“
Money was Carter’s invisible helper, a friendly ghost making things happen in the background. Cars arrived, restaurant tabs got picked up. When it was time to change scenery, money dissolved the city into a beach or a ski lodge. The thing was never to point out that this was happening. Since I couldn’t work out how I came to be there, why I was Carter’s faithful squire instead of some other studio engineer, none of it seemed real. It was all illusion, red dust, shit turning up in FedEx boxes. When Carter decided we were going to set up a recording studio, it just sprang into existence. He came into my room one day with the keys to a building by the water in Williamsburg. We cycled over and there it was. Contractors were already at work, installing soundproofing, building partition walls. The gear was magnificent, none of it new, always with a history, everything at least forty years old, tube amps and sixties fuzzboxes and a desk certified to have once been installed at Fame studios in Muscle Shoals. Vocals went through a pair of nineteen-fifties AKG C12’s that cost fifteen thousand dollars. When the remodeling was finished, we plugged in and started looking for business. Six months out of college and I was in New York, running a fucking studio. Carter had a very particular idea about what he wanted to do. We were billing ourselves as audio craftsmen, artisans of analog. We would even offer to record to quarter-inch tape, if that’s what the client wanted. He knew a place that could press from it, so we could make vinyl records of new music that hadn’t been digitized at any stage of production. Ye olde stereophonicke sounde. Step
”
”