Interviews | No. 173
By Larry Crane and Matthew Coughlin
There are a few engineer/producers I've met along the way where I've meant to get an interview with them for ages, but for some reason it takes so much longer for us to find the time to do it. Trina Shoemaker has been one of these elusive folks ever since we first met in New...
A consummate populist, Tony Maimone first caught my attention lecturing eloquently in defense of the women's-only swim time at the Metropolitan pool in Williamsburg to a grumbling bunch of men in the locker room, immediately after we had all been booted out at 10 AM one Monday...
David Minehan played guitar, sang and wrote songs for the Boston punk band The Neighborhoods from 1979-1992. After the 'Hoods he played guitar with Paul Westerberg on the 14 Songs tour and even filled in for Brad Whitford of Aerosmith. At his Wooly Mammoth Sound Studio in Boston...
While Tape Op has covered countless recordists with low-budget, grass-roots backgrounds in rock recording, we've talked to very few grass-roots engineers in the avant-garde music world. Russell Frehling, who now runs the house studio at Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening Space...
Hardly known, yet everywhere at the same time, Bryce Goggin has managed to help create seminal albums for Pavement, Spacehog, Evan Dando, Elliott Sharp, The Lemonheads, Kim Deal's Amps, The Apples in Stereo, Swans, Nada Surf, Trey Anastasio and his stadium stalwarts, Phish....
Ten years ago, Bruce Watson was just another would-be musician, running a department store by day in his adopted home of Oxford, Mississippi, and recording demos on his home 8-track for his friends in local bands. With a burgeoning scene on the rise featuring the likes of Blue Mountain...
East of Louisville, Kentucky, in a small town called Shelbyville, Paul Oldham has been recording some of the most unique and important American records of our times. His work can be heard on everything from mid '90s Royal Trux records to New York's own improvisational noise...
I've been listening to Bonny "Prince" Billy's Master and Everyone a little obsessively lately, so it seemed auspicious when the chance to interview him came up. At his hotel, we talked about the new Bonny sings Palace album, and about recording, the relation of music...
Fran Manzella, designer of East Hill Studios, Masterdisk, Sterling Sound, Stratosphere Studios and many, many others, learned studio design through his inquisitive nature and determination to understand how acoustic properties work. I visited the designer in his office in Northern...
Walking down a typical city street in Paris, passing cafés and shops, one wouldn't guess that on the same block, down around a back street and through a small courtyard, is a private recording studio where one of the most popular French music exports these days is being created....
John and I were in France last spring, and thought we'd search out some home recordists in Paris. I tracked down Air and we also came across some acquaintances of theirs (through the fabulous boys of Tahiti 80) by the name of Mellow. While Mellow may not be a well-known band in the...
The Shins debut album, Oh, Inverted World, is a testament to the power of home recording. A band with great songs captures those songs using the gear they can afford and manipulates the recording process to turn technical limitations to their advantage. For their second release, Chutes...
Howie Statland, one of the brightest guitarist/songwriters in New York City and founder of the gritty rock group NYCSmoke, is out of milk, so he's making me drink my coffee black. Normally, I would never do this, but his one-bedroom apartment/recording studio is five flights up...