JULY 16, 2025 INTERVIEWS
Joe Barresi: Recording The Melvins, Fu Manchu and the Jesus Lizard
Beware stereo salesmen everywhere. Be on the lookout for customers appearing with a reference album bearing the audio trademark of one 'Joe Barresi', for then your knowledge of signal-to-noise ratios, wattage, ohms, oversampling, woofers and tweeters will truly be tested to their limits and beyond. Barresi has equipment manufacturers' warranty writers pissed off, forcing them to continually rework their clauses to compensate for melting components having been in contact with his projects. For over a decade, Barresi has been a highly sought-after engineer and mixer. Like his treatments of sound, Barresi himself is left-field and ironic — living and working as he does in a land bent on saccharine, packaged music and playlists. Barresi works incessantly. He was an integral sonic part of the inspirational legend that was — and still is — Kyuss, the desert rock band that had single-handedly created a new audience and genre for hard-rock listeners around the globe. He has also put his hands, ears and enthusiasm on some of the most crushing albums of all time by such bands as The Melvins, L7, and The Jesus Lizard. His magical sound is now a genre of its own, bursting with raw soul and ultra-intense power. The louder, the better. It is real. Not all earthquakes in the southern California area are a result of shifting tectonic plates and fault lines — study the epicenter of a seismic occurrence and you might find that it was 'just' Joe Barresi experimenting with an amplifier and a compressor. And if it is a real earthquake, rest assured that Barresi will be competing with the rumbling activity all the way to the very end.
