My fieldwork in the Cologne based recording studio Supow, owned by German-Sierra Leonean Reggae artist Patrice Bart Williams took place in 2012. I mostly remained in the background as a silent observer during recording session, talked with engineers, assistants and musicians during the mixing-process and in-between recording sessions. Beside Patrice, I predominantly worked with the studios engineers and assistant-engineers Torsten, Julius and Teresa who main-tained the studio3. All of them underwent a formal training in sound engineer-ing and had several years of practice in different recordengineer-ing studios.
The studio had two recording rooms, a control room, two small vocal booths, a living-room area and several storage spaces filled with instruments and mostly analog recording technologies. Patrice had not only gathered a plethora of vin-tage sound recording equipment, but also attracted like-minded engineers focused on analog production to work in his studio. Especially older analog technologies, like the studio’s Neve V3 mixing console, served as important car-riers of the ‘Supow feeling’, as Patrice described the studio’s atmosphere. Beside the technologies used in music production, the studio as a place contributed largely to that feeling. Its interior design which was dominated by dark wood that covered the floor and the walls supported Supow’s vintage reputation.
Instruments like electric guitars, small drums or an electrical thumb-piano lied spread out over the studio’s rooms. A small balafon stood on a window ledge.
Large oriental carpets and heavy linen drapes added to the overall “earthy atmosphere “- as described by assistant-engineer Teresa (personal
3 After moving to Paris, Patrice sold the Neve console in 2013 and consequently dissolved the Cologne Supow studio. His motivations had been largely unknown even to his engineers and assistants.
tion, June 13, 2012)4. The session musicians I interviewed also emphasized the Supow feeling which was directly linked to the objects in the studio.
2.1 Elements of the Supow cyborg
During my time at the studio, I asked the people working there “What is it that makes the ‘Supow-sound?’” For assistant engineer Teresa, the rooms of the stu-dio gave the recordings their distinctive sound, “the rooms sound musty and earthy. You can’t do a sterile recording in the Supow. The room is audible in every track. It sounds like wood and nature in here” (personal communication, June 13, 2012). Assistant engineer Julius’ first answer sounded rather prag-matic: “In the end it is the musician, the instrument and the room. Mics, cables and that stuff add no more than ten percent to the sound” (personal communi-cation, July 2, 2012). However, when we spoke about why he initially came to the studio, he began to explain, “well, I noticed that many of my favorite tracks at that time came from this studio. When I came here, I immediately fell in love with the laid-back atmosphere and the vintage gear. I mean, for example our closet with that big reverb plate, it just sounds so real. If you listen to Jamaican records from the 70’s, that is exactly that sound” (personal communication, July 2, 2012). Julius, as well as the other assistants and engineers, has a strong scientific understanding of acoustics and electronics. They all tended to talk about session set ups in technical terms of signal pathways, however, when dis-cussing and experimenting during the session their vocabulary slightly shifted.
Not only where the sounds discussed in terms of their authenticity, their fatness or warmth, but where also attributed with quasi-magical properties. A good example of this is taken from a conversation with engineer Torsten. He listened to a playback that had been recorded simultaneously with different micro-phones. One of them was his personal favorite, the Neumann U47. Switching back and forth between different tracks he said to me while playing the track recorded with the U47, “do you hear that? There is something more to the sound in this. The U47 does not simply catch the sound but it adds something, it makes it actually sound better than in reality” (personal communication, May 22, 2012)
For Patrice, owner of the studio, a third component beside the rooms and the technologies is crucial for the Supow-sound. During the production and re-cording sessions of his 2013 released album “Rising of the Son”, Patrice wrote and recorded song snippets in the control room or in the big recording room, often staying overnight. He slept on the couch in the control room. Through this self-imposed isolation, he strove to focus and enhance his creative momentum.
4 All personal communications in this chapter are translations of the German originals by the author.
He liked to quote producer Quincy Jones, saying, “you just set everything up, get everything up and wait for god to walk through them room” (personal com-munication, May 25, 2012). The people at Supow often called this “catching the vibes” or simply “vibing” to describe an atmosphere of inspiration and artistic harmony with oneself and the environment. For Patrice, this worked best at his own studio, which had been designed to his own needs. For brief periods of time, Patrice lived in the studio, staying over-night. He rearranged the rooms into smaller areas or “work stations” were he could experiment with different instruments and technologies. For him, the studio had “the atmosphere of a playground”. This atmosphere, which for Patrice is largely comprised of the design of the rooms and the vintage analog recording equipment, then is the third non-human element of the Supow cyborg. In Patrice’s eyes, his perfor-mance was made possible by the inspiring atmosphere of his studio.
2.2 Transgressing isolation, reassembling the social
Following Hennion, the recording studio is an empty place that initially is com-pletely isolated from the outside world. Everything in it has to be assembled. By assembling the actors in the studio, existing social ties are reassembled, and new ones are formed. I recall a specific session when Patrice was ready to record some vocal lines. He entered the vocal booth and sang over the backing track.
For recording his vocals, he used a Neumann U47 condenser microphone, which transformed the sound waves into electrical impulses and sent them via cables through the Neve 1081 pre-amp and the Fairchild 660 compressor and then into the Neve V3 console. Along the way, as Patrice pointed out to me, that these components imprinted their own, distinct sound on the tracks, which also included noise and compression, thereby changing the shape of the sounds like a sonic vignette (ibid). After this, the electrical signals were transformed into digital signals via the Pro-Tools HD2 Interface and sent into the studio’s com-puter. From there, they would be further edited or sent back again through other devices, like the studio’s custom-made echo plate cabinet5.
Although it occupied a central position in the production by transforming ana-log signals into digital ones, the people at Supow considered their PC to be nothing more than a passage point. The computer was black boxed, it lacked its own voice, its performance did not contribute to the cyborg sound. In contrast, the analog technologies were associated with legendary musicians and produc-ers of the 1960’s and 70’s. For the people at Supow, the U47s as well as the Fairchild compressor and the Neve console were “fetish objects” (Meintjes 2012) in this respect, as they were constantly telling stories about them, in
5 In another Supow production that I did not witness myself, Patrice exclusively relied on analog equipment to produce his music.
which session and by whom they had been used how they sounded on which record. They used them as artefacts to achieve the same results as their musical role models. “There is something elitist about running an analog studio. Re-cording completely analog on tape and stuff is really expensive. There is not much ‘fixing it in the mix’ after its all on tape. Tape does not allow for infinite takes without loss of quality. The musicians have to be on point when record-ing,” explained Patrice, linking the Supow studio to an imagined international elite of music producers and studios (personal communication, May 25, 2012).
The musicians of Patrice’s band often expressed a certain pride in the fact that their musicianship had to be on point when recording on tape and that they did not rely on computers to sound good. This also expressed the notion of higher subcultural capital of analog technology in comparison to their digital counter-parts (Zeiner-Henriksen 2014, 34). By using the same technologies that have been used by Al Green, the Beatles, Bob Marley and other members of his po-pular music pantheon, Patrice created sonic associations far beyond the studios boundaries. The studio and the people in it associate themselves with other studios and artists with similar production aesthetics.
To me, many of the slight changes in sound caused by the analog gear often went unnoticed if I did not listened to them attentively. Even when I did, I could not be sure, that I was not just subjected to the suggestive potential of these technologies. When I asked Julius if he thought that other musicians that recorded in the Supow studio or their fans that listened to the records would recognize the analog sound, he explained: “I don’t believe that they would necessarily recognize the difference in sound. For most musicians, the recording with analog gear is a matter of feeling. They think that they are doing the same thing as their heroes did, the Beatles and others, totally analog and real, and this is when they get to the point of actually performing better. If they get inspired by the vintage gear in the studio, you can hear it” (personal communication, July 2, 2012).
Studio performances are shaped by rationalization processes that affect both social interactions and musical sound. These processes follow, as Théberge argued, the capitalist logic of gaining control over the object (sound) and cus-tomize it according to market needs (1989, 111). The rise of the digital audio workstation (DAW), which replaced most of the analog gear in modern studios, can be seen as a product of rationalization “that has dramatically reduced the element of collaborative, physical process” (Williams 2015) in record produc-tion. Williams analyzed the prevalent ‘nostalgia’ in music production, showing that “the fixation on the tools, environments, processes, and music of the past is really about the desire for social experience, to be part of something” (ibid).
Producing music in an actor-network, focusing on analog equipment as exem-plified by the Supow studio, where people become a part of a musical cyborg
through interaction and collaboration, embodies an idealized state of sociality that seems unachievable through DAW. However, in my second example I dis-cuss how the social is translated via purely digital sound recording and produc-tion technology and highlight the parallels between translaproduc-tions of the social into the recording session.