Studio City
In a town where everybody’s in a band, the recording studio has become its own art form.
By Tom Colligan
IN THE INDIE MUSIC WORLD, it’s easy to believe the professional recording industry is dead. After all, who needs Abbey Road when you can find cheap used gear and record an album with a few mouse clicks? Yet across Portland, dedicated recording and mixing facilities are not only surviving, they’re thriving. They’re booked weeks, even months, in advance, and they’re producing some our city’s best-known cultural exports.
“There are big records coming out of Portland now,” says Larry Crane, owner of Jackpot Recording Studio and founder of the world’s largest-circulation magazine about recording music, Tape Op. He points to locals like the Decemberists and the Shins (whose most recent albums—both recorded in Portland—debuted at no. 1 and no. 2, respectively, on the Billboard 200 chart). But acts from across the country, such as folk-rock sensation Bright Eyes, are also descending on Stumptown to lay down tracks.
Why? Just as cheap rents lured talented young chefs to Portland’s food scene, space and talent have combined in the recording business. Portland’s recording studios are run by working musicians who know how to improvise with more than their instruments. Crane’s $350-a-day studio, he points out, would cost twice that in LA. Here, in the town where the Kingsmen recorded “Louie, Louie” and where Greg Sage and the Wipers laid a cornerstone of independent rock in a shack on SE Powell Boulevard, the precision and the romance of the studio recording experience is within reach for musicians even without record label support.
“There’s a spirit of getting the job done in Portland,” Crane says. “Getting it out seems more important than laboring over it.”
Here we offer a look inside a few spaces helping to keep Portland’s unique brand of music-making very much alive.
Type Foundry
THE MUSIC: The jazz/country swing of Sallie Ford & the Sound Outside; haunting minimalist folk by Laura Gibson; the acoustic indie-pop band Blind Pilot; the richly layered folk-rock quintet Weinland (once described in this magazine as “the Beatles tripping on Robitussin”)
More than a recording studio, Type Foundry is a repository of musical energy. Hidden away in an old warehouse near the eastern foot of the Broadway Bridge, its stockpile of gracefully aging instruments includes a 1907 Gabler piano, old kettledrums, xylophones, a Hammond B3 organ recently left to stay awhile by local session man Lewi Longmire. There’s even a forlorn-looking harpsichord shoved into the corner of the capacious live performance room. “When I’m recording, I like going into a space that makes me feel creative,” says California-raised musician Adam Selzer, who founded the studio in 1998. “I’d much rather spend money on things for people to make sound with than things to record it. That’s what gets people excited. Not this stuff,” he says waving at a rack of preamps.
Selzer got his start recording friends’ music for free. He opened Type Foundry at SE 18th Avenue and Burnside Street, between waiting tables and touring with Kyle Field of the eclectic art-folk band Little Wings and Portland songwriter Matt Ward, and launching his own folk-rock project, Norfolk & Western, which has released six albums. After Selzer and his partners moved into their current sprawling industrial space in 2001, he never waited tables again.
“It’s big, not cavernous. If you want, you can get a really big sound here.” —Adam Selzer, Type Foundry
On the back wall of Type Foundry’s control room are banks of switches left over from the telemarketers who once occupied the building. The phone stations have been replaced with endless racks of audio gear—equalizers, compressors, preamps, and audio effects of every possible ilk. In the corner stands a 30-year-old two-inch tape machine, meticulously calibrated and spinning like a top, a working testament to the technical skill and dedication required to run this full-featured analog recording studio.
But for Selzer, Type Foundry is less about technique than a free-form brand of inspiration. Indeed, he recalls a moment when the building itself became just another instrument. A winter ice storm had shut the city down, but his client—singer-songwriter Ana Hortillosa (a.k.a. Anamude) of San Francisco—still had to record. “It was so slippery. There were no cars on the street; it was really bizarre,” Selzer recalls. “That mood shaped the entire project. There was all of this ice falling on the roof, I remember, and at a certain point I put a mic up to the ceiling.” The sound of Type Foundry itself now resounds with every playing of Anamude’s beautifully spare 2005 folk album, Pentimento, tailor-made, it seems, for riding out a stormy day.
Jackpot! Recording Studio
THE MUSIC: Indie icons Sleater-Kinney, Elliott Smith, and Quasi; the Seattle pop ensemble Telekinesis; energetic Portland punk trio the Thermals.
Over his two decades of making recordings in Portland, Larry Crane has worked with the likes of Elliott Smith, Stephen Malkmus, and Jenny Lewis. But the unassuming, dark green building off of SE Division Street that’s his studio is marked only with a sun-faded 8 ½-by-11 piece of paper on the curtain-covered glass door reading “Jackpot Recording” and a telltale coffee can full of spent cigarettes out front. The modest exterior belies the state-of-the-art vessel within. “Everything was designed with sound in mind,” Crane says.
Crane is a builder. Fascinated with recording since he was a teenager, he couldn’t find a magazine on the kind of low- to mid-cost recordings he was making in his home. So he started one: Tape Op. After 15 years, it is now the world’s largest home recording magazine.
In 1997 Crane opened Jackpot on SE 20th Avenue and Morrison Street, where he quickly began working with such seminal Portland indie-rock artists as Sleater-Kinney and Quasi. He recorded Elliott Smith’s “Miss Misery,” the song featured in the film Good Will Hunting that earned an Oscar nomination in 1998. Soon after, local electrical engineer Scott Hampton offered Crane the unique chance to create a new studio on the site of a burned-out building just off of SE Division Street, where Jackpot sits today.
Designed by Hampton, who now manufactures electronic audio equipment next door, Jackpot’s network of audio cables is routed through trenches in the foundation, with each room offering enough outlets to make microphones as easy to plug in as lamps. The building’s power runs high through the walls so it can’t interfere with sound signals coursing beneath the floor. The walls are all skewed by two degrees, with the studs slightly offset to prevent errant sonic transmissions.
Crane wanted a space with maximum flexibility: to be able to record every musician in isolation or capture a full band’s live sound swirling around the same room; to create pristine, limpid, noiseless tracks or distortion-drenched chaos. “Good records can be made so many different ways,” Crane says. “All the things you hear coming out of the speakers have been captured and manipulated to make you feel something. It’s all sleight of hand.”
From the crooked walls of his purpose-built studio, Crane has enchanted the multitudes with his illusions.
Secret Society
THE MUSIC: Alt-country rock band Celilo; songwriter Al James’s band Dolorean; indie-pop band Derby (familiar for the “If Ever There’s a Reason” Ford commercial); acoustic soul musician Ezra Holbrook, formerly of the Decemberists, who released his second solo album, Save Yourself, in March.
For 52 years, the stately 1907 Woodmen of the World building on NE Russell Street housed the Prince Hall Masons, an African American lodge formed back when such men’s clubs were segregated. Since being purchased in 2004 by former graphic designer Matt Johnson, however, the building is now a richly appointed feast for the senses: the Secret Society bar and ballroom on top; the popular eatery Toro Bravo in front; and, behind the unmarked door in back, the Secret Society recording studio.
“Things fall in and out. Sometimes I say,‘I love that microphone . . . today.’”—Jordan Leff, Secret Society
As Crane and Hampton did with Jackpot, Johnson and his business partner, Jordan Leff, spared no expense in renovating the century-old space into a modern, tricked-out studio. The atmosphere is lush, with brass lamps casting a warm glow on the ochre walls and densely patterned, brilliant red carpets. “The idea was to make it feel like a 1920s living room,” says Leff, the engineer who runs most of the sessions and plays with Johnson in the psychedelic pop quartet UHF. The audio cables run through the walls to the control room, leaving the pathways clear underfoot. The ballroom upstairs, too, is hooked up to the control room below for recording. Even the studio’s roomy, echoing bathroom is wired: you can plug a microphone into the wall just to the right of the toilet-paper holder.
Still, precision acoustics and living-room comforts aren’t without limits. “The song is always the no. 1 thing,” says Leff. “The writing, the arrangement. If that’s right, and everything seems to be working together, you get this great energy in the room.” But when things aren’t working, the Secret Society offers a potential fix: the bar upstairs. “Sometimes,” says Leff, “a drink helps.”
Published: May 2011
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