A studio manager juggles responsibilities and must also find the time and space for creativity. It takes a level head and a scopic vision to stay sane and to be brilliant. Knitting Factory Recording Studio manager Sascha Van Oertzen runs her Studio with an ease that only comes from mixing experience with creative vision. The history of the Knitting Factory's recording studio is almost as old as the history of the club itself. Many remember the Knitting Factory from its days on Houston St.; it is in this location that a robbery of the club in its early years nearly wiped out the club's existence for good. That was almost ten years ago, and since then the club has grown and moved to a more spacious location Downtown in Tribeca. The Knitting Factory remains a club with its feet firmly planted in jazz music and most things experimental, with four venues in the club, a festival production company, and a great record label that appropriately called Knitting Factory Records. Sascha Van Oertzen is a 29 year old woman who is a graduate of the famed Tonemeister Program of the University of Arts in Berlin. Sascha's daily grind includes doing live recordings of some Knitting Factory performances, and also recording albums for either Knitting Factory Records or Kramer's Shimmy Disc. Sascha is candid, honest, warm, and distinctly confident. She is a class-A troubleshooter, and thinks so hard about this it's like you can almost hear the cogs working as she thinks. As we speak I have to keep reminding myself that this is someone whose first language is not English- Sascha's vernacular and attitude is as "New York Downtown" as any other Knitting Factory regular. Before she decided to go to this school, Sascha was a musician who wanted to do something with music but didn't really want to be a musician. Wondering, "what else is there?" she found that recording and engineering was a program that offered many aspects towards engaging with music. Sascha described that in her program, "you had to play instruments and study music, while participating in various technical faculties of the University- you then get studio experience recording and get experience from practical work. The idea is that you learn music and have the same experience a musician has in order to work with them..."

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