Swing open the door to the little wooden shed behind Brian Beattie's house in south Austin and wonder how it all hangs together. The walls are stacked floor-to-ceiling with what looks like a yard sale wanting to happen: There are piles of ancient audio gear and instruments, a bag of "Texas-size" popcorn, a first-place trophy from a karate meet, a bass drum dangling from a coat hanger, and a smooth-hulled contraption that's either a giant kalimba or a rowboat. There's a bare 60-watt bulb in the ceiling and cables snaking through yawning fissures in the cement floor, and — except for two stuffed chairs on the verge of collapse — there's nowhere to sit, and hardly room to stand.

Yet it's here, in this unlikely space, that Brian has crafted beautifully idiosyncratic albums that sound as rich and expansive as the studio is cluttered and cramped. And to watch him at work in this little world, which he calls the Wonder Chamber, is to watch the room suddenly come to life. Hunched over a ten-channel mixer, flanked by glowing '50s-era Ampex preamps, tube Echoplex balanced between his feet, Brian looks like Han Solo in the Millennium Falcon: You get the feeling that only he could fly this thing.

He's calm and assured amid the chaos, coaxing warm, colorful performances out of often-temperamental equipment (and musicians), carefully assembling elaborate arrangements that never quite seem under control. Whether he's recording the world's sludgiest electric guitar or finessing the details of a delicate string part, Brian always seems to know where to put the microphones, how to keep the musicians in a good mood, and why the glaring mistake you just made is the best thing about the whole song.

The first Brian-recorded album I heard was Kathy McCarty's Dead Dog's Eyeball: Songs of Daniel Johnston, a producer's tour de force in which every song sounds as if it's just beamed in from its own oddball planet. By then, Brian was already an experienced producer and engineer, having cut his teeth in the '80s recording his and Kathy's band Glass Eye, fellow art-punks Ed Hall and the inimitable Dead Milkmen (the album title Beelzebubba was his idea). More recently Brian has devoted a great deal of time to recording the legendary Daniel Johnston, whose whimsical, organic Rejected Unknown bears Brian's stamp in every moment, as does its stunning and soon- to-be-released sequel Lost and Found, on which Brian plays almost every instrument. Brian has also worked with the Asylum Street Spankers, Amy Annelle / The Places, and my bands Shearwater and Okkervil River, among others. We spent three months with Brian making the Okkervil record, Black Sheep Boy, and had just finished the final mastering fixes when I came by to pick through the wreckage and peer into the future.

This was the first multitrack record you've done in a while.

Yeah, I've gotten really into recording live to 2-track. I call it the "Tube-o-Sonic Insta-Mirror Process", since "live to 2-track" sounds boring. I take my quarter-inch mix deck, which is a beautiful old Ampex 351, and record straight to that, with everyone playing at once.

Tell me more about the 351. What was it used for, originally?

The 351 was kind of the standard professional tape deck in the late fifties, early sixties. It's just a regular tube machine that runs at fifteen ips. There were other brands, but this one was the average — the Ford of tape machines. When I bought mine I just wanted an analog mix deck, since I do all my multitracking on digital — I'd been using the original ADATs, and now I've upgraded to the HD24 — and I was just looking for something colorful to make up for the fact that my tracking medium was so plain and bland. And the 351, it's alive. Every time you listen to it, it sounds slightly different, and it gives you these beautiful degrees of saturation and distortion. By taking the same exact mix and printing it slightly louder, you can give it a whole different character.

So then you decided to bypass the digital gear completely?

Well, I wanted to try to make an entirely analog recording, but I couldn't do a multitrack recording because I didn't have the equipment. So I started thinking about my favorite recordings from the era when people couldn't multitrack. I had always been fascinated with the processes used in the mid- and late-fifties especially, like at Bradley's in Nashville — Patsy Cline — or the classic jazz recordings where you could hear the sound of the room, and that kind of electrical energy that people have when they're actually standing around playing and listening together. The thing about live to 2-track that's most special to me is that my job, when I'm mixing something like that, takes place in the exact same period of time in which the musicians are playing. So it freezes that moment as an absolutely coherent piece.

I was surprised, when I first saw you do it, that it's not like you just set everything up, press record and wait for the song to end. You're riding faders, you're adjusting effects...

It's exactly like mixing multitrack, except that whereas with multitrack you can second-guess yourself, in live to 2-track you just have to just do it, you have to just trust your ears in that moment. You do a certain amount of setting up, creating this sonic environment that you're going to be putting onto tape, and then you take things again and again. It's the way they used to do it in the olden days.

It must have taken a ton of preproduction, especially with the setups where there'd be a live combo, an orchestra, and a vocalist.

It was very complicated. They were using fewer microphones and fewer preamps, but the preparation all went into the arrangement, and the placement of the few microphones, and of course, having the musicians that were best suited for the job. I think that the reason I'm charmed by the fifties, especially, is that it was an era when musicianship and hi-fi tube technology were coming together very nicely. Multitracking wasn't standard yet, and musicians were still depending on listening to each other.

Like in those beautiful early George Jones records you played me.

Exactly. You can tell those are live vocals, you can hear that things aren't absolutely controlled, and you get a palpable sense of the depth of the music. When I'm recording to 2-track, I'm trying to transport everyone back to that era.

That's one of the things that I really like about your recordings. Even when you're multitracking, your records don't sound at all modern to me — in fact, they sound like a blast from the past, or some weird alternate past that never was.

My obsession with tape delays is probably a big part of that. Like the Echoplex — it warbles, and it distorts, and you have to be really careful with it because if you gain it up too much it'll do terrible things to the sibilance in a vocal. But I adore it, because working in digital, tape delays are a great way to put that gooey kind of analog life back in. You don't have to use a slap-back, Elvis kind of sound. In fact, I've hardly used any digital effects for years now — every effect I use I just hand-create with tape delays and spring reverbs. Just by adjusting how close or far away you put the echo or how much it's regenerating, or what the tone of the echo is, or how much you're saturating it or not, there are so many flavors... it's just endless. A trick I use a lot is to take an element and run it through the Echoplex, then print it directly back onto the HD24, and replace the original track with this analog, distorted sound.

So you're not even using it as a delay?

Yeah, I'm just using it for the character. But when I'm tracking to the digital system, I try to track with a little extra goo in there anyway. I've got a bunch of old tube preamps, which distort very smoothly and gradually, and there are levels of saturation that, to the average listener, don't sound like distortion necessarily. They just give a kind of a warmth to vocals, so that even when someone's singing quieter, somehow the bass of it comes forward in a way that's very intimate, that same kind of strange hyperintimacy you might have heard in recordings of Bobby Vinton or Johnny Mathis, things like that.

Do you think the preamp matters more than the microphone?

They're all part of the same instrument, in the same way that an electric guitar and an amplifier are part of the same instrument. One microphone might sound terrible with an exquisite preamp, but through a cheaper one it sounds perfect.

What's the mostly unlikely chain you've found that really works?

Well, as far as unlikely goes you're usually talking about really cheap, stupid microphones. I can pretty much say that the most unlikely sound I've ever gotten is through a tiny Silvertone microphone, which is one of my very favorites. I've used it on vocals, on drums, even on the upright bass.

What preamp did you use?

I've had really good luck with cheap microphones and my Drawmer 1960 compressor. It's a hybrid of IC- based preamps and some tube gain stages, and I love it. It's just so easy to use, and so flexible — you can utterly squash things to hell, you can completely distort stuff, but you can also get a really nice, pristine sound. It was the center of my whole system when I first started recording. And it's the very best for all those weird, old microphones that apparently have no fidelity, like the Shure 55, which is the Elvis mic, or that Buck Rogers-looking EV 664.

Why use those mics?

Well, if you've tried to make your acoustic guitar or electric guitar or drums have the same sonic qualities that you hear in the room by using proper-sounding microphones, what you have is a nice, semi-realistic representation of the sound that just gets denser as you pile more and more things on there. So if you use something that actually gives you a less realistic presentation of the sound for the vocal, it can just cut through better. Now, I'm not talking about the really tiny, distorted, tinny-sounding voices...

"I'm singing to you from 1925!"

Yeah. Although I love that kind of stuff, too, but the Silvertone, when it's gained up properly, there is a realism to the sound that is bizarre, it freaks me out how right it sounds, because if you just listen to it all by itself you think, "Oh my God, that's so weird sounding." Quite often, people will just put up what they think is their best microphone for a vocal, and then they'll just EQ the shit out of it to try to make it have that sort of narrow sound, and this is just a different approach that's, uh, less expensive. It's more fun because you can have more of the things for less money, and you don't have to fetishize something that costs a ton. There are so many cheap pieces of junk that are truly musical and alive.

Like your Maze.

Oh, the Maze! The Maze, it's a black spring reverb unit with one knob, and it's just the darkest, creepiest- sounding reverb I've ever heard in my life. They were going to throw it in the garbage at the local community radio station.

In general, you don't tend to have the stuff that's the most expensive or famous, you have things that kind of fell by the wayside.

Yeah, like my Shure and Oktava ribbon mics. I guess the exceptions are the 1176s, which aren't the most expensive thing at all, actually they're kind of common, but they're sort of up to a certain standard that everyone thinks is good. I have two of those, and I have this Studer 169.

But still, it's a ten-channel board. It's not a giant console.

It's more like the kind of thing you'd use for broadcast or for recording an orchestra, where you'd be going directly onto two tracks — it doesn't come with individual channel outputs. But I had my tech, Andy Barrett, build me a box, which tapped each of the channels so I could use them as individual preamps. Half of the microphone preamps I needed to track the basics for the Okkervil record I got off the Studer. And then, when it came time to mix, I kept most of the crucial stuff — drums, acoustic guitar, and the vocals, and the electric piano — in the Studer, and then I had my Mackie 1604 working as a sidecar. I took the output from the Mackie and I put it into the two line input channels on the Studer, so I used the Studer as my master stereo mix.

You've made some great-sounding records on just the Mackie, though.

It's a perfectly good-sounding board. I made Dead Dog's Eyeball on that one.It's the one I bring when I go to Daniel [Johnston]'s house. You just can't push the output too high — that's what keeps the full dynamic range in there. Whereas with the Studer you can do things where you're pinging the needles against the top the whole time, and then you're getting the subtle harmonic distortion that's, to a different degree, the same type of thing you'd have with the tube gear. I haven't used the preamps on the Mackie much — I've always used it just as a monitor and mixer.

There's a superstition about giant boards, isn't there? It's like a studio's only considered a real outfit if it's got a huge console.

Well, I feel very lucky that I got to do all my first recordings in actual studios with real engineers, with real fancy boards — APIs, Neves. Because what I found was that the boards themselves weren't necessarily well-maintained, and that the studio rooms all sounded stupid, you know, they were all dead, '70s-sounding rooms. I just got terribly bored with the expense and also the lack of good results I was getting out of studios like that.

I'd like to shift gears here and talk about your philosophy of production.

I enjoy just being able to sit back and record, but I've found quite often, and specifically with rock bands, that they haven't learned to just listen to each other, and understand how what they're doing is affecting what everyone else is doing. So working with arrangements is usually pretty simple. It's like, someone has a bass part, and it's really cool. This other person has a guitar part, and it sounds really cool. And you put both of them together and it's worse than either one of them by itself. So what you do is you say, "Let's have a part where it's just the bass part playing, and we can do just the guitar part later on." People get attached to their own parts, which is natural, but they don't necessarily have a sense that they're working together to make a whole. I think the most important part of production is the arrangement of the song. It's fun for me to go to rehearsals, because I can hear what parts I think are made worse by a band, and what parts are made better, and I can try to emphasize the things my ears 'hook' toward. And just by going "a little less here," or ,"Let's work on this transition" — it's always the

How do you go about training yourself as an arranger? It's not like there's a manual for arranging rock bands.

I think the best way to start that is to go listen to records that you really like. Go back, and listen to them, and analyze what people were actually doing. I had an experience when I was twenty, twenty-one years old, where I found that I just didn't like a lot of stuff that people said was cool. I didn't care about the Minutemen, I didn't like Hüsker Dü — I was bored with that stuff. So there was about a year where I stopped playing and listening to music. I thought that in order to be a real musician I needed to be part of some social movement of what was cool. But I hated what was cool. But I still wanted to play music! So I had to get all the static out of my mind about what music was supposed to be. And when I finally decided I wanted to start playing again, I started thinking, 'What do I like? What music do I like that I've never really listened to seriously?' And I thought, 'Well, I liked that AC/DC stuff I heard about a year ago, that was pretty cool.' So I went and I bought Back in Black.

Were there other bands that you rediscovered?

I also found that I really liked War. I bought a War greatest hits tape, and I started listening to "[The] Cisco Kid", and "Me and Baby Brother", and "Low Rider". I started listening to each instrument, and there are things going on in there that, seemingly, have no relationship to what I remembered about the songs. But they were all little teeny parts of this wholeness that just made it sound so cool.

The appeal of the song came from the arrangement.

Yeah, exactly. I realized that with some care taken with how all the pieces were put together, you could make something that was far larger, and by not having so much going on you were able to express more ideas more clearly. But I also think a little anarchy is important. It's the combination of a band naturally having control, and listening to what they're doing, and also that last five or ten percent you can't possibly control. The problem these days is that with a Pro Tools-type recording, you're tempted to exercise absolute control over everything. But music is like nature, and it's like, if an inexperienced god had used Pro Tools to create the world, all the rocks would be circular, or square, or whatever. Once you have a good arrangement, what brings it to life is allowing these elements, which you can't control, to come out. That's something that, in a lot of ways, working with Daniel Johnston taught me.

Let's talk about your work with Daniel, because that's the project you've spent the most time on, and also because it's just such an unusual situation. He's a great talent, but you have to do things in an unorthodox way to work well with him.

Well, I met Daniel in '85 or so when I was playing in Glass Eye. Our first record had come out and he used to come to our shows — we would record together occasionally on my little Fostex 4-track. And then fast-forward to what was it, '95, when he was in the tail end of his deal with Atlantic. He'd just done the record Fun with Paul Leary, from the Butthole Surfers. At the same time, the record that I made with Kathy McCarty, Dead Dog's Eyeball, which was a record of covers of Daniel's songs, came out, and, fortunately for us, it was piggy-back reviewed with Fun everywhere. Unfortunately for Daniel, he made Fun at a difficult time when he'd been hospitalized again and again, and was just getting socialized back into the world. But for our record we were able to mine his whole career of songwriting, and we were presumptuous enough to believe that we could record the arrangements that we thought Daniel was hearing in his mind, while he was banging the songs out in his garage as a teenager. Daniel heard it, and he asked me to come record with him. So Daniel's A&R guy called, and he wanted me to record a song called "Impossible Love", which I'd never heard, for the Power Rangers movie. So, I go down to record Daniel, and I have musicians with me and everything, and he's digging through his notebooks, and he says, "I can't find the song. I can't find the song 'Impossible Love'. But I wrote a new song called 'Impossible Love'!" And I thought, 'Well, I can't force Daniel to find this other song, and we're all here, so, let's just, uh, go ahead and record it.' So we put the drums in one room and Daniel in another. But on the first take the drums were still just crashing into the vocal mic, it was just utterly wrong. So I said, "Daniel, we just need you to sing it one more time." This was my moment of learning. Daniel looked at me like I was insane. Like, "What do you mean one more? I already did it once!" It took about half an hour of begging and pleading, and he finally went and just sang it again, which, thank god he did, but that was the moment I realized that in the future, with Daniel, I had to set it up right the very first thing, because that was going to be it.

You go to record him fairly often these days. Do you have a routine that you always follow?

Daniel calls me up four or five times a week, and we talk about his fantasy world of the records he's making, and then we set up a day for me to go out there. I bring a small amount of equipment out to his garage in Waller, and he sings anywhere from three to five songs. Then we go and get some cheddar peppers, a burger and a Slushee at the Sonic, and we go back and listen to what we did. Then we pack up and I go home. There's stuff we've been doing lately, he'll play the basic track on piano and sing it, and then he'll play the drums over the tracks that he sang.

He plays the drums?

Yeah, I've been bringing a drum set lately. The approach I'm trying to use now is very primitive, because my impression of what everyone wants out of Daniel, and really what I like out of Daniel, is a very plain performance of just the tune. One of the problems, I think, of the perception of Daniel that the world has, is that everyone wants to see him as a folk artist. But Daniel sees himself as a pop star. He's thinking, you know, if it was like Queen, or if it was like the Carpenters, or if it was like Metallica...

I've had the sense that people think that Daniel really just wants it to be simple, but that these evil producers keep showing up and piling all this goop on there.

Daniel insists [on the goop]. And ninety-five percent of the time he's absolutely right. A good example is the song "Funeral Girl", from Rejected Unknown. He plays a very simple piano thing in the beginning — and there's a cricket in his garage the whole time, chirping away, which was a complete blessing — and then at the end he starts spontaneously doing this rocking part, which is the whole trick of the song that makes it so amazing. So I mixed the song, and I added some drums and organ, and he said to me, "That's really good, but it needs some saxophones, like 'Savoy Truffle'." I thought, "Oh my god, he's so completely right!" So I had to dig up a saxophone player and do this crazy part for it, and it just put it over the top in a perfect way.

See, this is why I think you work so well together. You're able to give him what he wants, which is a complex arrangement, but you do it with all this humor and instability that's in the same spirit as his performance.

Well, Daniel is an unusual guy, and I think anytime anyone tries to accompany him in a very 'proper' way, it sounds like Daniel karaoke. I've found that there's sort of a loose and brutal and, uh, out-of-tune sometimes, rough-edges kind of sound that works much better, so that his voice and his performance is in context with the music.

Do you always follow his vocals, or do you ever assemble a backing track before you record him?

I'll only do that if I feel like I haven't gotten a good enough basic version after several attempts.

How does he respond to that?

Oh, he loves it. He knows it's his song, and he has exactly the right reaction, you know, he's like, "Oh, it's my thing! So much care and love has been given to my thing!" and then he really wants to do something with it. Daniel and I have a mutual delusional fantasy that we're doing something important. He talks about the record's place in rock 'n' roll history, and I trick myself into this idea that I'm making a record that's going to completely change musical history. With Daniel, I'm trying to capture the feeling of this guy who actually gets to be a complete legend and star, like when he goes to Europe and plays for thousands of people, but he still gets to be a complete loser, too, going down to the convenience store and buying bags of candy in Waller. You know, he gets both things. Everything he always wanted.

Speaking of getting everything you always wanted, let's talk a little about the future of the Wonder Chamber. It sounds like there are some big changes in store.

I love my little room here but I've always wanted a place that would be a little easier to work in. I mean, even if I pack everything up, the moment I start to work, everything vomits out from the edges of the room! The other thing is that my tech, Andy, started telling me about Ward-Beck consoles, which are relatively uncommon broadcast consoles. Broadcast people are always throwing away things that home recordists would die to have in their studios. So I started calling every single TV and radio station in an ever-widening circle around Austin, and saying, "Is the head engineer there?" I reached a guy in Fort Worth who had worked at Ward-Beck in the '70s, and he said, "Oh, those things are great. We don't have one here, but our sister station in New Orleans does." So I wrote to them, and the engineer wrote back and said, "Yes, we have one, and we're going to digital consoles later this year, so if you want, you can come get it."

For free?

I couldn't believe it either. But I drove down there, and here's this 30-input, seven-foot-wide, you know, a late '70s-era console, with these wonderful EQs. And they threw in a pile of forty more preamps that were extras from another console! It was about a hundred thousand 1982 dollars' worth of stuff that they'd rather give away to someone like me than to haul it another forty feet and put it in the dumpster. And it's exactly what I wanted. But I realized that I couldn't fit it in this little space. So I took a deep breath, and refinanced my house, and I'm going to build a substantial place. I'm going to have a proper studio with a real cutting room. But of course I stopped working in studios because I hate studios! Every single one I ever worked in seemed like a hospital room. But the experience of most people that come to work with me here is, "Oh, this is more like our shitty practice space!" They're just more at ease.

So you're imagining a bigger version of this room?

What I'm doing is I'm making the cutting room into a huge living room, with chairs, and couches, and bass traps hidden behind bookcases. And I'm going to have a live echo chamber, which is going to be a ridiculously strange bathroom. It's going to be twelve feet long and five feet wide at one end, four feet wide at the other, and about, you know, eleven and a half feet tall, completely tiled, and I'm going to have permanent microphones and speakers set up in there.

The potential for abuse...

I know, I know. It really is sad. I'm going to have to have great restraint when someone's going in there. But I'm really thinking of Mitch Miller. He was a producer, he did all of the old Johnny Mathis stuff, and he used a bathroom for an echo chamber. I was listening to the sound of Johnny Mathis' voice in "Chances Are", and I suddenly realized, "Oh! It's Mitch Miller's bathroom!" It was a revelation. And I feel like I identify with him, somehow. All these years later, there's hardly anyone who thinks that Mitch Miller is hip, but, you know, sonically, his recordings just transported you so much, the way he used all these tiny flavors to create these magical arrangements. The idea that I could actually have a bathroom like Mitch Miller... it's completely thrilling to me.