Line Crossing Stories
Talk about your experience at Realgrey, what has it meant to you?
I've had the pleasure of experiencing Realgrey from Tagging along with my boys in Elephant Society in the late 2000s to laying floors deep into the wee hours of a 2010's summer night to walking in recently, blown away at the live room breezeway or whatever the hell that extravagant addition is used for (what is that Ron, another more live-er room?).
Anytime I show up, there's the sage, calm (he'll deny perhaps) smiling (can't deny) Ron and whatever iteration of local misfits, chattering, working together to build something:
A song, a wall, a secret sound proof door... switching around rooms and monitors and boards as if the whole building alive, ever-changing.
No matter how constantly in flux, Realgrey's meaning to me is present in the 100-plus year old carriage house wood that surrounds our temple, gnawed and defiant with its permanence.
Ron & family reallocated those artful planks from an original structure that certainly had to take plenty (if not just a batch) of folks to put together. Then, families later, we took the same damn wood and spent hours, days, weeks, bonding over the construction process of some incredible utility that we would soon all use together, just like those before us.
I imagine the similarities; our shared breaks over lunch and refreshments, laughing distractions the fatigue born of heat and toil (and the horrendous itchiness of that goddamn insulation). Perhaps they developed new words like "goop" (Liquid Nails, I think) and "gooper" for those applying said goop (half to the building and half to ourselves)...
I'm not sure they had as vibrant a vocabulary in the Year of Our Lord 1900-whatever, but this too prospered in our time.
The only difference between us and the past is the purpose of the final product:
We were children building our fantasy playground. It's rare to re-conjure joy like that. And even more so that we helped to build this gigantic toy and SHVS were the first kids that got to play with it. What a summer that was!
How would you describe the ethos ... experience ... purpose of the studio?
As clever and deep as I want to be, the purpose is always collaboration. The cliche here is different however, because in my experience, collaboration is executed because there is such an open door policy.
SHVS had like several guest engineers (just friends of Ron's, interns, friends of ours just stopping by, etc.) and so many ears on the project we were manifesting. You hear stories about the famous folks all hanging out together, features and hands on albums (the way Steely Dan or Kanye or whoever host multiple geniuses during recording so as to have a massive amount of artistry on tap).
If you’re serious about your craft, you can’t possibly be short of folks in your life that can provide missing pieces to your compositions. Realgrey’s hospitality and open channels to thought made it clear to me that brilliance thrives from togetherness, and it shows in SHVS' very dense LUSH LP.
Has the studio influenced your music in any way? If so, how?
Realgrey, for us, was the dawn of re-amping. We had this giant sound and a giant room, so of course, we had to figure out how to clobber folks whilst retaining the integrity of what was going on instrument to instrument.
This is production nerd stuff that I’m sure I could be more versed in, but we had our Drummer Alex mic’d to the gills and Chris’s bass and my guitar isolated in little single mic, 1x12 “sound chambers” (whatever the hell they are. We physically were in the same room ripping up the album, from start to finish as if it were a live set. The only kept audio was Alex’s barrage of percussion. Once the takes of each song where agreed on, we took our amps in, one at a time and ran that direct signal into the amp, loud as we wanted in the room alone.
This allowed Chris and I to be on all fours with our pedals to perfect (and invent) tones as if we had extra feet during a live set. The result is clarity of each instrument in that room without sacrificing power. That was a huge.
Side note:
Having a virtuoso keyboard player (if you don’t know, that’s Ron) next to me while I layered organs and strings and keys influenced the record quite a bit.
Since I play every instrument like a guitarist (apparently), Ron helped me simplify and experiment within reason; being that we never had a keyboard player in the band. I had recently stumbled on a toy Casio that previous winter and just couldn’t help myself.
Talk about the people that you've encountered at Realgrey ... what has your experience been w/ us?
It starts with Ron, I believe, but Realgrey is a mindful set of engineers (shout out John King and Greg Snier) as well as sporadic talent milling in and out of the place. I remember planning out this building project preceding our musical project.
I can't remember specifics but we had a pre-everything meeting with Ron and Culture Coffee (right?). It was the first time I thought of what I wanted to achieve on a perception with a batch of songs. Normally, me and the boys will have written the album on stage essentially, and eventually want to record best version of each, and that's it.
Ron was asking about how it should arrive to your ears, what feeling the album should deliver. We were young reprobates who wanted to present our loud, lollopping prog rock as bar-clearing on the album as it was in real life. Ron is a jazzman with a tall horse-house to play in. If we could help build his concept, he could accommodate.
We hung out every day for a couple weeks (months?) that summer, with Ron's family, with whoever wanted to come see if we were bull-shitting about this "studio" we were building. Thus a little community was formed around us making this record, making this collection of songs were the first to hold an extra sentimental value I still hear and feel listening to it years later.
We love Ron and his vast team(s) for helping us constantly achieve whatever we have in mind. The crew here simply love to be doing what they do.
Nobody there "has" to be there. This is a home to the passioned; you can see it in every photo of musicians grinning as they sign the live room upon wrapping a project.
