Summer News

I will not complain about the weather. I live in Berkeley, California, and it's sunny and pleasant every frickin' day. I love it! (Okay, I wouldn't mind a nice, violent thunderstorm now and then).

I was guest #80 on the Working Class Audio podcast, hosted by Matt Boudreau. If you ever wanted to learn more about decamethylcyclo-pentasiloxane as it pertains to archiving cassette tapes, then this is the podcast for you! Matt and I had a great chat about mastering, restoration, archiving, gear, tape formats and best practices.

Check out this video by Very White and see if it doesn't stir up the tiniest bit of romance in your soul. I mastered their upcoming EP, Make Believe. Here's another one for your summer playlist: Summer Jazz, by Buffalo NY's The Tins. They've got some truly excellent new material coming out soon, too. Southern blues rockers Swamp Cabbage's JIVE is finally out this month (and worth the wait!) I really enjoyed working closely with Walter Parks on this album.

One of my most challenging projects of this spring was reviving a thirty-something year old cassette for Awesome Tapes From Africa. It was a doozy, but I am in love with the music, which transcends the medium. Hailu Mergia and Dahlak Band's Wede Harer Guzo, the third record I've restored and remastered for Ethiopian synth and keyboards genius, Hailu Mergia. 

I am one tape away from finishing the digitization of an archive of nearly 100 1/4" analog tapes I've been working on since January. It is unbelievably satisfying to look at my tidy spreadsheet detailing the progress of the preservation of these tapes and see one last entry waiting to be filled in. And, oh, the music! Under wraps for now, but you'll hear some of it soon.

As I'm finishing one archive, I'm starting another, this time a batch of cassettes recorded in New York City in the early 80s. I'll leave it at that. But they sound positively skronky!

Happy summer! Happy 4th of July! I'm going camping!