Tape Op Magazine - Issue #135

Interviews

Interviews

Interviews

Interviews

Interviews

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JULY 31, 2025 INTERVIEWS

Greg Kurstin: Music is My Happy Place

BY JOHN BACCIGALUPPI

Greg Kurstin is an in demand producer who's worked with a laundry list of great artists, including Lily Allen, Sia, Pink, The Shins, Foo Fighters, Liam Gallagher, Beck, The Flaming Lips, Tegan and Sara, Peaches, Kelly Clarkson, Lykke Li, Ellie Goulding, Adele, and Paul McCartney. He's won seven Grammy awards, including two for Producer of the Year in 2017 and 2018. Greg's also one half of the very cool duo, The Bird and the Bee, with vocalist Inara George. They recently released their fifth full-length album, Interpreting the Masters, Vol 2: A Tribute to Van Halen, featuring covers of Van Halen songs rearranged for keyboards (in lieu of guitars), with Inara's soulful vocals casting these classic songs in a new light. I recently had the chance to meet up with Greg in L.A. to talk about the album and his production work.

JULY 31, 2025 INTERVIEWS

Leo Sidran: Handed Down

BY MARK WHITCOMB

Leo Sidran is an accomplished solo artist, multi-instrumentalist, award-winning music producer, and podcast author. He grew up surrounded by great musicians, producers, engineers, and recording studios via his father, producer/keyboardist Ben Sidran. When he was a teenager, he wrote a few songs for The Steve Miller Band and watched with perplexity as his demos became the actual album cuts on Steve's next record. He went on to win Oscars and a Grammys for productions with other artists that were essentially from the original demos as well. In the spirit of his brilliant The Third Story Podcast, where he interviews prolific creative types and looks for the moments that helped shape their success, I caught up with Leo to get a glimpse into his production ethos, and to track how that may have been shaped. We talked about demos, dancing, eureka moments, gymnastics, and making records in the parlor.

JULY 31, 2025 INTERVIEWS

Recording in Iraq: Capturing Mosul Live

BY JACK KENNEDY

I had been writing and producing music in Los Angeles long enough to question the state of my existence when I got an email asking me to come to Iraq and help record an album to be called Mosul Live. My heart leapt with joy. Finally, a break from gluten-free lunches and vegan ice cream. Finally, a break from young songwriters and various A&R guys not calling me back. Finally, something bigger than the music business. I may as well have been going to Mars. I joyously told my girlfriend about the job offer. She was alarmed by my excitement and we split up shortly thereafter. Some people got visibly uncomfortable when I talked excitedly about going to Iraq to record musicians living under the Islamic State. Some changed the subject to Game of Thrones. I have never seen Game of Thrones. Back in 2013, a poet, translator, and friend named David Shook brought me to Haiti to help with some relief work. I brought my Digidesign Mbox 2 and recorded a great Haitian singer in Port Au Prince. David had now moved to Iraqi Kurdistan, where he was an artist in residence at The American University of Iraq Sulaimani (AUIS). AUIS, under the leadership of author and translator Alana Marie Levinson-Labrosse, was beginning a project to document people living in Mosul during the occupation by the Islamic State (2014 to 2017). They had been recording the spoken word stories of civilians in Mosul and wanted to make an album, Mosul Live, by affected musicians. During the occupation music was outlawed, taken off the radio, and forbidden to be performed in public. In the months leading up to the project I assembled a recording system. I needed a multitrack recorder that was battery powered and could last all day. Some areas would not have electricity, and the areas that did have power experienced outages throughout the day. (Case in point: as my plane was landing in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, I watched a large section of the city's lights go out.) The Sound Devices MixPre-10 was my best option. It would run for 20 hours at a time on two battery packs, and it had eight mic inputs with Kashmir preamps that record to a hard disk/thumb drive. I combined that with a handful of microphones from SE Electronics, and the whole setup fit nicely into an over-the-shoulder Stingray bag made by K-Tek.

JULY 31, 2025 INTERVIEWS

Thomas Jouanjean of Northward Acoustics

BY LARRY CRANE, ADAM GONSALVES

Northward Acoustics is an acoustics engineering and consulting company based in Brussels, Belgium. Its founder, Thomas Jouanjean, developed his Front-To-Back Control Room and Mastering Suite design in the early 2000s, and he now has constructed some of the finest studio rooms all over the world. Clients include Sterling SoundNew York and Nashville, Skrillex, Brad Blackwood's Euphonic Masters (Tape Op #102), Dave Collins Mastering, and many others. I was lucky to chat with Thomas right before my pal, Adam Gonsalves, had him design and oversee construction on a new facility for Telegraph Mastering in Portland, Oregon. The resulting room speaks to Northward's quality, and, having spent many hours there, I can attest that the design works. I'm humbled when I hear mixes I've done in Telegraph, and it's amazing how other work sounds in the new space.

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