From the Grecian seaside to the Brazilian mountains to the Arctic Circle’s edge, musicians have recorded in these far-flung spaces — and changed their creative outlooks in the process.
“There were literally killer whales outside,” Sebastian Ingrosso recalls of Swedish House Mafia’s stay at Ocean Sound, a recording studio nestled on a tiny island off the northwest coast of Norway. “We had chefs coming with fresh fish every day. The ocean was right there when you opened the door. It’s one of the best studios I’ve been to. It was magical.”
A recording studio’s setting and vibe can have an immense effect on the artists recording there. And from the Grecian seaside to the Brazilian mountains to the Arctic Circle’s edge, these far-flung spaces have hosted countless artists, including ABBA, Queen, Sade, Soundgarden, Justin Bieber, Harry Styles, Fleet Foxes and more.
In addition to our in-depth look at the rebirth of Miraval Studios — a particularly stunning (and historic) recording space in Provence, France that Brad Pitt and producer-engineer Damien Quintard have brought to new life — Billboard is taking a global tour through dozens of gorgeous, state-of-the-art studios. These are the studios that inspired the artists who have created timeless classics and modern radio smashes, and for the most part, they’re far from the hustle and bustle of traditional industry hubs.
There’s the getaway in the mountains of southern Spain with rooms inspired by the J.R.R. Tolkien’s Hobbits (Space Mountain Studios); the luxe studio on Santorini where, says owner Kostas Kalimeris, Björk worked a few years ago as “her birthday present” (Black Rock Studios); the Welsh farm space where the cows still get milked every morning, and where Pixies love to hole up (Rockfield Studios); the rustic Vermont escape where the vibe is as laid-back as a Phish jam (The Barn, built by the band’s own Trey Anastasio).
Take a tour of those scenic studio locales — and many more — below.
The Arctic Sweet Spot
Two years ago, Jay Sweet, executive producer of the Newport Jazz and Folk festivals, was approached by his friend Chad Pike, founder of adventure lodging company Eleven Experience, about putting together a festival on a property the company owned in Haganesvik, Iceland, four hours north of Reykjavík.
“Within 10 minutes” of surveying the area, Sweet recalls, it became clear a festival would not be feasible in such a rugged, remote location, where daylight hours vary wildly. (In summer, it receives up to 21 hours of full daylight; in the colder months, as little as five.) But the veteran event producer noticed two dilapidated buildings nearby — one, a former grocery store; the other, an old butcher’s shop — and had a thought: “Maybe you could create a ‘music hang’ area here?”
That idea became Floki Studios, offering all the comforts (and then some) of a top-notch modern recording facility at the Arctic Circle’s edge. Chris Funk, lead guitarist for The Decemberists, is currently expanding the space with Sweet.
How did you two start working together on Floki?
Jay Sweet: About two years after I had seen the property, I got a call from Chad [Pike] at Eleven, saying, “We turned those buildings into a pop-up studio [and want to expand it into] a fully functioning, top-of-the-line, best equipment recording studio. Could you help build a list of equipment we should buy?” So I called my friend Chris Funk of The Decemberists — it was just serendipitous because right then, Funk was extricating himself from a studio that he had just finished building out of a unique space [Halfling Studios in Portland, Ore.] and was kind of looking for his next adventure.
Chris Funk: I flew to the north of Iceland with Pike and Jay and caught the vibe of Iceland for the first time. I was like, “Where do I sign up?” They then took me to the “pop-up studio” — there is more gear in there than the other facility that I was working at in Portland. So I got hired to help develop the Floki 2.0 studio, which we’re about to break ground on, as well as booking the current studio and helping with other music initiatives surrounding it.
What, to you, sets Floki apart from other destination studios?
Sweet: I get to hear amazing artists record in the most inspiring place. So I’m hearing George Porter lay down a bass riff — he’s taking a break? Great, I’m going to go mountain biking for an hour. And when I come back, I can jump in the geothermal hot tub pool, and then I’m going to get up and have this world-class meal by a world-class chef, and then I’m going to go hear the finishing of the session. I’ve kind of stopped trying to pitch it that hard because it’s just that wonderful kind of an experience. It’s for those people who want to go see what being on Mars looks like.
Is it difficult coordinating the operations of a studio in Iceland when you don’t live there?
Sweet: Not really. I’m in Boston, Funk is in Portland. My flight to Iceland is about four-and-a-half hours, which is about the same difference as going to Funk. It’s a weird thing where it’s seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and it is, but the actual ease of getting there is pretty amazing.
What about Iceland makes recording music there so inspiring?
Funk: We’ve made it a point to ingratiate ourselves to the Iceland music community, and we’ve received full support from them, which has been really amazing. But Iceland also has a very deep connection to their history with mysticism — a solid percentage of the population still believes in elves.
Sweet: Absolutely — even the word “Floki” itself is a reference to a legendary, mythical Viking, and our logo with the ravens has to do with his story.
Funk: I always look at a record or a song as a period of time that you’re capturing. In those five weeks or whatever it takes, why not try something new? I don’t want to say it’s just inspiration — yes, you can walk out the door and feel inspired, but there’s so much more to it than that. There’s the community, there’s the folklore, there’s this comfort level and excitement of just getting out, in particular after COVID-19. You get to go somewhere and just feel like you are taking this period of time seriously by making something great in this mythical place and this great country. —STEPHEN DAW
The Well-Appointed Bubble ‘At The End Of The World’
On the tiny island of Giske off the northwest coast of Norway, in a region best known for its fishing industry, sits a studio that’s one of the most in-demand in Europe — despite being (almost) in the middle of nowhere.
Since opening in 2009, Ocean Sound has become a destination for acts including Arcade Fire, Swedish House Mafia, Sampha, Flume, a-ha, Madeon and Kygo, who come in search of the tranquil mindset that working amid crashing waves, fishing boats, snow-capped mountains and the glowing Northern Lights can inspire.
“Even when you don’t look out the window because you’re working intense days deep in the computer or your instrument, things are happening around you in a slow, nice way that actually triggers something in your brain,” says studio manager Terje Erstad. “That’s one of the secrets why Ocean Sound is a really good place for creativity.”
The original studio was built in 2005 in a nearby boathouse as a practice space for Norwegian band The Margarets. When big-city friends started asking if they could borrow the facility, a business plan was born on Giske. While the island is home to 700 people (and several ancient Viking monuments) and takes just 20 minutes to walk around, Ocean Sound is surprisingly close to the perks of city life. After a long day in the studio, artists often head to Ålesund — a town just a 15-minute drive from the studio with its own airport, where flights from Oslo and Amsterdam arrive daily — for a great meal and mountain views that, Erstad says, look “like the typical Norwegian postcard.”
Still, plenty of musicians visiting Ocean Sound never leave Giske, opting to stay in one of the studio’s four cozy bedrooms — and to watch the sun set from the outdoor jacuzzi.
“There were literally killer whales outside,” Swedish House Mafia’s Sebastian Ingrosso recalls of the electronic trio’s stay in a cabin on Giske during a pre-pandemic stint at Ocean Sound. “We had chefs coming with fresh fish every day. The ocean was right there when you opened the door. It’s one of the best studios I’ve been to. It was magical.”
The best-of-both-worlds appeal of the area extends to Ocean Sound’s two studios, which are stocked with equipment, Erstad says, that would “make an old piano player feel at home but have a young techno artist feel at home, too.” One is outfitted with Dolby Atmos, and both hold enough gear that artists, particularly those coming from afar, don’t have to travel with their instruments.
“One of our goals when you’re at the studio,” Erstad says, “is that it’s easy to get into a bubble and feel like you’re at the end of the world.” —KATIE BAIN
The Historic Island Spot Where ABBA Reunited
Riksmixningsverket — better, and more simply, known as RMV Studio — is “an impossible name, also for Swedes,” admits co-owner Ludvig Andersson. But there’s a good reason for its lengthy, official moniker. Ludvig’s father, ABBA’s Benny Andersson, who co-owns the Swedish studio, had wanted to use the name (a suggestion by ABBA’s former engineer, Michael Tretow) for the group’s Polar Studios, but was legally unable to use the word verket, meaning “institution.” “At the time in the ’70s, you weren’t allowed to call anything that wasn’t an actual institution or department that. But in this day and age, they don’t care anymore,” says Ludvig, who helps his dad with myriad aspects of ABBA’s business. Thus, the National Institutional Department of Mixing was born. “It’s a joke,” Ludvig explains, “and it sounds kind of nice.”
Housed in a 150-year-old former naval warehouse on the island of Skeppsholmen in the center of Stockholm, RMV overlooks the waters surrounding the city and features a restored Neve 8068 console from 1977, formerly owned by Max Martin. Since opening in 2011, RMV has hosted Coldplay, Cat Stevens (aka Yusuf), Daniel Caesar and many local acts — including ABBA, which recorded Voyage, its first album of new music in 40 years, there. “It’s in Stockholm, and I’ve done a lot of recordings in there with my band,” says Benny matter-of-factly. “So it was obvious. Why would we go anywhere else? Besides, the money stays in the family!”
Ludvig Andersson: Benny and I, both being musicians, had been saying for a while that one should really have a studio, shouldn’t one? I think we knew that it was going to be difficult to run it as a commercial, profitable operation. But we both love studios, and here was an opportunity to build one and to have our own.
Benny Andersson: To have a studio available when you need it is vital. Before [ABBA] built Polar Studios, we had to go to find time in the studios that existed in Stockholm, and sometimes, there was no availability. Obviously, RMV is open for booking for anyone, as long as they’re not Donald Trump fans.
Ludvig: I think our main selling point is that we’re not in a basement. We have big windows overlooking the inlet of Stockholm. We have daylight in this building that has a lot of character, and it has a very good soul. I remember when we had just opened, it kind of felt like that studio had been there for 200 years. It hadn’t, but it somehow married and matched with the existing building in a way that [gives] it a very welcoming, warm atmosphere.
Benny: It’s full of French doors all the way around. Normally, when you go into a studio, it’s down in a cellar somewhere. There’s no light because of the sound isolation. But we did that anyway, and it works, as long as there’s not a bus standing right outside — but then we just wait for a minute until it disappears.
Ludvig: What was fascinating [when ABBA reunited] was that they walked through the door, and from an outsider’s perspective, it was as if it was yesterday. There was no, “Oh, wow. How cool is it that we’re back together?” It was just like, “OK, hello, let’s have a coffee and do our COVID-19 tests and then get to work,” which was really lovely to see. [They were there for] a month and had quite reasonable working hours for 75-year-olds.
Benny: Yes, that’s absolutely true. Once the ladies came into the studio and we started recording and going through the songs and all that, and they went to their mics, all of us said, “Wow. It’s like no time has passed.” It’s just continuing from when we last met. It was quite amazing, actually, I have to say. And the fact that they can still sing.
Ludvig: Most of the time, not to say all of the time, it works because we’re very similar. [Benny and I] share the same sort of morals and values and views on what music and art is. He and I have a very good relationship, and it’s nice to see your father often.
Benny: It’s wonderful for me, too. Of course it is. And he’s right. He knows what I feel and think about everything. If he needs to, he can answer for me whoever asks him a question about what’s going on. That feels very comforting. —CHRISTINE WERTHMAN
Interviews conducted separately and condensed.
The English Countryside Eden For Electronic Acts
Tucked into the rolling coastal hills of Exmoor in southwest England, Devon Analogue caters to electronic artists yearning to get out of the club and into nature. Since opening in 2017, the space has hosted acts like Disclosure, Skream, Yaeji, Bicep and Calvin Harris. The lattermost artist brought collaborators including Pharrell Williams, Busta Rhymes, Normani and Tinashe along with him while recording his most recent album, this year’s Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 2, at the studio.
“The workflow in there is perfect and really motivated me and [my live engineer Francine Perry] on how we want to build our new studio,” says U.K.-based producer HAAi, who recently spent time working with Devon Analogue’s vast synthesizer collection and taking in views of the area’s expansive fields — and the cows who live in them — from the mixing board. “It’s a real slice of heaven.”
Tristan Grace, who created and runs the studio with his wife, Elley, shares more on the facility.
We wanted to twist the classic, rural, British residential studio concept, which was peaking between the 1990s and 2000s, particularly with legendary U.K. studios such as Ridge Farm and Rockfield Studio playing major parts in recording everybody from Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Sade, Oasis, EMF and Portishead to The Stone Roses. We wanted to create a similar focused studio and living environment with the same vibe for house, techno and electronic artists.
It was, and definitely is, our continued mission to be an electronic sound-focused facility. When we originally planned the idea — it was conceptualized, as people say, on the back of a beer mat in our local pub — there wasn’t much of a commercial plan, just an idea on the space and its use within the scene. Importantly, a key aspect was to create a space accessible to both unsigned artists beginning their journey, those preparing their first record, and then through to the most established electronic artists internationally.
We look at our space as more of a creative room rather than the stereotypical control room. We wanted a workshop flow and vibe. We have a large collection of amazing synthesizers, drum machines and bizarre instruments, all of which are instantly ready to record with no faffing.
Obviously, the primary function is the studio, but it’s also very much about the space, the place, enjoying the Devon countryside, golden-sand beaches, eating good food and having fun outside of sessions. The studio is very rural, set in the hills. You are surrounded by farmland and forest walks. You arrive and switch off from the daily pulls you may have in your usual recording environment. Artists get everything from total privacy; peace; tranquility; our friendly dogs, Larry and Eve; and very, very fresh air. All of these elements we feel directly feed into an artists’ ambitions for their project here and ooze out in their music! —K.B.
The Slice of Middle-earth in Spain
Plenty of destination studios have cushy accommodations for visiting artists. But it’s a fair bet that only Space Mountain Studios, located in the hills of Albuñuelas in southern Spain, has “Hobbit rooms” inspired by the residences of J.R.R. Tolkien’s pastoral-dwelling Lord of the Rings characters.
The cave-like rooms, with round walls and windows, also have “a fair bit of Roger Dean inspiration, the artist who did all the Yes album covers,” says producer and studio owner Youth (real name: Martin Glover), who co-founded British band Killing Joke and has worked with acts including Paul McCartney and The Verve. Dean, he adds, “was also an architect, and some of his architectural designs have played a good influence in the design.”
Middle-earth is just one of the many inspirations for Space Mountain’s residential spaces, which have housed bands like The Jesus and Mary Chain, Culture Club and Spiritualized. The main property can host 16 guests at its villa, which features Moorish-influenced plasterwork patterns, ornate tiles and arches. (The two-bedroom, two-bathroom guesthouse sleeps an additional four.) A Moroccan courtyard leads into the villa’s lounge that looks across a veranda to the Sierra Nevada Mountains and gardens cultivated by award-winning landscape designer Andy Sturgeon. Sturgeon’s designs centered the house and studio on a Daoist pentagram, with each point representing a key element (earth, metal, fire, wood and water) connected by paths leading in and out of the house.
In 1998, weary of basement studios after working in them for 20 years, Youth bought a remote piece of land in the Andalucia region that’s surrounded by 100 acres of predominantly olive and almond trees — and no neighbors. Builder Terry Ottley helped him incorporate elements from some of his favorite recording rooms, like London’s Olympic Studios, at Space Mountain, where artists can use state-of-the-art equipment as they gaze out of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Sierra Nevada valley.
“Because you go so far deep inside [making music], you want an environment that catapults you out to the cosmos when you step outside,” says Youth. “That’s what Andalucia does. It gives you really big skies and 300 days of sunshine.”
Of course, recording in a far-flung, heavily wooded area has its risks. In early September, nearby wildfires threatened Space Mountain for the second time in the 24 years Youth has owned the property. “When [the fires] kick in, there’s not much you can do,” he says. “You’re at the mercy of where the wind’s blowing.”
But wildfires haven’t deterred artists from recording at Space Mountain, which welcomes guests year-round. While at the studio, clients can enjoy true solitude, even receiving deliveries of locally grown vegetables to prepare for themselves from a Spanish organization called La Bolina. “It’s run by a group of women who do it as a charity,” says Youth. “They also house and employ refugees from Africa and all over. They take over unused communal grounds in villages, get the mayors to allow them to farm it and provide fantastic fresh vegetables for everyone in the valley.”
But it’s not always quiet at Space Mountain. Each October, the Space Mountain Festival hosts about 500 guests, including regional flamenco artists and international acts — a big party, and a big promotional opportunity. “It definitely turns people on to the studio,” says Youth. “I invite all these people who’ve never been there before, and seeing it all through their eyes inspires me about how great it is. It’s great to share.” —TAYLOR MIMS
The Washington Barn — And Tree House — With A ‘Family Vibe’
Nestled in a forest just outside of Seattle stands a cathedral-like barn with huge windows that allow sunlight to soak the structure’s interior. But Bear Creek Studio stands apart from traditional, stuffier recording spaces in another key way: its atypical business structure.
“Because this has been my family’s place, it has a real family vibe to it,” says Ryan Hadlock, whose parents Joe and Manny Hadlock built the studio in 1977. “It’s a home studio that was built the right way.”
After purchasing the former “dilapidated” dairy farm on 10 acres in Woodinville, Wash., Joe and Manny, both producers, “built a house here and they’d travel downtown to rent studios and work” on ads and short-film soundtracks, says Ryan, who followed his parents into the world of music production and now owns Bear Creek.
“Back then, there were only really two or three real studios in the Northwest, and they were very expensive,” he says. “So, my parents got together with a bunch of their hippie friends and built the studio in like six months.” Initially, Bear Creek wasn’t considered a residential studio, but rather a space where touring musicians could record day sessions. “It has been constantly expanding since then from its original setup of just a console and tape machine,” says Hadlock.
Today, Bear Creek is staffed with engineers and producers and has become a go-to recording spot for acts such as Foo Fighters, The Lumineers and Brandi Carlile, who loved Bear Creek so much that she named the album she recorded there in 2012 after it. But it came into its own as a residential studio in the late ’80s, right as Seattle’s grunge movement exploded.
“We hadn’t had a residential project until then, which was when bands started coming out here,” Hadlock says. “Soundgarden was really the first band to stay here for like six weeks when they recorded Badmotorfinger [in 1991]. Once people figured out you could book it for months, things changed for us. It was all pretty much word-of-mouth, so the growth was organic.”
Despite its quaint and rustic aesthetic, Bear Creek is very much a modern recording facility. Its studio loft comes equipped with preamps, digital recording gear, vintage microphones and instruments that range from a 1970s Camco drum kit to a 1968 Gibson SG guitar. “One of the beneficial things is that we’ve been around since the ’70s, so we’ve been collecting instruments since then,” Hadlock says.
The property’s pièce de resistance: a treehouse behind the barn that stands 18 feet off the ground. The two-level, cabin-like cottage (with two twin beds) is another fully functioning studio where artists can record vocals or guitars. The Hadlocks added the treehouse in 2013 — “The only thing in the property that was built by professionals,” Hadlock says — because “we wanted to keep growing and the clients kept coming.” (There’s also a producer’s cabin and a farmhouse for lodging on the grounds.)
“Aside from being a beautiful space in a verdant location with excellent gear, Bear Creek holds a special place in my heart,” says Robin Pecknold, frontman of indie folk band Fleet Foxes, “as my dad, a musician and luthier, played bass on the first album recorded there back in the ’70s, Linda Waterfall’s Bananaland. I believe he even helped carry the recording console into the [studio] space.” Fleet Foxes tracked its second EP, Sun Giant, at Bear Creek. “Getting to follow in his footsteps and record there myself for some early Fleet Foxes songs was a thrill. My dream now is to produce his first solo album and record it at Bear Creek to complete the circle.”
With nearly 30 artists recording at Bear Creek annually, Hadlock (whose parents are still involved as consultants and producers) hopes that when people walk into his family’s studio, “they feel at home and comfortable. I hope they get a sense that this is a different and unique place that was really built for them. A lot of care has gone into having an amazing world-class facility but not having it necessarily feel like you’re working, because you’re removed from the city and urban environment. That can be quite inspiring.” —GRISELDA FLORES
The Luxe Grecian Island Idyll
Owner Kostas Kalimeris was still adding the finishing touches to Black Rock Studios when he welcomed his first guest, blues musician Joe Bonamassa, in 2009. Kalimeris had built the space overlooking the Aegean Sea on the Greek island of Santorini with the hope of putting the country on the map of the international recording industry, but he hadn’t had time to take promotional images for it before a friend recommended Bonamassa — a lover of Greece — to come record.
“They asked me for photos and I said, ‘I have no photos, just drawings like blueprint plans,’ ” says Kalimeris. “So, I sent [the drawings] and they booked a month.” The next year, Bonamassa’s album, Black Rock, debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s blues chart.
The whitewashed residential studio, covering more than 72,000 square feet of isolated hilltop, is a particularly idyllic place to record a Billboard chart-topper. In addition to the cutting-edge, open-concept recording space, the three-story residence features a large swimming pool and jacuzzi with a pool bar and barbecue overlooking the sea, and natural light floods its five bedrooms.
Even with stunning photos now available for potential guests to peruse, Kalimeris says the property continues to surprise visitors when they arrive. “It’s the view. It’s 360 degrees. We’re surrounded by ocean,” he says. In just over a decade, the studio on the tourist-heavy island has welcomed artists such as Justin Bieber, Rita Wilson, Skrillex, OneRepublic, Björk and Michael Sembello, who sang the 1983 Flashdance hit “Maniac.”
But establishing an island off the coast of Greece as a recording destination took strategy. Plenty of studios have high-end equipment; Kalimeris understood standing out was about location, location, location. After Bonamassa christened Black Rock, Kalimeris started hosting songwriting camps to drum up attention and create buzz, welcoming as many as 35 people for up to four days who then spread the word to other artists.
Santorini’s attractions include an active volcano, vast vineyards and archaeological sites, so artists can easily turn recording sessions into vacations, too. “Sometimes artists don’t have time for family vacations, so they combine both,” says Kalimeris. “Björk came for her birthday a few years ago in November. It was her birthday present to come work in the studio.”
While attracting artists was once a hurdle, getting them to return has never been an issue. Following his 2009 session, Bonamassa left a note stating, “It has been the best session I have ever done in my life,” and returned to record his next album. Clients have continued to leave handwritten notes of appreciation: OneRepublic recorded “Counting Stars,” the band’s highest-charting single on the Billboard Hot 100, at Black Rock, and wrote, “By far the best studio experience of our lives… We are counting down the days until one or all of us return.” Sembello’s contribution to the wall of notes was even more ecstatic: “If heaven has a recording studio, I hope it will be like Black Rock.” —T.M.
The Brazilian Monastery of Sound
In June, Portuguese singer-songwriter and 2022 Eurovision finalist MARO headed to the lush green mountains of Nova Lima, Brazil, to record at Sonastério, one of the country’s largest studio retreats. She only spent four days there, but she hasn’t stopped thinking about returning since. “I could have spent a whole month at Sonastério,” she says. “As we drove into the mountains toward the studio, it seemed like we were leaving our worries behind. It felt therapeutic.”
Located a half hour from Belo Horizonte, the capital of the southeastern Minas Gerais state, Sonastério is nowhere near the metropolises of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, where Brazilian artists tend to congregate. But the studio’s founder and majority partner, Bruno Barros, decided to build it when he was quite far from these remote mountains himself. Between 2011 and 2014, while attending the Musicians Institute in Los Angeles, he noticed the city had something Brazil lacked: a plethora of well-furnished retreat-style studios nearby.
“When you go to Santa Monica, Malibu, Venice, you see studios with this kind of vibe,” Barros says. “Studios taking artists away from the big city and bringing them to places that are more chill, more isolated.”
Using his own finances, Barros brought on musician and architect João Diniz to design the concrete and wood building, while sound engineer Renato Cipriano (who has helped create studios for Green Day and Alicia Keys) planned the studio; the whole project cost around 2 million reais ($380,000). Sonastério now has a “family ranch vibe” that is “both rustic and modern,” Barros says. It has two wide doors, enabling natural cross-ventilation and plenty of natural light. “I’ve never been a fan of dark studios,” says Barros. “You don’t know whether it’s day or night. It feels like you are in a Vegas casino.”
Since opening in 2017, Sonastério — which in Portuguese means “monastery of sound” and is also the name of a label Barros started in 2021 — has hosted projects with acts from Brazil and abroad, including Brazilian-American singer-songwriter Zeeba, dance music star Alok, pop-samba artist Seu Jorge and multiple Grammy winner Milton Nascimento.
But regardless of their genre or level of fame, Barros says Sonastério attracts artists who have a particular kind of relationship to their work. “We don’t do anything in a rush or the final result will sound ‘plasticized.’ The places that are doing that end up looking like a bakehouse instead of a music production house. I think art demands more respect.”
He never hesitated to build Sonastério in his native Minas Gerais, a region that also birthed legendary singer Nascimento and Clube da Esquina, the influential collective he started with Lô Borges in the 1970s, as well as seminal heavy metal band Sepultura in the 1980s. “I want to catapult the music scene in our region again,” Barros says.
And in this mountain sanctuary, he has found, little miracles have a way of occurring. While working on a documentary about Nascimento and Clube da Esquina, “we spent nine days recording 18 songs with Milton,” he says, “with absolutely no technical problems. That almost never happens. It felt like something magical.” —BEATRIZ MIRANDA
The Bespoke Studio Matchmaker
Sonoramica is a recording studio in Argentina’s Traslasierra Valley, not far from a national park designed to protect the Andean condor population — though looking at photos, it’s hard to imagine even a hardened workaholic getting anything done in such a stunning location. Maybe an artist might prefer to hunker down at Durbuy Music, tucked away in the Belgian Ardennes in a renovated riverside villa. Then again, natural beauty can be a distraction here as well: “If you keep your eyes peeled,” the studio’s website notes, “you may see beavers, deer, squirrels, kingfishers, herons, woodpeckers and many other wonders.”
Sonoramica and Durbuy are just two of the more than 175 recording facilities around the world that Miloco Studios either owns or partners with. The company not only operates and books studios but also helps build them out, deals in audio gear and even manages some producers. The breadth of Miloco’s studio “roster” — which includes numerous spots in industry hubs like London and Nashville, but also a plethora of options in some of the world’s most dazzling and far-flung locations — allows Miloco to create bespoke recording experiences for artists as they hunt for the right place to cut their next album.
“Most people just say, ‘I want a studio,’ ” says Chris Brown, who handles digital marketing for Miloco. The three-person booking team then “has to work out what that means in reality — how that translates with the project they want to make and the budget they have. That’s the beauty of maintaining a roster with variety that covers all bases: You can work out what would be a best fit for these artists.”
Miloco started as a single studio in East London, where Henry Crallan and Queen bassist John Deacon founded Milo Music in 1984. They were subsequently brought in to help run The Garden Studios, another London recording institution. In 2000, Milo Music bought Orinoco Studios (Miloco is a portmanteau of the two names) and it has continued to expand, through acquisitions or partnerships, in the years since.
Today, the still-family-owned business has 13 full-time employees, as well as a Labrador retriever named Prince. (“Prince is completely useless, to be honest,” Miloco’s website jokes. “He has no studio experience and can’t operate a telephone.”) The tiny booking team, on the other hand, is impressively productive. Miloco receives 200 to 300 studio inquiries a day. If they organize a booking on a studio they partner with, they receive a commission; they collect money directly when studios they own are booked.
“We have all sorts of clients,” says Lottie Field, one member of the booking team. “The studios in London start around 275 pounds [$295] a day and go up to around 1,000 or 1,500. For high-profile major-label artists, budget is maybe not so much of an issue. If you’ve got a smaller indie artist that’s not got that budget, they’ll let us know what they’re working toward so we can help narrow down the search.”
The roster encompasses everything from smaller rooms for writing or programming to big spaces for live-band recording. When assessing a potential partner studio, Miloco thinks about what’s both inside and out: “There’s the technical aspect — does it have industry-standard stuff or something that nothing else [on the roster] offers?” Brown explains. “Is it in a desirable location, somewhere where people are going to go?”
But there’s one factor that Miloco values above all. With a client list of “some pretty hefty names,” Brown says, “the most important thing is, if we put somebody with that kind of name in one of these studios, are they going to be happy?” —ELIAS LEIGHT
Aaron Dessner’s Hudson Valley Refuge
After 10 years of cramming The National into his Brooklyn garage-turned-studio, band member Aaron Dessner was ready for a change. In 2014, he and his family moved upstate to an 18th century colonial house in the Hudson Valley, complete with an old horse barn. “It’s right by this pond that’s quite long and thin and really beautiful, and I remember thinking, ‘That’s where a studio could be,’ ” recalls Dessner. So he hired architect Erlend Neumann to design a space that felt far removed, not only from that New York garage, but also from any studio he had been in before.
“The idea was to create some cross between a barn, a garage and a church,” says Dessner. “Also with the feeling that you would always be looking at nature and that there would be a lot of oxygen in the room. When I’m staring out at the countryside and seeing a lot of trees and birds and water, you’re just in a good mood.”
While originally created with The National in mind — complete with two bedrooms plus a loft, a living space and outdoor area — what became Long Pond Studio has since hosted many of his talented close friends, including big names like Taylor Swift. After working with Dessner remotely on folklore and evermore, Swift visited Long Pond to film the 2020 Disney+ concert documentary Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions, and artists including Gracie Abrams and King Princess have since stopped by. Soon, Long Pond will expand to include a Studio B (also built by Neumann). “Everyone who has been coming feels like they’re getting away and that it’s an ideal place to be able to think and create,” says Dessner. “I didn’t realize that it would become this creative oasis, but it has.
Did you and your family feel any anxiety over leaving Brooklyn?
No. I feel like New York has changed so much and at some point it just didn’t feel like the center of it all, musically, anymore. I feel more vital or something here, creatively. I also grew up in Ohio in a very rural situation down in the woods so this is much more natural to me.
Does that factor into why artists come work and stay at Long Pond?
I hate to say it, but it is a little bit like a vacation for some people. For some people, I think it just feels like camp. People are pretty focused, and they usually don’t leave the property. Although it’s really pretty up here and the towns are thriving, it’s rare we do anything other than work, drink some wine and hang out.
Why else do you think artists are so eager to record at Long Pond?
It’s welcoming and it’s very fast, the workflow in there, because you can use anything at any point and it’s all plugged in and ready. I learned a lot from [Bon Iver’s] Justin Vernon and how he works. The vibe or the feeling you have is almost as important as the sound quality. A lot of people spend a lot of money investing in acoustical treatments whereas we have leaned much more into the environment.
What are some distinct functional design elements of Long Pond?
Most studios have an isolated control room that you look through, like a fishbowl into the live room, and I’ve always found that to be kind of paralyzing when it’s like, “OK, go: It’s time to do something brilliant.” I prefer, and that’s what we did at Long Pond, a beautiful room with really high ceilings where there’s a lot of room to think. And then there’s a big iso booth for when someone needs to sing or play something that’s truly isolated. Even the drums fit in there.
Since Long Pond is on your family’s property, are you more particular about who comes through?
Most of my friends at this point are people I make music with. Gracie [Abrams] is a great example; she has been here five times for 10 days each. She just comes in, hangs out with the kids, we’ll make some songs then make some dinner. Same with Justin or Taylor, whoever. I feel really lucky that that’s my job.
After artists visit, do you do the cleaning and laundry yourself?
Yeah, totally. I don’t mind really, but I make the beds and buy the food and I have some help [from engineers] Bella Blasko and Jon Lowe, but we don’t have a studio intern or assistant or anything like that, and I kind of like it. You just do it. And to be honest, whenever I’ve hung out with Taylor or anyone, they’re making breakfast and I don’t feel like anyone is being waited on.
When the folklore doc was released, what did that do for your request pile?
After Taylor, it was a bit crazy how many people reached out. And getting to meet and write songs with people you wouldn’t have had access to… I’m so grateful for it. I have made a lot of music now with Ed Sheeran that I really love, and I met him through Taylor. Gracie and King Princess and Girl in Red have all been here. But I also love going back into The National. This space keeps getting better and I keep adding new instruments, so I feel like we benefit from all these things. But you can’t do everything, and I really don’t want to franchise myself to the point where my head is spinning, so I try to just do things where I feel like I really can help or make something that I believe in, and I think that’s what I’ve done. —LYNDSEY HAVENS
The Woodland Oasis Outside Nashville
More than 40 years ago, when Robin Crow was a young artist signed to RCA, he visited Caribou Ranch, producer James William Guercio’s barn-turned-studio in the Colorado Rockies where Elton John, Chicago and Dan Fogelberg recorded now-classic albums in the 1970s. “ ‘Well, this is heaven,’ ” Crow recalls thinking at the time.
His career as an instrumental guitarist never took off — and he never got to record at Caribou, which was damaged in a fire in 1985 — but the studio left a lasting impression on Crow. It was exactly what he had in mind when, in 1993, he opened Dark Horse Recording in Franklin, Tenn. — charging $134,000 on multiple credit cards to foot the bill.
The Inspiration: Like Caribou, Dark Horse is in the woods; Crow even planted 240 evergreen trees on the 10-acre property, “so you feel like you’re in the mountains.” Then he took the idea of rustic luxury several steps further. The 9,000-square-foot timber frame main complex houses The Lodge, the largest studio on the grounds, as well as an attendant gourmet kitchen and upstairs lounge. The Lodge’s control room, with its Bud Wyatt-modified Trident console, features a 33-foot cathedral ceiling and 142 windows — and it’s quite the view: Hundreds of acres of forests surround the property, along with a river in which clients can fish or kayak. The smaller Barefoot Studio can be used as an extension of The Lodge, but it’s also a favorite for artists like Heart’s Ann Wilson, Yes’ Jon Anderson and Wynonna Judd, who’ve all recorded vocals and overdubs there.
The Clientele: It’s just 20 miles south of Nashville, but Crow says only about 20% of Dark Horse’s clients are country artists. Keith Urban, Carrie Underwood and Dolly Parton have all recorded there, but so have Neil Diamond, Jeff Beck, Korn and OneRepublic. And given his own history, Crow has always supported new and independent acts — including an aspiring artist named Taylor Swift, who recorded her 2006 self-titled debut at Dark Horse. “No one knew that she was going to be Taylor Swift at that point, but we treat everybody exactly the same,” Crow says. “And we try to give everybody a great experience.”
The Setup: Dark Horse can sleep 12, with accommodations ranging from luxury apartments to a four-bunk bedroom, so plenty of acts just move in. Matchbox Twenty stayed for “four months and four days,” Crow says, to record 2012’s North. Even though Tim McGraw lives in Nashville, “he likes to sequester himself” when recording. “He has an entourage of about 30 people. They had to bring in tour buses to sleep a lot of them. He rented every studio, every apartment. He brought in chefs that stayed on site.”
The Future: With its pastoral setting and beautiful wood interiors and exteriors, Dark Horse has also become a prime film and TV shoot location. Reba McEntire shot most of her 2021 Hallmark movie, Christmas In Tune, here; the forthcoming Apple TV+ global singing competition, My Kind of Country, made it base camp for 47 days; and Ford rented it out to film a commercial for the Ford F150 with Rascal Flatts.
And soon, demand for this tranquil hideaway will likely increase further. A planned expansion will include an 8,900-square-foot building with another studio; a gym outfitted with massage tables, saunas, a juice bar and space to sleep an additional 12 people; and a 2,200-square foot air-conditioned “Party Barn” capable of hosting far more than jam sessions.
“My goal is for Dark Horse to be a gathering place,” says Crow, who has also started the Dark Horse Institute to train the next generation of studio whizzes and songwriters. “Obviously, it will always be with music at the core, but maybe it would be something where a group of people that are trying to help with climate change would come and do a summit. Or it could even be a yoga retreat for a weekend. That’s kind of our niche: Instead of trying to compete with everybody else, I’m just trying to be more of what we already are.” —MELINDA NEWMAN
The Exquisite And Eco-Friendly Vermont Setup
In 2015, James Shaw, founder and lead guitarist of the band Metric, was attempting to squeeze recording sessions in during days off on tour. “We booked studios all over,” he recalls, but Guilford Sound in southern Vermont left a lasting impression. “The land is bonkers — rolling hills, something like 400 acres,” Shaw says. “The only person who didn’t enjoy it was the bus driver trying to get the tour bus down that dirt road.”
Guilford Sound belongs to Dave Snyder, who left New York in the 2000s in search of a place where — after years spent drumming in the band Ruth Ruth, then turning a Lower East Side rehearsal space into a recording facility and owning additional Manhattan studios “with varying degrees of complexity” — he could build a studio of his own. By overseeing the construction process, he was also able to ensure the studio’s operations were, top to bottom, eco-friendly. “The awareness of global warming and environmental impact was not in the news every day when we first moved up here,” says Snyder. “But it was on my mind, and I thought if I have the opportunity to build with a green approach, then we’ll do it.
Get The Lay Of The Land: Snyder’s first attempt to find a parcel of land was a bust: He bought property in nearby Marlboro, Vt., and spent six months surveying it, only to find there wasn’t a suitable site for his dream studio. But a new piece of land went on the market around the same time in Guilford — “80 or 90 acres with a house attached.” Snyder says he “fell in love immediately” and purchased the neighboring property, too. Then the real work began: blasting through rock to create a 250-foot-long road, then clearing space for the studio itself. Some of the wood incorporated into the studio and living quarters was harvested on property and kiln-dried down the road.
Don’t Be A Drain: Recording studios are “notorious energy hogs. We leave our console on in the control room 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” Snyder says. Guilford Sound offsets this usage in a variety of ways. Construction incorporated “insulation treatments,” including triple-paned windows, to prevent hot or cold air from leaking out. The buildings rely on geothermal heat pumps, which harness the relatively constant temperature of the earth hundreds of feet below the surface for warming and cooling. And when those pumps need a little extra help, Snyder feeds a wood-fired boiler with lumber he chops down himself. “I learned quite a bit about forestry and wood felling,” he says. “There’s not much chopping; it’s mostly chain sawing. I’m environmentally conscious — I’m not a masochist.”
Be Mindful Inside And Out: The homemade New York studios Snyder worked in weren’t built expressly for the purpose of making pristine recordings. “You can have great speakers in a crappy room and those speakers will sound terrible,” he says. “When I moved up here, I wanted to have the control room be as accurate as possible.” Francis Manzella of FM Design, Matt Marinelli of Coral Sound and technical consultant John Klett all aided in creating acoustics that now make Snyder feel “spoiled.” The extra space he has in Vermont also has its advantages where equipment is concerned: “We have a bass trap that’s just gigantic,” Snyder says, so bass frequencies “don’t bounce off the back wall and come back and distort what you’re listening to.”
The attention to detail on display in the studio is also mirrored outside its walls. Snyder has carefully cut goat-path-sized trails “so they just fit in with the woods.” If one member of a band is working on overdubs, perfecting a vocal part or a guitar riff, the others can walk out the door and wander through the trees. “I almost got lost,” Shaw says. “Then part of you is like, who cares? It’s so beautiful.” —E.L.
Phish’s Chilled-Out Vermont Clubhouse
As a teenager, Phish frontman Trey Anastasio recorded “fake” albums with his friends on a four-track cassette machine. When the jam heroes exploded in popularity in the early 1990s, he “wanted to maintain that joy” — a tall order at rigid, expensive recording studios. So Anastasio, newly married and freshly relocated to the tiny northern Vermont town of Westford, built his own in the woods, minutes from his home. “I can’t even describe how much I love this place,” says Anastasio of The Barn, Phish’s 4,000-square-foot home base since the late ’90s, which has also welcomed Herbie Hancock, Toots & The Maytals and more. “There were no plans, no architects, nothing. The whole thing was all planned out as it went. They let me push the button and blow up the dynamite to put the foundation in.” Like Phish’s music itself, inspired improvisation yielded startlingly realized results.
Acoustic Serendipity: Anastasio purchased The Barn “from a Vermont farmer with rough, rough hands” for just $1,000. Then, the farmer broke the news: That handshake deal was to buy the building itself, not the land it was on. Anastasio decided to move and painstakingly re-create the structure a few minutes down the road, which ultimately paid off. “Every producer I’ve ever worked with has been like, ‘I’ve never been in a room that sounds so good,’ ” says Anastasio. “It sounds unbelievable because all the walls are rough barnboard, and they’re jagged. There are no flat surfaces.” The floor, a poured concrete slab topped by boards culled from the trees cleared to make a path to The Barn, is another result of the “magical bunch of decisions that yielded this anomalous acoustic space,” says producer Bryce Goggin, who has worked with Phish since producing 2000’s Farmhouse, the first album recorded at the studio. “It has this great combination of very diffuse and very varied surfaces, which is something that acousticians are always just trying to do to recording spaces already.”
Stories Wherever You Look: “There’s nothing new at The Barn at all,” Anastasio says. “Every piece of furniture is from family or hand-me-down.” After walking through hand-carved doors (Anastasio’s mother found them on a trip to India), visitors can relax next to the recording console (the 64-input API that Anastasio is fairly sure was used to record the Cops theme) on the Davenport couch Anastasio jumped on at his grandmother’s house as a 2-year-old, or unwind in the chair his father watched TV in when Anastasio was growing up in New Jersey. During breaks, “the table that we eat on is my Italian grandmother’s that I ate every meal on when I was 6, 5, 3 years old.” Other pieces are locally salvaged, like the overhead lighting fixtures, taken from the gym of a nearby school before its demolition and still wrapped in the mesh that once blocked wayward volleyballs.
The Clubhouse Is The Key: Road life wore Phish down, and the band took two extended hiatuses in the 2000s that cast doubt on its future. Today, Anastasio credits The Barn with the group’s longevity. “I don’t think there would be a Phish — I know there wouldn’t — without The Barn, because it’s our clubhouse,” he says. “It isn’t a recording studio. When we go there, everybody just starts laughing and cracking up.” Anastasio credits absurdist creations like Kasvot Växt, the fictional Scandinavian band Phish concocted and “covered” an album’s worth of material by at its 2018 Halloween show, to The Barn’s freewheeling atmosphere. The lack of a control room helps, as does the console, which Goggin calls “the backbone of the operation” and has so many inputs that “we can leave everything set up and just flow and flow and never have to pause to tweak anything.”
A Good Hang: The Barn’s laid-back aura — and its 50-mile view of Mount Mansfield and the Green Mountains — has a way of making other artists stay awhile, too. For their 2004 album, True Love (a set of collaborations with other musicians), Toots & The Maytals visited the studio, planning to record just one track with Anastasio. “But once they got there, the stars were out, the doors open up, the moon is out. The Maytals are in the corner, consuming pounds of ganja, and everybody’s laughing and having a good time,” Anastasio recalls. Toots had plans to rerecord Willie Nelson’s “Still Is Still Moving to Me” with the country icon, and spontaneously decided to lay down the track’s instrumental then and there at The Barn. “Nobody gives a f-ck at The Barn,” Anastasio says with a laugh. “You’re just there with your friends. It’s a hang.”
—ERIC RENNER BROWN
The ‘Safe Haven’ Under A Baja Hotel
Flying to Cabo San Lucas in Mexico and chartering a car north on Highway 1 along the rugged coastline of Baja California is the easy part. When pulling up to Hotel El Ganzo in the tiny beach town of San Jose del Cabo, the real trick is finding the studio located inside — or rather underneath — this hip hub for vacationing creatives.
Those in the know will spy the trap door in the floor of El Ganzo’s chic lobby, pull it open and descend the stairs, walking past a glowing art installation into a thoughtfully designed, slightly retro-looking recording space outfitted with guitars, a grand piano, hand drums and other necessities.
Artists who’ve traveled this path usually do so thanks to El Ganzo’s Musicians in Residency program, which offers travel, a week’s accommodations and use of the studio in exchange for a rooftop performance and live recording session for the hotel’s YouTube channel. They’ve included everyone from French pop band L’Impératrice to Anderson .Paak, whose 2019 residency was highlighted by the Grammy Award nominations he received during his stay. “Our founder wanted it to be a sacred, hidden place,” says El Ganzo’s music director, Paco Rosas, “where artists came into a safe haven to explore and create.” —K.B.
The Estate Upstate
Randall Wallace was mid-air when he first noticed Glen Tonche, an 85-acre mountaintop property overlooking the Ashokan Reservoir in upstate New York. It was 1998, and he was flying to visit a friend, folk musician Jay Ungar, who ran a fiddle camp in the area. The trip was cut short when Wallace contracted Lyme disease, but his impression of the estate (originally built as a summer home for Pennsylvania magnate Raymond Pitcairn’s family) and its spellbinding surroundings stayed with him. The property, he discovered, was for sale, and he had a “novel idea” of what he could make out of it: “a recording studio with a view.”
Wallace — a fashion photographer and also the grandson of former U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace — had little recording studio experience. But he had recently started seeking opportunities in the music world, and he found the bargain and the potential too good to pass up. “I think it was a $1.6 million offer price, and I called in an expert and said, ‘This seems ridiculously low and people must be idiotic to not want to buy it,’ ” Wallace recalls. “The last time I checked, every recording studio has the ugliest view imaginable — if you even get a window. So why don’t we do this?” He did, and the result is Allaire Studios.
The Build: To construct Allaire, Wallace enlisted the renowned Walters-Storyk Design Group and lead designer John Storyk, the architect behind thousands of recording studios since founding Manhattan’s iconic Electric Lady for Jimi Hendrix in 1968. Storyk envisioned turning the property’s giant “Great Room,” with its panoramic view of the Catskills and its naturally low-end-absorbing acoustics, into the studio’s live room. “The setting, the site, the view and the tranquility were key in thinking about what this room should be,” he says. “And at the same time, we created a lounge and a kitchen area and all the other amenities that are usually associated with destination studios — the kind of stuff you might not get in an urban studio.”
The Stories: Following its opening in 1999, artists were encouraged to come stay at Allaire for weeks with their bands, families or both while recording. Norah Jones laid down part of her 2002 blockbuster album, Come Away With Me, here. David Bowie was so taken with the area after recording most of 2002’s Heathen here that he ultimately bought a nearby property for his own use. (Sadly, Wallace notes, the rock legend died before getting to do much with it.) And country superstar Tim McGraw took full advantage of all Allaire had to offer: Wallace recalls him smoking a joint with his father — former MLB All-Star pitcher Tug McGraw, who was undergoing cancer treatment — in one of the studios while working on his Billboard 200-topping 2004 album, Live Like You Were Dying, and also renting out the estate’s master bedroom (usually occupied by Wallace himself) with his wife, fellow star Faith Hill.
The Treasures: Wallace’s world-class array of studio instruments is available to Allaire’s clients. “Usually [studios offer] bass, guitar, drums and then go f-ck yourself,” Wallace laments. “I have the finest bass clarinet you can buy… flutes, trumpets… tons of saxophones, all top-drawer. And then synthesizers, insane quantities of synthesizers right now.” Within that keyboard selection are some of the rarest Yamahas, Chamberlins and Lowreys, including, Wallace notes, those used on classic recordings by rock greats like The Beatles and The Who: “You’re just coming in and going, ‘Look, this keyboard can’t just do “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “Baba O’Riley,” it can do a third song. Let’s do it!’ ”
The Future: The mountaintop mystique of Allaire continues to draw artists ranging from indie rockers Grizzly Bear to jam trio Medeski, Martin & Wood to alt-pop singer-songwriter Clairo, who came with collaborator Jack Antonoff. (He had sought Storyk’s advice on a place “for a week or two that was really out of the way and quiet,” the architect recalls.)
“There are very few places on the planet where day to day you just don’t hear anything of hustle and bustle,” Wallace says. “And it slows you down very quickly. When you don’t hear anything, you’re now only hearing what’s inside you — and what you’re trying to get out.” —ANDREW UNTERBERGER
Hans Zimmer’s Seductive Santa Monica Lair
Hans Zimmer can’t remove himself from society completely while recording like some artists — after all, he explains, “I always like to be close to where I can get a hold of the great musicians.” But the revered film composer has still managed to build himself an escape at the seven-building Santa Monica, Calif., complex that houses his film scoring company, Remote Control Productions. With walls lined with vintage synthesizers, shelves of old books and even an original by the Austrian expressionist painter Egon Schiele, Zimmer’s surreal inner sanctum is, as he puts it, a place where “your ideas can run free and you can be a little bit naughty and a little bit wicked” — and the perfect setting to score some of the century’s most iconic movies.
I was recording at Jackson Browne’s studio and saw a “For Lease” sign next door. We leased that building and then eventually bought the freehold on it. But everybody told us we were doing it wrong: “If you want to work in Hollywood, you should work in Hollywood.” For me, coming from Europe, I just wanted to be close by the sea.
I had an architect, Bret Thoeny [who designed Prince’s Paisley Park in Minnesota], come and help so that the thing wasn’t actually going to collapse. I had my friend Roger Quested, who has always built my speakers and who I’ve known my whole professional life, come and help out with the acoustics. The rooms I like are the rooms that you can have a normal conversation in, that are not too dead and not too echoey. You don’t feel like you’re walking into an alien space, because your audience isn’t going to be in an alien space.
I said to everybody working on things, “I want it to look like a late-19th-century Viennese brothel.” Where you feel free, where you can have a good glass of wine, where you want to go and have a good chat, where you feel unshackled by society, where you feel unshackled by anything. There’s Pro Tools and there’s Cubase, like with everybody else. But I feel, since the heart of the system is the same for everybody else, it’s as important to create an environment that is — well, if you think about it, I suppose 90% of my life is spent in that room, so I might as well have some fun with it. There is absolute purpose behind everything I did in there. It’s not just ostentatious and over the top for the reason of being ostentatious and over the top.
You can cram a fair amount of people into there. [The soundtrack to 2013 film] 12 Years a Slave was recorded in that room because that’s a small ensemble and I could have the director there. You want to make the director part of the band. We recorded [the soundtrack to 2013 movie] Rush in there with Ron Howard absolutely being part of the band. I did something with Gore Verbinski, and Gore was actually playing guitar. It’s great when the director can play something and you can put them to use and save money on one musician. I mean, we’re all working with limited budgets. (Laughs.)
I wanted a library, really. There’s an enormous amount of books in there. Most directors that I work with are literate and are visual. So having them within a library where I can just go to the wall and pick up a book about Caravaggio or any old painter or whatever it is, you can instantly cross those two divides. You can go between sound and picture very easily in this room because it’s supposed to inspire both.
It’s a constantly changing, constantly evolving laboratory. Once, Ron Howard was leaving and was nearly finished with his movie and he said, “Just remember, don’t shut the laboratory doors too early.” I thought that was a really great statement. Always leave room for the next question to be asked. Let it evolve all the time. —E.R.B.
The Bahamian Beauty That Gives Back
Steps away from the coast of the Atlantic Ocean in New Providence, Bahamas, there’s a striking structure that very much resembles the waves surrounding it — a white edifice by starchitect Bjarke Ingels, set on the 600-acre grounds of a luxury resort community. It could well be the tropical hideout of a star like Drake, or Mariah Carey, or Sting.
But while all of those artists have inhabited it at some point, this isn’t any of their mansions away from home: It’s Sanctuary Studios, where they have all recorded. The 19 narrow windows on the facade let the Caribbean sunlight into a Finnish oak-paneled live room, designed with the help of acousticians from U.K.-based White Mark to achieve sound quality as pristine as the scenery outside.
“You have the overall designers, but they need the experts,” says Ann Mincieli, studio director of Sanctuary and an established engineer known best for her work with Alicia Keys. (She also owns New York’s Jungle City, a luxe destination studio itself.) “It’s quite the team, down to mechanical and HVAC engineers and plumbers — over 80 to 100 people, and we all work together.”
But for Mincieli and founder Charles Goldstuck (founder/co-chairman of HitCo Entertainment), building a destination studio in the Bahamas didn’t mean shutting it off from surrounding residents. “We felt this would be a great balance between a commercial opportunity but also giving back to the local community — to have a place where Bahamians could learn how to work within a recording studio environment,” Goldstuck says.
So they teamed up with the local Windsor School and the Bahamas Youth Foundation to create a scholarship program aimed at bringing “talented and gifted young people” into the school’s well-regarded music program, which includes trips to Sanctuary itself. The studio also houses a training program for local music teachers to further their own education. “If you’re building a studio in an area where there aren’t facilities, it’s down to going into the schools and hearing from the music teachers,” Goldstuck says. “What do you need? How can we help?”
Funding those programs is possible because Sanctuary is often booked solid by global stars for seven months of the year. Recently, DJ Khaled made two trips there while working on his chart-topping 13th album, God Did. The megaproducer is one of a few artists who fortuitously touched down at Sanctuary at the same time, spurring spontaneous collaborations. “Justin Bieber and Khaled, Justin Timberlake and Khaled, they definitely made songs together,” Mincieli says. “If [an artist] posts on social media in the Bahamas, [other artists] get excited. They know exactly where they’re at, and they’ll either call them or try to come down and be a part of it.”
Still, it’s hosting the stars of the future at Sanctuary that Goldstuck and Mincieli ultimately find most rewarding. “You can have the most impact when you reach younger students because they don’t have the resources and opportunities — at least in our world,” Goldstuck says. “We are as excited about what happens locally as we are about bringing in the top artists from around the world.” —NEENA ROUHANI
The Welsh Farm Where Rock Legends Frolic
How do you keep a recording studio in a remote location running for six decades? For Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire, Wales, the secret is animal magnetism. Literally.
“Cows, sheep and horses!” exclaims lead Pixies guitarist Joey Santiago of why the alt-rock forefathers always return to a facility located outside a village that’s home to fewer than 200 people. “The laid-back, countryside feel of the studio enables you all to concentrate on the work.”
That bucolic quality has attracted icons such as Queen, Rush, Black Sabbath, The Cure, Robert Plant and Coldplay to the recording studio, which brothers Kingsley and Charles Ward opened in the early 1960s — and to this day functions as a working farm. (Yes, cows are milked each morning.) And, over the years, the simple setting has inspired some classic compositions.
“One night [in 1999], the tape machine broke down at 12 o’clock, and [the members of Coldplay] all stepped outside the door,” recalls Kingsley, now 82. “There’s all yellow lights around the yard here. The stars were shining, the moon was shining, and the producer, Ken Nelson, looked up and said, ‘Look at all the stars — they’re shining for you.’ In other words, your luck is going to change. Chris Martin went, ‘God, that’s a good line.’ And within an hour, he had written ‘Yellow.’ ”
Kingsley also recalls watching Freddie Mercury putting the finishing touches on “Bohemian Rhapsody” in 1975 while seated at a piano near “where we used to keep the saddles for horses.” The ivories faced a window with a view of a weather vane, and, he says, “my brother wondered if he wrote [the lyric] ‘any way the wind blows’ looking at it.”
Rockfield’s setting — saddles, chicken feed, milk buckets and all — is not a savvy promotional gimmick. When Kingsley bought an acoustic guitar in 1959 (“I wanted to look like Elvis”), Charles (who died at age 85 in July) began writing songs while the two worked the family farm. Given the substantial distance to the nearest recording facility, they crafted a DIY setup in their mother’s attic with a tape recorder and a mixer. Over the next decade, the duo refined and expanded the studio using fees from local bands who would pop in to record.
By 1970, Rockfield Studios had produced its first major hit, Dave Edmunds’ “I Hear You Knocking,” which topped the U.K. Singles Chart and hit No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100; that same year, Black Sabbath rehearsed its breakthrough hit, “Paranoid,” at Rockfield. Since then, the rural Welsh studio has lassoed artists from Robert Plant and The Stone Roses to Oasis and The Cure (which began working on new material there in 2019) to the Pixies, whom Kingsley calls “the nicest band we’ve met.” He fondly remembers watching the band’s drummer, David Lovering, wowing members of The Proclaimers with card tricks during downtime. “[The Pixies] appreciate that we’ve had a bit of a struggle over the years to keep this going, and it’s a team effort,” he says, noting that Rockfield has upgraded over the years to include resources from Pro Tools to three natural echo chambers.
While Santiago says the “legendary” history of Rockfield put it on the Pixies’ radar a decade ago when the band trekked there to record its trio of reunion EPs, it’s the pastoral surroundings that brought them back earlier this year. “The working farm provides great sounds and smells,” he says. “We take daily walks along the river to the town.”
“If we didn’t have the cows and the farm, if we were a studio in London or Manchester or Birmingham [England], perhaps they wouldn’t be interested in us,” says Kingsley. “What throws them is that we did some of the greatest records in the world, and people can’t believe it’s still a working farm. Every television crew wants to film the cows first, then the rock stars.” —JOE LYNCH
Tame Impala’s ‘Spiritual Home’ on the Aussie Coast
After recording his band’s seminal 2010 debut album, InnerSpeaker, at Wave House — an oceanside studio three hours south of Perth, Australia — Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker recalls telling a bandmate: “ ‘If I ever make any money on my music, I’m going to buy this place.’ ”
Just in time for the album’s 10th anniversary in 2020, Parker fulfilled his pledge. During lockdown early in the pandemic, the urge to “create my own perfect world in the area I was stuck in” struck him. So he called an acquaintance to inquire about Wave House, where he had also recorded parts of Tame Impala’s third album, 2015’s Currents. “Oh, it’s kind of falling apart,” the acquaintance told him. “Hearing that triggered me,” says Parker. “I knew I needed to buy it.”
Soon after, Parker made an offer on the 50-acre property, situated next to Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park and the Indian Ocean, to its original owner, American expat producer Ken Eichenberg. Since its founding in the 1980s, the far-flung compound has attracted acts such as the Beastie Boys, Fatboy Slim and The Waifs, and it is infamous among locals for the multiday, sex- and drug-fueled raves it hosted in the ’90s.
“It’s so funny: When we get a painter or plumber out to the house, they usually come in and are like, ‘Oh, sh-t. This place?’ You can see it in their eyes they are having flashbacks,” says Parker with a laugh. But when he first came to the studio to create InnerSpeaker in 2009, he wasn’t familiar with its past. “For me, this was just a sanctuary,” he says. “I was in love with it.”
Before coming to Wave House, Parker usually recorded his music alone, in cramped, noisy share houses. But he had just signed a deal with Universal Music Australia’s Modular Recordings, and for the first time, he had the budget to record somewhere other than his bedroom. First, the company urged him to spend two months in Los Angeles and do sessions with big-time producers, but Parker balked at possibly losing his creative autonomy. He begged them for just a “shack by the beach” where he could work in isolation — nothing fancy.
Ultimately, his team booked him at Wave House — a major upgrade from the shack he had requested, though one that was falling into disrepair. To combat a leaky roof, he “had to put pots and pans out to catch the water droplets from falling on [my] gear,” he says, an issue that remained when he bought the place in 2020.
He also had to lug in his own equipment. By the time Parker arrived, Wave House’s downstairs studio had been mostly disassembled so the house could be rented out for weddings, events and bachelor parties. Plus, that recording space didn’t have the same views of the ocean as the living level above. So Parker splayed out his own guitar pedals, keyboards and tape machines in the family room to record. “Because I was watching the waves crash in the distance as I was making music, I’d record a few seconds of something and think, ‘Ah, this sounds heavenly,’ ” he says. “That’s kind of the double-edged sword about recording music in beautiful places: Everything you make sounds beautiful.”
He wonders aloud whether the effect of breathtaking scenery on music-making is actually good or bad. “Does it make it worse because you’re not trying as hard? Or does it make it better because you’re more satisfied with it?” he asks. “I think, ultimately, Wave House made InnerSpeaker better and really influenced its sound. It’s quite simple and spaced out because I didn’t feel the need to cram it with too much production.”
Upon release, InnerSpeaker quickly established Parker as a musical innovator, and in the decade or so since, Tame Impala has headlined Coachella and received four Grammy Award nominations. Eichenberg accepted Parker’s offer on the compound without pause, despite receiving higher bids from property developers over the years because, Parker believes, “Ken was waiting for someone to come along and take on the legacy of the place.”
Parker now calls Wave House his “spiritual home,” despite noting that he’s not a spiritual person generally — the place is just especially “magical” to him. “I’m even thinking about burying some of my things out there,” he says, referring to a pond on the property that’s no longer up to code, which local officials have asked him to fill with concrete; he wants to leave some personal artifacts in the sealed pit to commemorate his time there. “Maybe the kick drum I used on InnerSpeaker?” he muses.
Whether or not he proceeds with that kick-drum burial, Parker’s connection to Wave House was already immortalized through two of his defining albums. He plans to create much more music there in the future and dreams of a day when the studio is revamped and he can “bring artists [he’s] working with out there,” to give Wave House its rightful renaissance. —KRISTIN ROBINSON
The Coolest Kind Of Camp
“Shaking up the routine can lead to great creativity,” says Peter Coquillard, head of international at the management company Milk & Honey. As part of his enviable roles there and at his own firm, The Invitational Group, Coquillard helps songwriters and artists do just that by setting up trips for them to make music together in far-flung locations.
Industry folks know these types of excursions as songwriting camps, and while some involve camping out in urban centers like Los Angeles, Coquillard often sends his teams to far more unexpected locales — say, on an all-expenses-paid trip to make songs in a converted Transylvanian castle, including a private dinner at the location that inspired Dracula (as Coquillard did this past year).
The idea that creatives can thrive — and be productive — when taken out of their regular work environments is one that’s not only spreading but also encouraging more international collaborations. Prescription Songs, for example, hosted a camp in South Korea to acclimate its songwriter roster to the lucrative world of K-pop; Universal Music Publishing China and She Is the Music teamed up to host an all-women writing camp in China; and S10 hosted a stay in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
Placing talent in a totally new environment can do good in more ways than one. Jackson Browne hosted his own camp in recent years with a philanthropic twist, taking over Artists Institute, a Caribbean seaside studio and school outside Jacmel, Haiti, and inviting musician friends like Jonathan Wilson and Jenny Lewis to work with local Haitian engineers and Lakou Mizik, a roots band from the country. The unlikely group ended up creating a full album, Let the Rhythm Lead, Song Summit Vol. 1, and the project’s royalties were donated to benefit both the institute and another school in Port au Prince. “It’s a really powerful, unique album … interweaving North American indie rock with beats and percussion of Haitian Vodou, Spanish and Malian guitar [and] Tres Flamenco with songs in English, Creole, Khassonké, Manding and Spanish,” says the studio’s co-founder David Belle.
These overseas camps can get pricey, but Coquillard says that, for him, it’s a long-term play — investing in international relationships and building a community of worldwide talent is just as crucial as producing hits. And getting songwriters out of their usual routines is, he says, more than worth the trouble: “Giving them something to alter their normal perspective, and to give them a bit of beauty and wonder, usually translates to great songs.”
The International Group/Milk & Honey songwriting camp team doesn’t plan to slow down. Coquillard’s so-called Bali Songwriting Invitational led to the creation of Noah Cyrus’ hit “July” and Demi Lovato’s “Sober,” and the Transylvania camp led Milk & Honey and songwriter Oak Felder to discover the untapped potential of Romania’s songwriters; together, they launched a joint-venture publishing and production company with Romanian star Smiley’s HaHaHa Productions called Romdrops.
“Truly,” Coquillard says, “you never know where great talent will come from.” —K.R.
The Sprawling Texan Superstudio
Everything’s bigger in Texas — including the recording studios. The Sonic Ranch, a sprawling compound in tiny Tornillo, about 40 miles southeast of El Paso and a short car ride from the U.S.-Mexico border, claims to be the “world’s largest residential recording studio,” with five studios and distinct mixing and mastering rooms, 35-odd bedrooms spread throughout several different structures, a pool and a basketball court, all contained within a 3,300-acre working pecan orchard that founder and proprietor Tony Rancich inherited several decades ago. Lush and green under the widest, bluest Texas sky, Sonic Ranch has served as a respite from the frenetic pace of music industry hubs for acts from Jenny Lewis to Portugal. The Man to Midland, which named its 2021 album for the place.
It’s not just the wide-open spaces and decadently appointed studios that make Sonic Ranch creatively fruitful, though, according to artists who’ve worked there: Because there is so much studio space, different artists will often stay on and record there at the same time. “It’s very much like band camp,” quips singer-songwriter Rett Madison, who was recording in Studio A during Billboard’s Zoom tour of the premises. “It feels like a really magical, peaceful place to be able to be really honest and raw and vulnerable and connect with other musicians.”
1. Studio A: The first studio on the property includes five separate spaces. Artists enter through the airy Top Room, which features a 1927 Steinway piano as well as numerous original lithographs by artists like Joan Miró and Marc Chagall, then proceed into the knotty alder-paneled control and main rooms designed by the late renowned acoustician Vincent van Haaff. “Everyone talks about the wooden smell whenever they first walk in because it’s just so amazing,” says studio intern Natalia Chernitsky. Its Back Room, which used to be a chinchilla farm, is partially underground — which Rancich says further enhances the acoustics.
2. The Hacienda Built: in the 1930s by Rancich’s grandfather, the 12-room Spanish Revival manse is adorned with antiques and original art, as well as all the amenities one expects from a well-appointed hotel. On-site chefs prepare food in one of the two kitchens for communal meals, and adjoining mixing and mastering rooms are outfitted for both intense editing and spur-of-the-moment recording sessions.
3. Neve Studio: The second studio built on the property, the Neve was also Sonic Ranch’s largest room until recently, with a chapel-like main tracking room that Koe Wetzel, Lil Yachty and Arcade Fire recently put to use. Finished in 2005, the studio is named for its console: an 80-channel vintage Neve, part of which formed the console at Motown’s West Coast studio and changed hands through Madonna and X Japan’s Yoshiki Hayashi before landing at Sonic Ranch.
It’s the crown jewel in Rancich’s vast collection of musical instruments and recording equipment, most of which have a similarly remarkable provenance and all of which are available to visiting artists. A bass that The Byrds used to record “Eight Miles High” is sitting out in one studio, and Rancich has 100 guitars and basses all stored on their own labeled shelves. “It makes a huge difference to get instruments that are truly one in a thousand,” he says.
4. Big Blue: Piece by piece, Rancich has expanded Sonic Ranch over the years, and the most recent addition is one of his most ambitious yet. After driving on a bumpy dirt road through rows of pecan trees (there is also a smoother, quicker route by highway for those in a rush), visitors arrive at another cluster of studios and housing that includes Big Blue, which was completed in April 2021 and is the property’s largest studio yet. “I knew that this would coalesce and bring things to another level,” says Rancich. “We hadn’t had a room of this size — it’s actually similar in size to Abbey Road’s smaller studio.” Expansion isn’t done yet, though; Rancich is building an elaborate workout facility for his guests, adorned with the same imported fabrics that have become the studio’s signature.
5. Adobe Bungalow: “At the end of the night, this is where the magic is,” says Rancich of the one-room studio. “People gravitate over here because of its vibe.” The 100-year-old adobe building that was once a blacksmith shop is now a cozy studio with a view of the rolling Trans-Pecos hills. “It’s like mixing two realities,” adds Chernitsky. “You go inside and have the best and most advanced equipment, but it’s totally isolated from the chaos of the world right now.”
6. The Garcia House: For artists seeking more seclusion, there’s a collection of housing options (and that basketball court) around a more isolated set of studios. Almost any kind of accommodation is possible: When Fiona Apple visited to record parts of her 2020 album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Garcia House added a fence so that her dog could be close by without any danger of getting lost on the vast property. —NATALIE WEINER
Peter Gabriel’s Rural, Revolutionary Retreat
As a freelance engineer in the 1990s, Tim Oliver mostly lived between London and Manchester, England, where he played in bands and recorded acts like The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays. But about 15 years ago, he decided to try working farther afield: He rented a room from Peter Gabriel at the iconoclastic artist’s Real World Studios, in the village of Box near the historic city of Bath. Oliver was familiar with the studio’s legend: New Order was among its first clients, and he still kicks himself for missing a party there that “went down in history” during the “heady rave days.” Once he started working at the space, the self-professed “country boy” realized he preferred its vibe, which is now much more peaceful. After its studio manager retired, Oliver became senior consulting engineer, part of a team of three overseeing Real World’s operations. He spoke about the special place that’s just an hour from Heathrow but, as he puts it with a laugh, “far enough from London to keep the horrible people out.”
I just love the environment, and now there’s no way I can leave except in a box! (Laughs.) It’s a magical part of the world. All the green, the running water, it’s all part of Peter’s belief that you need that for refreshment and creative ideas. But also the studio design and layout was his vision — and completely opposite of conventional studio design at the time. He hated having the control room separated from the studio by glass; there would be this latent or slightly under-the-radar paranoia from musicians. He wanted to bring everyone together. So he thought of the big room, this vast, cathedral-like space where everyone — the musician, the producer, the engineer — are all in the same room, which makes communication so much easier. When he built it, I believe it was slightly laughed at, but I found it really exciting, and I always wanted to work here because of that. And now it’s kind of the norm; if you find a new studio, they’ll have a very big control room that can house most of the musicians. It’s much more relaxed; there’s no red-light fever.
We can put up about eight to 10 people in the house, and there’s a separate, self-contained producer cottage with a bit more privacy. We have a chef who cooks for everybody, a big dining room, a lovely housekeeper who’s a kind of West Country woman, very down to earth, who just looks after everyone’s needs. It feels like home immediately. There’s no “Oh, sh-t. I didn’t feed the cat.” You don’t have to look at the news or read about the queen dying — you can find out two weeks later. And when Peter comes in, he’ll pick up on little things that make all the difference. He’s very astute. God is in the details.
Harry Styles was here just recently to do his last record. You can hear [the studio’s influence] in how laid-back that record is. He’d go out running in the morning, around the fields — freedom he probably doesn’t get so much elsewhere. He’s very funny, a lovely bloke. He’d go off to the local pub, book a table for Sunday lunch — and within a few days, we had 50 young girls at the gate. But he manages it so well. He doesn’t get carried away by it at all. He’s just a smiley boy.
We’ve had Foals, The 1975, Tom Jones. I do a lot of work here for Robert Plant. Most of the vocals for the last record he did with Alison Krauss, he stood right here singing with me. It’s a huge range of artists, and they all enjoy the environment and the vibe and find the creative kick. That’s why we survive, I think. And that’s all down to Peter and his ethos. It’s all about fostering the creativity of the musician and the performance — nothing else matters. That’s his ethos entirely. —REBECCA MILZOFF
The Thai Compound Fit for a (Literal) King
Only one of the recording sessions for British hard-rock band Enter Shikari’s eight albums was interrupted by a monsoon. “The rain was falling the size of shotgun shells,” singer Rou Reynolds recalls of recording 2012’s A Flash Flood of Colour. “After that, all the bugs come out. One of us made the mistake of leaving the doors open to the kitchen area, and it was full of dragonflies.”
That’s just another day at Karma Studios. In the 12 years since former Abbey Road Studios producer and Sony executive Chris Craker opened Karma on a two-acre plot in the Thai fishing village of Bang Saray, acts including Enter Shikari, Jessie J, Bullet for My Valentine and The Libertines have recorded there. It’s a place where someone can schedule an ice bath at the break of dawn and meditate for two or three freezing minutes at a time, surrounded by tropical gardens filled with tweeting birds and clicking cicadas. An outdoor pool is 30 feet from the studio; the gardens contain an abandoned building that Enter Shikari used to record drums. The nearest city, beachside, bar-filled tourist favorite Pattaya, is half an hour away.
“I wanted something by the sea, where we would have peace and tranquility and just [be] away from the real world,” Craker says. “That was my desire — to give people a chance to be working in a space where they felt like they were on vacation.”
The story of why Craker, a 63-year-old Brit, moved to Thailand begins with a fax he received in 1996 while recording the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road. It was from a collaborator of Bhumibol Adulyadej, also known as Rama IX, the king of Thailand since 1946. The monarch was a classical composer and jazz buff who had recorded many albums, and after the collaborator heard Craker’s work, he wondered if he was available to make a record.
“Yes,” Craker quickly faxed back, then flew to Bangkok the next week. Thus began a string of 11 albums with the king (who died in 2016) and a fondness for Thailand that led Craker to buy his Bang Saray plot in 2008. Roughly two years later, he built Karma, then spent so much time creating what he envisioned as a “cross between a resort and the most amazing studio” that he didn’t put much thought into drawing customers. He had to give the studio’s inaugural client, London rock band Placebo, 10 days of recording for free to lure it to Karma. Jay Kay of Jamiroquai, a friend of Craker’s, became customer No. 2, and that led to a rush of British bands.
“I’ve never paid one dollar in Facebook advertising or social media marketing,” Craker says. “The whole thing has run, the last 12 or 13 years, completely on word-of-mouth.”
In Karma’s early years, he continued to work in American studios and was constantly flying between his London home and New York and Thailand. (“I’ve got enough air miles to keep me going for the rest of my life,” he says.) But the stress hit him hard, as did a prostate cancer diagnosis six years ago. He has fully recovered but now spends most of his time in Thailand.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Craker’s son, Richard, a U.K. songwriter-producer, relocated to Karma and helped set up an independent label, Karma Sounds, which the elder Craker calls a “health and wellness label.” They pivoted to making their own ambient music to soundtrack yoga and meditation sessions, as well as general chilling out; within 15 months, the label’s music surged to 15 million monthly streams. “The side hustle has grown into a business,” Chris Craker says. “We can just be a little bit more choosy [about bookings] now.”
All told, Karma Sounds has spewed 1,800 tracks, working on social media marketing with yoga and meditation influencers. But the studio still brings in artists for sessions, including comedian-singer Oliver Tree late last year. “Everything’s mic’d up to be creative from the minute you arrive,” Craker says. And Reynolds has never made music anywhere like it. “I was at a loss for words,” he says. “It was recording in a microcosm of paradise.” —STEVE KNOPPER
