Interviews | No. 172
By Sam Retzer and John Baccigaluppi
It’s Sunday night in Manhattan at Irving Plaza, and Dan “The Automator” Nakamura takes the stage behind a mouthwatering wall of synths, across from Kid Koala [Tape Op#159] and his three turntables. Deltron 3030 is back to rock the same stage where they made their New York debut 25 years...
I think the best music reaches you on a subconscious level, connecting with you in a way that's not always immediately obvious – when you hear something that makes a real connection, you know it's there even if you don't quite know why. Logan Farmer's Still No Mother...
What do Björk, Beach House, Slowdive, Liturgy, !!!, The Mars Volta, Deerhunter, Explosions in the Sky, serpentwithfeet, and Ryuichi Sakamoto all have in common? Mastering and mixing engineer Heba Kadry. Born and raised in Egypt and now residing in Brooklyn, New York, Heba has become a...
Founding members of the band America, Dewey Bunnell and Gerry Beckley, have kept the group America going 50 years, and this year sees the release of Half Century, a seven CD/one DVD box set of rare archival studio recordings of alternate mixes, demos and rehearsals. I dropped a line to...
Upstate New York is an odd place, with its mix of old Dutch Farmers, economically depressed towns, and a slew of aging hippies. This is especially true in the town of Woodstock, nestled in the Catskill Mountains; a quaint country town two hours north of New York City, with under six...
A frequently overlooked part of hip-hop history and culture, the story of the mixtape deserves to be archived, preserved, and celebrated. Beginning with cassette-recorded board tapes of early hip-hop club performances – featuring innovative beat matching, scratching, and early rapping –...
Ian MacKaye and I have been friends for over 20 years, ever since I convinced him and the band he was in, Fugazi, to come and play at the "Food Not Bombs" 20th anniversary free show in San Francisco (with Sleater-Kinney and the late Vic Chesnutt). The band's only concern...
It's 1970, and a man runs a respected barbershop in inner-city Philadelphia. One day his five-year-old son asks him for a timeslot to DJ for the patrons. (He also wants to borrow some records). Most might've laughed at the request, but not this father. He and his wife value...
For the better part of three decades, Butch Walker has simultaneously been a rising and continuous presence in music-making. From his early days in the late '80s glam metal band SouthGang, to Marvelous 3 in the '90s, as well as numerous releases under his own name and penning...
I first met Randy Kohrs years ago at the Summer NAMM tradeshow in Tennessee. Randy is known as a hotshot player; a multi-instrumentalist who's respected for his resonator guitar/dobro abilities. But he's also a Grammy award-winning producer, recording engineer, and studio...
The second half of the 1960s saw a dramatic shift in the way albums were recorded, not only technically, but artistically as the roles of producer and musician morphed into new conduits for freedom and creativity. As artists' perceptions of studio sessions shifted from...
This story begins many years ago, in Portland, Oregon. It was 1996, and the first issue of Tape Op had just been released. In a quest to learn more, I had been devouring as many books and magazines about recording as I could get my hands on. I was spending my days in the Multnomah...
Having played drums, piano, and guitar in various bands and orchestras, Sam Okell undertook the exalted Tonmeister degree course in music technology prior to serving a placement year at Abbey Road Studios. It was there that the much sought-after sound engineer and mixer made his name...