JUNO sounds, especially.
Do you miss tracking at all, or is this exciting in a new way?
I was talking to another engineer about this recently, kind of lamenting not tracking as much but also remembering all the rote tracking – not everything needs to be overly creative. Moments where I'm thinking, "This is the sixth guitar amp I've mic'd in X number of days." Somebody else could do that, and I could pop in and have the objectivity to comp and review takes without having to sit through the entirety of the tracking. In some ways I don't miss that, but I do love recording drums, especially really good drummers. There's an adrenaline rush I get from working with a drummer where I think, "I can't believe I'm hearing this through the speakers right now." That level of skill is a real rush that I don't totally get when mixing. And also, I miss just working with other people. There's so much that relies on the context of the person doing it – the choice of microphones, and guiding takes, and such – there's so much to it that can be built up from the beginning that it's tough for me to see a world where I wouldn't want to do that at all. But on the other hand, I can do so much with the clean slate of a mix if people are interested in having me open it up in the way I would interpret it. There's something about the controlled environment of mixing and the schedule that appeals to me at this point in my life.
