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 still remember my first experience hearing Taylor Deupree's Northern on a winter night back in 2007. Reaching into a stack of borrowed CDs in my apartment, I randomly selected a disc for some musical accompaniment while washing the dishes. The album began so stealthily that it...
Andrew Savage, one of the co-songwriters of Parquet Courts, is decidedly "not an engineer," yet he owns tape machines and once built a studio with his friends in Denton, Texas. Savage's top priority when recording is an environment free of distraction - acoustics be...
How many of you ladies and gentlemen are making music these days intended for listening primarily on a five CD changer set to shuffle? If that's your audience, you might feel forced to use multiband compressors and brick wall limiters to squeeze every bit of life out of your mixes....
Here Photo: At The Old Western waiting for the rest of the musicians...
Luke Temple wears several masks and many hats. Since 2005 he has released five solo records under his own name, four as Here We Go Magic, and his latest release, Blast Off Through the Wicker, under the moniker...
Although I'd heard of Berlin-based musician Nils Frahm, I actually first heard his music on his beautiful and recently released LP, All Melody, which I reviewed online for Tape Op#123. Nils was recently in San Francisco, on tour for this album, so engineer Jeremy Black (from Coyote...
Way back in [Tape Op #39], we received a wonderful report on how The Mammals utilized a bunch of borrowed gear and gathered talented friends to track their Evolver album at home, in upstate New York. Some 14 years later they are still at it, but now have a private studio above their...
Over the last 20 years Matt Chamberlain has contributed to a staggering variety of recordings including David Bowie, Tori Amos, Frank Ocean, Miranda Lambert, Bill Frisell, Brad Mehldau, Fiona Apple, and Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians, to name a few. Seriously, we're just...
F. Reid Shippen is a successful music producer, engineer, and businessperson. He has also helped out Tape Op over the years with his insightful reviews and great ideas, so we thought it was about time to drop by and pick his brain. His credits include Little Big Town, Dierks Bentley...
The least surprising thing about the 2017 release of the Giles Martin remixed version of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is that its sonics – indeed, its very existence – was heavily and passionately debated. Audio engineers who work on historic recordings know they have to...
Photo from Calvin's Fall 2015 Sampler.
You came up over and over again in the interview that we did with Julien.
Julien and I grew up together playing music. I had done demos with her, prior to working at Ardent. We were working out of another studio called The Grove. I was her...
Having recently released his twenty-second studio album, Savage (Songs from a Broken World), Gary Numan is no stranger to the recording process. Produced by Ade Fenton (see his interview this issue), it is a soaring, epic, electronic dark groove record, with the unique lyrics and...
Ade Fenton is a creative, masterful cutting-edge engineer, producer, DJ, and composer based in the UK. He has worked with Gary Numan on his past four studio albums, Savage (Songs from a Broken World), Splinter (Songs from a Broken Mind), Dead Son Rising, and Jagged, as well as having...