Tell me a bit about the room across from what's now the master control room. Was this the beginnings of what ultimately became Eyeland Studio?
Ben Knox Miller: It's currently a "dry" room, as well as a drum school on Saturday mornings, run by Rachel Blumberg. But that was mission control when we first moved in here. It felt a bit like outer space, in the darkness, black curtains, with the gear lights illuminated. You feel like you're mixing in a vacuum. We moved in there for the control, at first, because we wanted to hear exactly what was in the speakers and not be fooling ourselves. We needed to know what the opera house actually sounded like on playback. But soon it got claustrophobic. You could mix a three-piece and be totally cool and comfortable, but any more than that and it was too crowded.
So when you first moved into that small room, you knew you'd be using the rest of the space, eventually?
BKM: We had no plan at all, other than to make our new record. We had 400 feet of snake, a few mics, and a bunch of songs. But the record outgrew that room and we began to see the long-term potential of the space, so we ripped out the kitchen sink, smashed out a window, and built QRD [Quadratic-Residue] diffusors. The kitchen was bigger.
How are you integrating the Columbus Theatre into the studio? It's an incredible space, with so many variations available.
BKM: We built a patchbay that makes it easy to record any sound in any of the acoustical settings in the theatre. The concrete dressing rooms under the mainstage and the large theatre lend themselves as unique natural echo chambers for the studio. Jeffrey Prystowsky: There's a silent movie organ, too. An original Wurlitzer from 1926. The mechanical instruments and pipes are high above the theatre seats, behind the mural.
How did The Low Anthem journey lead you to this place?
BKM: Well, we'd been on tour for about five years, and in the meantime had various warehouse studios where we'd always do our own recording. We'd come home for a few months to work on the record, then move shop again. It seemed that we were moving shop every season, and after five years of not living in one place, or having a permanent setup, we came home and really wanted to decompress for awhile. We had demos for the new album. We packed up our last studio, a decrepit swamp of a mill building where some guy used to breed rare reptiles in North Providence. We were looking for a place where we could keep all of our equipment, because much of it was in my parents' attic. We wanted to find a space that would allow us to become self- sustainable, as well as keep producing work. JP: We were at the end of the Smart Flesh tour, and we were so used to riding into town in the tour bus, looking for the venue, for the pizza place, and whatever forms of alternative media there were available. It was nice to break that routine and decompress back home. I first saw the theatre, and there was an ominous marquee that said "Opening Soon," which hung there for so long that no one really believed it would ever actually open. I suppose it was "soon" in the cosmic sense. [laughs] Anyway, I was having pizza across the street and I thought, "This is a music venue." In Providence, at the time, there was really nothing like it, so I started to research, making some calls. We had no plan, and no real intent to move in. Through a mutual friend, Ben and I got a tour of the theater, which had been closed since 2009. Once we saw it, we knew we had to make our next record here. We'd just come from a pasta sauce factory and the gator pit, so we got the gear out of Ben's parents attic, swept the floors, and started recording!
Was the owner immediately receptive to what you guys wanted to do?
BKM: We knew right away that someone had been using this space in a DIY way. Jon, the theatre's owner, is also a musician, who comes from opera. He has owned the theatre for 50 years, and there are artifacts from all the different eras cluttered in holes, crawl spaces, and crevices throughout the building. It was built in 1926, a year before the first Western Electric theater PA systems were produced, so it's designed to project naturally. He thinks of the room as an instrument for natural singers. For a lot of big hall recordings, the sweet spot has turned out to be the orchestra pit. Go figure. The sound comes up off the hard floor and fills the double proscenium, which then draws the sound out into the room like the bell of a horn. He was excited to be offering the space to amateur acousticians.
When did you open the doors to the public, and how did you go about handling all of the code issues and renovations?
BKM: We opened on November 21st, 2012, and we told him that if he would let us, we'd put our efforts into building something here. It was a gradual process. Once the building was active again, he began showing up more and more. It had been hard for him to see it in the state it was in, but as things improved he found ways to make stuff happen. We fed off each other's energy.
