Radiation City captured my attention back then. Telegraph Mastering's Adam Gonsalves said, “Check this out,” because he'd mastered your records.
Yeah, he did. He was one of the first people we met in Portland. I love his masters.
Where did you guys come from?
I grew up in Portland. Lizzy [Elisabeth Ellison] grew up in the Chicago area and moved out here for high school. We met when I was living in San Francisco after college. I was trying to play in bands and do music, and I was instantly captivated. We started dating, I moved back, and we started Radiation City.
She's got an amazing voice.
Oh, incredible. We started that band with Randy [Bemrose], and eventually brought in Patti [King] and Matt [Rafferty]. We liked the idea of these crunchy old recordings that we were listening to. We did all our own recording; that's where I caught the bug.
There's such a unique sound to that band. The vocals are midrange-y with this big reverb.
Right, totally.
Even at a show, it would sound like that, which was probably hard on the sound person!
I think there were a lot of bummed out sound people. We'd ask, “Can you high-pass it at 500 Hz and low-pass it at 5 kHz,” and they'd ask, “Why?”
Putting it right in the feedback zone.
Yeah, exactly. But we were pretty stubborn about what we wanted, and about specific types of reverbs. I guess what we were going for at the time was kind of a spring reverb sound. Real midrange-y, again, a real feedback zone.
I remember going to see you play and thinking, “How’d they pull that off?”
And with four vocal mics on stage! Hopefully there were moments when the sound people ignored us and made it a little more hi-fi.
Was that a production idea of yours from the beginning, or was that something that Lizzy came up with?
I think it was kind of combined. We fetishized these ‘60s records that were pretty lo-fi. It was also in an era, the early 2010s, when there was a lot of lo-fi music and people were into that.
But there was contrast. There were instruments that had lows, and there were bright keyboards and guitars.
Yeah. We would put [Roland TR-]808 drum samples in there, and we liked that contrast of this weird hi-fi sound against the lo-fi vocal. We were definitely trying to stretch the boundaries of the things that we loved; we wanted to add to them and not just recreate them. There are a lot of bands that are like, “We're going to recreate ‘60's psychedelic” or whatever. But we loved Pink Floyd, bossa nova, The Beatles, soul, and Motown, and we tried to incorporate that into a sound that felt cohesive. I can speak for myself at the time – I was indulgent about being unpredictable at every move and, in hindsight, I could’ve maybe toned that down a little bit.
With the music?
With the compositions. I think we all were like that. “How do we be unpredictable at every turn?” Sometimes the song just wants to flow. I think it elicited a lot of cool results, and things that I would still probably do now. But, at the same time, there are moments where now I think, “Why didn't we just go to the chorus?”
You were recording on your own. Were you using Pro Tools?
We had [Apple] Logic, a MOTU eight channel recording interface, and a bunch of shitty mics.
You were tracking the drums too?
Yeah. I think we had one SE [Electronics] tube mic, an Oktava condenser, a bunch of [Shure SM]57s, and an [AKG] D112. We had cool room sounds. We recorded the first album [The Hands That Take You] in a cabin up in Trout Lake, Washington, and the room sounded great. We put the mics in the room, and we said, “That sounds cool.”
Yeah, as long as you find the right thing to commit.
Totally. It was fun, because we'd be in this cabin recording and there'd be somebody making food in the background. You can hear, “Clink, clink.” A lot of people in projects I work on are worried about taking out all of the background talking, but I think that's the vibe. That's being in the room with people.
There are three Radiation City studio albums. Were all those done in that same way?
Our second album, Animals In the Median, we tracked ourselves and then Sonny DiPerri mixed that at Jackpot! [Recording Studio]. We did the last one [Synesthetica] at Tiny Telephone. That was a great experience, working with [producer] John Vanderslice [Tape Op #10]. He's a mad scientist. I love that dude. But that was tricky because I think we worked on it too fast. We ended up reworking some of it afterwards, because it was the all-analog process. Either you keep those mixes, or you don't.
You were tracking to tape and mixing it down old school?
No computers involved, which was the JV way. That was a cool learning experience. Then we worked with Jeremy Sherrer over at Ice Cream Party [Studio], reworking some parts, doing some production touches, and remixing everything.
Yeah, he’s fantastic.
A super talented dude.
Before your second record, I remember bumping into you and you said, “I emailed you about mixing and you didn't get back to me.” I scoured my computer. I never found that email.
I wonder if it never went through, or I didn't hit send or something.
I was so bummed!
But we did mix the live recording together [Live From the Banana Stand]. That was fun. Looking back on that, I was probably doing the same thing to you that I did to all those live sound engineers. “I’ve got to filter the vocals.”
I remember that. But I already knew that was going to happen! [laughter]
You had already prepped for it.
I said, “Do you want this to sound like your records, or do you want this to sound like a straight, live recording?” It would’ve been an interesting contrast.
Yeah, totally.
I learned to stop fighting with the artists a long time ago! [laughter]
I could talk for a while about that! The last thing we did was an EP [Coda], and we did that with Sonny DiPerri. He produced and tracked it from the ground up. We did that at a beach house and that Trout Lake house.
Did you learn a lot from Sonny?
I was super thirsty about learning everything I could from everybody. [Portland producer/engineer/mixer] David Pollock did a test mix for us, and I was taking detailed notes on all the signal chains. I was also doing that with Sonny. It's funny, because at the beginning of the process of starting to make my own music and learning recording software, I told myself, “I'm never going to be an engineer. I'm going to be a songwriter.” Then I couldn't help it, at a certain point.
You all started Radiation City with that sonic idea at the beginning?
Absolutely. We would write songs by recording them. “Oh, let's put this idea in there,” and then, “What's the next thing?” We'd record it, we’d move stuff around and chop it up. That contributed to the sound, because we would record a whole arrangement, chop it, and stutter it.
You ended up setting up mics, despite yourself.
Exactly. At that point, I had already caught the bug. Listening back to those early Radiation City mixes, I hear where I would do things differently now.
Well, we all do that!
That's part of the process. We were on tour, and I remember sitting in L.A. with Randy saying, “I think I'm going to get good at mixing.” I wasn't sure if I could ever be a pro mixer at any point, but I had that determination. I practiced and practiced and failed a bunch. I’d be thinking my mix was great at night, then listening back in the morning I’d be thinking, “This is total dog shit.” But the process starts to hone in until less of those mistakes get made.
I told someone once that I have a mental list when mixing, and he said, “Write it down for me.” I don't think I can!
“But it's mental.” [laughs] When people ask me, “How do you mix a kick drum” or whatever, I'm always telling them, “Well, it depends.” It depends on so many different things.
“It depends” is the true audio answer.
Exactly. It's funny when I see these videos on YouTube where they're saying, “Here's how you mix your kick drum to make it fat,” and it's some dude bro, “Hey! What's up, followers?”
I've been writing a lot about pushing back on that that type of “teaching.” That's certainly not where art comes from.
Totally. From my own experience, everything I know has been a collection of a lot of tinkering and learning by doing. I’ll think there's a rule, I try it, it doesn't work in a certain scenario, so then I’ll learn a new technique. But if you're always doing the same things over and over, how do you learn? How do you get better? One thing I love is when artists will challenge my preconception of how something should sound. They'll ask, “What if we try this?” I'll be thinking, “That's not going to work,” but I'll never say, “No, we're not going to try it.”
Being an artist initially makes you have empathy. You can easily put yourself in their shoes.
And that, honestly, is exactly how I formed that kind of empathy. I had worked with a few producers and engineers, when we were in Radiation City, who were like, “No. That's not how you make a record.” I was like, “What?”
This is a backhanded version of it, but I’ve told people, “How you're working is not how the records you like were made.” I want them to understand that there was a process that mattered.
Which is good perspective. And then, “If you still want to proceed…”
“…it’s fine. But you're not going to get those results.”
It’s funny. I worked with a guy who had a rock album he wanted to be gritty, and he said, “I don't want it to ever touch a computer, all the way to the vinyl pressing.” I said, “Well, with the gear that we have it's going to be harder to get the sound that I think that you want. But let's do it.” We did it, and at the end he said, “This is really clean sounding.” I don't like, “I told you so,” but... I'll definitely push back with people. There's a way to make it everybody's idea. “What if we try this? I think this could be really cool.” Get everybody excited about it. Then it's a result that neither of us would have gotten on our own.
Right. It’s the push and pull of collaboration.
And the spontaneity of the studio. Plug it in and see if it works. You'll get a result that you never would have gotten with your preconceptions.
One thing I love about the studio is the collaboration.
Exactly. With a lot of records, they'll bring the demos and say, “I know it sounds shitty.” I'm thinking, “If it sounded good, then what are we even doing?” The less that they have figured out, I'll say, “Don't worry about fleshing out every idea, because we'll come up with cool things.” Especially if there's a little bit of urgency with budget. You want to be less stressed, obviously. But sometimes if you have less time, the limitation breeds creativity.
If you're doing Blackwater Holylight or The Shivas, it's a band recording. You're starting with that.
Yeah, it makes things a little faster. The Shivas, because they are so high energy and such a great live show, it feels like a very simple arrangement. But when we get in the studio, they have very specific ideas about arrangements, and the recordings are actually really layered. We’ll be re-amping vocals, putting stuff through a Leslie [rotary speaker], and doing these creative moves. You might say, “I thought they were a garage rock band.” They're very intelligent and intentional about their recording process, which is cool.
That gives you a lot to work with too.
The last one we did, we did a fair amount of pre-production – like me sitting in on rehearsals and trying different compositional moves. “That bridge sounds like the chorus. Let's move that and repeat it a few times.” That's what I did with Spoon Benders’ [How Things Repeat] too. I sat in on rehearsals and we talked through the parts. I said, “I'm going to give you these suggestions. You can take them to rehearsal and do the things that you like, and don't do the things you don't.” It's low pressure.
I've had a lot of sessions lately, like The Prids, where we haven't done that. But they come in and the songs are so damn tight, I'm thinking, “What would I have changed?”
I know. Sometimes I’ll think, “Do you even need me?” [laughter] My overarching principle is to do what's best for the band and what's best for the record. If I don't have to do arrangements, then I can focus my energy on getting into some of the other details. There's always something to do.
Focus on pure sonics, or how to arrange overdubs.
Yeah, exactly.
Do you find yourself playing a lot of instruments on your productions?
I definitely like doing it. It can be trickier to hit record and then run in there. It's fun, but I don't really have an ego about it. I want the best-sounding result. Sometimes that's me playing bass. Sometimes it's me playing keys. Or maybe it's faster that way.
Like, “I’ve got this idea. Use it or not.”
Exactly. Often, people are stoked about it. I'm lucky, because I work with a lot of mature artists who aren't saying, “I need to do everything on the record.”
I don't know why that's sometimes a thing. Is it something they have to put in their press release?
I guess so. I worked on a record for Adria Ivanitsky recently, which is an amazing album. She'd never made a solo record before. I played some of the parts, but I said, “I want you to play most of it, because you're capable. It's going to give you a sense of empowerment. Maybe you're nervous about doing the record and now you can feel like, ‘I did that.’” But, more often than not, it comes from a place of ego. It's like, “I need to do everything because I'm really cool.” There are so many different permutations of how you can assemble a group or an arrangement, like whether it's having session musicians or not having them at all. Where do you start? Often, I will put in a shitty drum machine loop and say, “Let's get the composition down.” We’ll get a scratch vocal in as quick as we can, so we know what we need to work around. Sometimes we’re doing drums at the end.
I could hear that on some of your productions. “Let's build this in the studio and make something cool.”
All those “record the band live” rules went out the window when The Beatles made records.
I think people search for an honesty or authenticity from the recording process that's never been there.
Right. They're still obsessed with that concept. Or, “We can't play this live, so why would we record it?” I'm always saying, “Just make the best record.” What band have you ever seen play live that does it exactly like the record? I don't think I've ever seen that.
Post-Radiation City, you were like, “I'm going to teach myself to mix.” What was the process?
I was honing my Logic chops, at that point. But, even still, I hardly ever use hardware for mixing – even on the two bus – because of recalls and flexibility. There are always revision notes. I'll print outboard effects all the time, but it's printed right in and it's in there forever.
What jobs were you initially getting?
Blackwater Holylight was one of the first ones, which was a great stroke of luck.
Were you friends with them?
Yeah, because Sunny [Faris] was in Grandparents, and she was friends with this band, Moon By You, that I'd recorded, and she said, “I love the recording. Let's do a little EP.” It was the first solo thing she had worked on. She got in there and she was pretty nervous, but then she was instantly in command of the space. I was thinking, “Well, this is something special.” Everybody who heard it was like, “Uh-oh. This is about to go off.”
That's been cool to see Blackwater Holylight get bigger. They’re in L.A. now.
And now they're working with Sonny DiPerri [#129]. Small world.
What other projects were happening then?
The Shivas were early on. I did a few local bands here and there. That was in a basement in a house that I was living at, and I had a bunch of roommates who were also musicians, so they were cool with it. We called it Gold Brick Studios. I had sessions in there all the time. We made the Aan record [Losing My Shadow] in there, we did The Shivas' [Dark Thoughts] mostly there, a record [Songs of The Saxophones] with a band called The Saxophones, and a bunch of other stuff.
How much space did you have?
Not much. We had this room that was really cool. It had a table, weirdly enough, and it was in the basement too. There was a little hole in the wall that we could run lines through and put an amp in there, but the control room and the live room – everything was all one room. It's felt very luxurious getting into this situation, where the control room is not in the room with the drums.
What changed there?
I had moved out of that house. There were people still living there, but it was less and less musicians. I was like, “Okay, I see where this is going.” And we did a whole buildout down there too. We put insulation in the ceilings, and we made a mix cloud, bass traps, and everything. It sounded pretty good down there, for what it was. The records got done.
That’s all that matters.
I listen back to them, and I'm still really proud. Some, I’ll think, “I sucked at mixing,” but that was the only issue. It wasn't how the room sounded.
How did you end up connecting with Clayton [Knapp] and Trash Treasury?
I had known Clayton for a long time, and we had always geeked out on recording. I hit him up, because I saw the writing on the wall at that house. I thought, “I’ve got to get out of here before they kick me out, because they're sick of having bands every day.”
It's hard on the roommates. I went through that way back.
Yeah, totally. And the studio was right below a bedroom, so I understood. I hit up Clayton because I had done a couple of records in here. Lizzy and I had done some demos for Radiation City for Synesthetica here, and we loved it. I said, “If I bring my projects in here, maybe we could work out a deal where my band can rehearse and I can get some recording time here and there.” He was super amenable to it. We've been friends for years. It was an easy transition, and I was able to bring my gear. But compared to Trash Treasury, my rig before was super modest. It was a [Universal Audio] Apollo, two outboard preamps, and one compressor. Maybe ten mics.
Clayton had been building up a lot of cool gear, it seems.
Totally, and he continues to. I'll come in here and there's a new piece of rack gear. The [Oberheim] OB-X [synthesizer] showed up one day. It was sitting on the couch, and I was like, “Oh! For meee?” [laughter]
There is an extensive amount of keyboards in this studio.
We prioritize keyboard space in here.
Are some of them yours, or mostly Clayton’s?
The [Roland] JUNO-106 and Roland SH-2 are mine.
There are all these pianos, vibraphones, and electric pianos.
Yeah, everything from the most acoustic version of a keyboard to the most synthetic. That's the nice thing about the whole 10,000 hours idea: At a certain point, certain ideas become second nature. I don't have to work through too many sounds because I’ll think, “I know it's going to be one of these three,” rather than searching through every keyboard every time.
What work have you been doing lately?
A lot of solo artists, actually. It's fun because we get to build from scratch and I get to have a little bit of creative latitude. But there are some bands. There's a band in today who we're going to do the drums for the songs. We started that one with a drum machine, and he had all the guitar parts written and some ideas for melodies. We worked on melodies together, figured out the compositions, and the drummer's going to come in and drum over that. There's even bass laid down already.
Do you have any cool projects coming up?
I've been working with John [McCrea] from Cake on a new Cake record.
I forgot he moved up here from California. They opened for my band, Vomit Launch, in 1992, years before they even had an album out.
They haven't put out a record in 14 years. He's been doing the family thing. It's great hearing his demos. That's exactly the same voice I remember on all those records. It's so awesome.
His recorded persona is such a character.
Yeah, exactly. I think their sound is singular, in a way. I genuinely loved those records when I was a kid, and it still holds up for me. The new record is really cool. I love the songs, and that's an interesting recording process. John's doing most of the recording, and he's having me do some edits and time stretching, getting stuff on the grid. We're working through ideas and arrangements together. It's just on his laptop in his living room. He's got one BAE two channel preamp. His guitar player will fly in parts, drum stems come from people, and he'll record vocals at a proper studio. It feels liberating to me; you can make a record anywhere.
When I started Tape Op, people would get mad at me and tell me I was telling people they didn't need to go to a studio. That was not my intention.
In terms of my education and process, in some ways it's harder if you have infinite plug-ins and soft synths. That's what I like about studios: When I see something in front of me, I'm thinking, “There's a limitation to the possibilities of that specific thing.” When there are endless plug-ins, drum machines, samples, and soft synths on your computer, how do you make creative decisions?
I was mixing a song recently, and I wanted to make the drums punch harder. There were all these plug-ins that I'd been given to check out, like Drum Attack Monster or something.
That sounds awesome! [laughter]
I’d put them on the drum bus, and every time I'd A/B I'd go, “Nope, drums sound worse.”
Maybe it's a trend right now, but I've talked to a lot of engineers recently who use no compression. I don't do that, but I like this idea that you don't have to do a bunch of shit to make the mix sound good. Have some fundamental process, and you can do a lot with just balance and some simple EQ. When I'm doing drum tracking, I'll never put compression on any of the close mics. You're squashing the dynamics, and if you want to gate it later then you're fucked.
If you compress the tom tracks and then try to clean them up, you're screwed.
You can't even [visually] tell where they are!
And the snare keeps rising up between tom hits.
Yeah, exactly. The more I do this, the more I realize that can be my philosophy for mixing: A really light touch. And mixing within the mix, not soloing the drums to make them sound good. Which I will do, at some point. But I’ll pull the whole song up, get it balanced, and ask, “What does it need?” I don't feel like I have to process everything individually for it to be a good mix.
With your projects, how do you charge or figure out how much time you might need?
It's tricky, because I try not to set false expectations for people. I never do flat rate projects because I feel I could get totally boned by that. But I say, “We're going to work as fast as we can.” I think people are generally happy with the workflow, not feeling like we're wasting too much time, and are happy with the results. It always feels like it’s worth it, even though recording is so expensive. Even with very fair rates, which I think these are, it's about balancing expectations and getting people excited about their art. Making them feel like they're getting the most out of it. Part of that is the studio environment, the social component of it, and making people feel excited. If you're digging for patches all day long, or dialing in a compressor for an hour, that can be a bummer for the social environment in the studio. I try to work pretty fast and loose and keep things exciting so there's always something cool happening.
