How did the studio get started?
AL: The studio started because (in typical New York fashion) me and Dan [Long] (our other partner who's in L.A.) were both interning at studios and we had the dream of being the next big band,. We got a rehearsal space and to get good demos we started collecting recording equipment. I was working in a music store in Soho and this guy — a really friendly guy named Reggie Hodges — came in and he was saying how he lived in Williamsburg and how he had a space that needed a sublet that was already built out and would we be interested? We were like, "Fuck yeah." So we went to this place that was right next to this bar called Galapagos on North 6th, and they had a full studio called Bass Mind that they had built up. They had a room that me and Dan subletted. Even though we were working on our own music and getting into a couple of production projects, we saw the need to make some money because we had to pay our rent — so we started taking commercial clients. Then the person who owns Galapagos ended the lease and our landlord — this whole collective called True Mystic Sound System who we were subletting from — they were doing jungle, dub, reggae, all this other stuff — the guy we were subletting with was like, "Hey, do you want to go with me and build a studio in another building? It'll probably take three months." [Scott laughs.]
AL: This was ten years ago so the neighborhood was just starting to fucking pop. It felt like anything was possible still, just really exciting. Then Doug, the guy who sort of commandeered looking for space, found this space in East Williamsburg — just out in the middle of fucking nowhere. We moved in, we did a little bit of construction and then we started smelling some weird smells. We just realized that we were literally adjacent to a barrel cleaning business. It was like clockwork at twelve and seven and we were like, "I don't think this is going to work."
How long were you there for?
AL: We were there like two weeks, but it was an expensive two weeks. Dan and Doug were pretty skeptical about finding another space in this neighborhood. So I was like, "I'm going to find a place in this area." Some-fucking-how I found this building just walking down here with my wife. I call up and it's this Hassidic landlord and I was like, "How much is the space?" and he goes "It's $4,500 for 6,500 square feet," and I think I was hallucinating and I said, "You mean it's $6,500 for 4,500 square feet?" I literally said that because even back then that was such a crazy good deal. And he was like, "No, you fuckface. It's actually $4,500 for 6,500, shut up." I was like, "Okay, we have to do this." So we were only going to do a studio before and now we've found a whole building. So for the next year — which was not three months — we built this whole building out. We built the Headgear space, and we built two spaces up front. We split the entire building into thirds, three spaces of 2,000 square feet and split the first third into two spaces, and the middle third into two spaces. So we subdivided the whole building. My wife and I lived in an apartment in the first third, Doug lived in an apartment in the other third, we had a painter who was here for a number of years and then a kickboxing school, hence the "School of Kickboxing" sign. They were here for a few years and now Stay Gold [Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio's studio] is there. It was a really ambitious project.
SN: I came out a few times and it was always, "Three more weeks and it'll be done."
AL: Scott was kind of parallel with us because he had a studio in New Jersey and he had a kind of similar situation. DS: I met Scott because Scott was the manager of the Magic Shop, which is where I used to intern, and he was my boss — kind of. It was a cool, amazing place. Then he moved on to do his studio in Jersey. So we're having these parallel lives — always keeping in touch. Then we got in here and me and Dan were working and things were going okay and then 9/11 happened. We had just gotten busy and then literally there was like four months without any phone calls. At that point we weren't working with bands on labels. Basically our clientele were 25-year-old designer/Internet programmers who had a lot of money and were playing music and wanting to make their record. That was our fucking bread and butter. It was really the most bizarre thing I've ever witnessed. That's when Dan and I were like, "You know what? I think we should call Scott. I think he should come over here. He doesn't need to be in New Jersey, he needs to come to New York. He can put a studio together."
