Pink Noise Studios, 2014-2022

Saying goodbye to 15 Ward Street

"All this and more is impermanent 
A fluid in motion you float within  
Predictions aren’t worth what you wrote them in  
Secondhand ink from a shitty pen  
So I’m gonna try out more listening  
And I’ll take all the blows as they come to me  
I’ll live and I’ll love my community  
Then I’ll disappear into memory"
-- The Michael Character, "29"

Pink Noise's lease on Ward Street in Somerville, is ending on March 31, 2022. A new tenant is moving in on April 1st. Sometime before then, I'll conduct my last session at Pink Noise. I hope it won't be my last one ever.

For the last month I was hoping that I could find some kind of partnership that'd make the rent make sense, and sign a new lease at the eleventh hour. Given how recently my landlord had spoken to me about his difficulties finding a tenant to move in after the end of our lease, it seemed like a reasonable possibility. But as of Friday I've been made aware that it's not a possibility any more. If Pink Noise exists past April 1, 2022, it won't be at 15 Ward Street in Somerville.

Pink Noise was a big space, and its monthly operating costs between rent, utilities, equipment replacement, toilet paper, piano tuning and coffee filters totaled to somewhere between $3500-4000 / month, a sum which over the years has been somewhere between slightly more than or equal to my monthly take-home pay at my day job. From late 2018 until mid-March 2020, I was, remarkably, just about breaking even on a yearly basis through a combination of regular podcast editing work, at least 3 weekends' worth of full-day sessions a month, a show or live performance every other Friday (where I charged a flat room fee), and a complicated schedule of renting the space to other engineers, or to musicians looking for a practice space, at an hourly or monthly rate. It was a delicate equilibrium that I managed myself–I refused to take on unpaid help, but didn't have the money to hire anyone–and most of my time outside of my day job was spent either at Pink Noise or managing the space remotely.

The pandemic upset that equilibrium. I was extremely lucky to work on some incredible albums as a mixing and mastering engineer in 2021, and to host a handful of one-on-one in-person sessions in those furtive weeks between the first and second waves, but as COVID cases kept increasing with no end in sight, I realized how financially unsustainable the lease was. Beyond that, the lockdown caused me, like many others, to reevaluate my priorities, and I began to realize how much of a toll the frantic pace of breaking even on the studio pre-COVID took on my physical and mental health. Even if we returned to pre-2020 conditions, with conditions in the local music scene strong enough to sustain the number of bookings I could count on before, would I even want to go back to what was essentially a second 40 hr/week job that I subsidized with my "real" 40hr/week job?

With all this in mind, I asked my landlord to put the space on the market at the beginning of 2021, in the hope that I could end my lease early. Ultimately, due to lack of interest from other tenants throughout 2021, I ended up maintaining my lease through the originally-agreed-upon term. During that time, I tried unsuccessfully to find a new equilibrium, where I could share the space with other like-minded folks who might preserve the spirit of Pink Noise while letting me take a reduced role in day-to-day management and financial responsibility. I've been glad to have talked through these questions with some of you, and I hope to collaborate with many of you in the future in some capacity, but sadly I couldn't pull off a last-minute Hail Mary and keep some continuity to this space I've been involved with for most of the past decade.

I took over the lease to what is now Pink Noise at the end of 2015 from my good friends Mathieu Cunha and Parker Crane, who found the space and who signed the initial lease in the spring of 2014. While I didn't initially sign the lease, I helped build out the space and ran what might have been our first audio recording session, in September 2014 with Perseverance Family Band. By the end of 2015, we were only renting half of the current Pink Noise space, there were only a few strips of console tape stuck on the booth door, and the future of the space was uncertain. We'd tried a number of things in the space - recording music, videography, late-night talk shows tapings, podcast production, and more that I'm sure I'm forgetting—but by late 2015 we were all considering moving, or finding different work, and Mathieu asked if I wanted to take over the lease and keep the space (then known as BOCA Studios) going.

Still, we could all agree that the space at 15 Ward Street was a special one. I remember going over the lease transfer with Mathieu over lunch at Sunset Café (RIP to another local East Cambridge haunt), and I remember Mathieu's relief that he wouldn't have to tear down this space he quite literally built from scratch, that it would keep going in the hands of someone who cared.

At the time, I was excited to keep the space alive, but I was also nervous: would I be the one to have to put it to rest someday?

From 2016 through 2020, I learned a lot more about running a recording studio than I'd expected. I learned how to use the space, with its high ceilings and unexpectedly full sound, to capture sounds that I was proud of. I learned how to decorate the space to make it inviting as well as functional. I learned that a clean bathroom and a working coffee machine are just as important for a DIY studio as a rack of API preamps or a deep mic locker. I learned that I had a knack for working with performers and getting them in the right headspace to be creative—to this day, I cherish all the moments a musician approached me after a session and said that of all their times in a recording studio, I made them feel the most comfortable.

I even got a bit better at promoting the studio, which didn’t come naturally. My early forms of promo never moved the needle much—Facebook and Google ads didn't translate to bookings, and the flyers I put up in my practice spaces got torn down before anyone could react to them—but when I started hosting shows at the space, I found a way to bring new musicians into the studio while giving folks I'd worked with a chance to play a nice, intimate show in the place they'd recorded their most recent songs.

There are so many shows I remember fondly, but these are a few highlights:

- The first show I booked in summer 2017, with Miserable Chillers, Dyr Faser, and Pure Pupil
- A live, full-band recording by Oompa that inspired me to quit my crappy coffee shop job and spend more time at the studio
- Album releases for Christians + Lions, VQnC, Hamstank, Kirk Windsor, and more
- My dear friend Ari's birthday party in 2019, with Brittle Brian, Ultra Chapelle, Grace Givertz, The Most Beautiful Moth in America, and LDLS
- Getting to host HIRS and Coherence on their tour on like a Wednesday in 2019 along with WIMP and Pain Chain
- At least two MCTheprofessor.gov recording sessions
- Solo performances by Susan Putnins and Amy Klein, both former members of the first band I was ever in, The Sinister Turns
- One of my last pre-COVID gigs, from January 2020, featuring Grace Givertz, Madison Duffy, Ultra Chapelle, and the Michael Character. I remember standing in the audience at that show, watching that murderer's row of a lineup, and thinking "2020's gonna be a good year."

While I never wanted to spend too much time booking shows, I look back fondly on the connections I made hosting events at Pink Noise. Not to gas myself up too much, but I think Pink Noise was a pretty special place to play or attend a show, and during a pandemic that's cost us Great Scott and ONCE, I'm sad to have to close down another small, independent-minded local venue.

In the next two months, I'll be at the space as often as I can, finishing recording projects, clearing out the space, and tying up loose ends. I'll need to find a practice space to use for my own band practices, something I haven't had to do since the EMF building still existed, so if you have any leads on those, or you're renting a spot that I could share for a few nights a week, please drop me a line! If you have any projects to finish at Pink Noise, or have one last thing you want to track here while I have the space, let me know, and we'll find a time to do that. If you'd just like to come by and see the space for one last time, let me know too.

(This is a real long shot, but....if you've been dreaming of interviewing me for Tape Op magazine but have been too afraid to ask, now's your chance! I'll clear my schedule. Love y'all; I read the first three Tape Op compilations so often in college that I think they literally disintegrated)

I've earmarked the weekend of March 18-20 (the weekend before my birthday, incidentally) for some kind of final gathering or event (COVID permitting) to commemorate the space. The time after that will be spent packing up the gear and finding a space for the pianos and the sound-absorbing baffles before we close up shop for good.

What in the world will I do now?

The obvious answer:
Ideally, I'd like to ultimately set up another, smaller studio, somewhere bigger than the closet of a practice space but smaller than the Ward Street property. I've been excited about the prospect of building out another space for years now–the lessons learned from building and maintaining a studio make you acutely aware of all the things you'd do differently, and better, the next time around–and I hope that someday I'll have a place like that to show you all.

The biggest obstacles I see to that are 1) even if I rented a smaller space, commercial real estate in the area is expensive and landlords aren't usually psyched about the idea of using a space as a recording studio, and 2) you can make a lot more noise, and have a lot more space, in a more rural environment, but I would also very much not want to live in a more rural environment. Besides, it's not like housing prices outside of the city are that much cheaper these days.

The real answer:
- I don't really know.
- Even if I do end up creating another studio space, that will undoubtedly take a while and I don't feel like rushing into it.
- I couldn't tell you what my weeks will look like, or how I'll feel, once the thing that's at once my biggest time-sink, one of my greatest stressors, and a major contributor to my self-esteem is no more.
- I've been feeling like a lot of things need to change in my life, and I'm excited to take some time to work on myself more.
- Perhaps I'll dedicate myself to my day job in corporate AV / IT; attend a bunch of webinars, collect certifications, deepen my skills. Make elaborate lunches to share with my coworkers in the break room.
- Perhaps I'll do the same thing but for creative audio engineering: save up and do one of those mix retreat deals where you bum around a chateau in France for a weekend with like Jack Joseph Puig or some shit
- I'm gonna read a lot more, go on long walks with myself, exercise more, run a bunch of tabletop roleplaying games.
- I might spend some time planning my dream vacation, to see the Personal Rapid Transit System monorail in Morgantown, WV.
- Hopefully I'll spend time more time with you all as a friend. There are a lot of you I'd like to get to know better but with whom I've mostly interacted when one of us was paying the other for recording services. It's scary to think about–am I interesting as a person outside of being 'the studio guy?' What will it be like to start more conversations with 'how are you doing?' rather than 'how about these dates for recording the EP?'–but I'm excited to start.

(It’s a bit distressing to realize that moving out of Somerville, or the Boston area, is a realer possibility for me now than it has been since 2014, when I decided not to move back closer to home in order to stay near the studio. I don’t want to leave Somerville, but it’s weird to think about how I haven't been able to consider living anywhere else for most of my 20s and early 30s even as friends and family have moved all over the country. I’m grateful for my partner, my friends, the really nice little park by my house, and all the other people + places that have + will continue to connect me to this place even when Pink Noise isn’t here)

But what about this? A tangent

Aside from music and the recording thereof, the single biggest hobby in my life has been tabletop roleplaying games in the genre usually just called "D&D."

I've been lucky to have gotten back into playing in some weekly games since the start of the pandemic, and I've spent a lot of my free time getting deeper into the online RPG blogosphere, where thousands of writers and gamers release brain-rattling new content daily. Like recording, and like a lot of "passion projects" that people our age dedicate themselves to, RPG writing is an art form that many hobbyists attempt to make into a career, or a business, with questionable returns both financial and inspirational.

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about one article I found in this zone, by the always-insightful Marcia B. of Traverse Fantasy. In the article, she asks what it would look like to demonetize a hobby, to engage in one's craft without bending yourself out of shape to commodify and monetize it. Can we envision other ways to fulfill ourselves creatively, and to support our communities materially, without struggling for success in the market? She writes:

"Something we can do, on an individual and a collective basis, is to reject the predominant culture of the hobby and to strive for a community with non-commercial interactions between members. This is not to say that the issue is grounded in the culture of the hobby, but that the culture of the hobby has developed to reproduce the sorts of relationships we have with each other. No more indie publisher guilds masquerading as unions (?) and misappropriating the language of anticapitalist critique (!) to convince you to buy their zines. No more Twitter pseudo-personalities taking offense at people pirating their work. No more snake oilers arguing with walls that Wizards of the Coast is selling trash, and therefore you should instead buy their trash. None of this makes anyone’s lives better, except for those fortunate enough to profit off of everyone else. Fortune here is mostly a function of being early to the chase and having a strong force of personality directed towards marketing. I want an exit."

It's a question I keep coming back to w/r/t recording. What would non-commercial recording even look like? Audio recording is already one of the costliest creative practices, especially in an urban environment where playing or recording 'rock' or 'pop' music often means renting a sufficiently isolated space outside of your home. Commercialization also comes naturally: for all the times I've been undercut for recording services, people generally agree that music recording should cost money, even at the most DIY level. My own story with Pink Noise has been told according to the logic of monetization, to wit:

- I graduate college and can't use the recording facilities I used to have access to as part of my tuition
- I feel like I have some talent for recording music, or at least a desire to keep recording music
- It's tough to find a way to record music without having a space of my own to record in
- Rent is expensive
- I book as many sessions as I can to try and cover the rent
- I look for ways to grow my business and bring in more customers, through subletting the space, advertising, paying for logos and a website, etc etc
- I spend as much of my 'recording' time being a small-time business manager / petty landlord as I do actually recording
- I raise my rates (a good thing! all the DIY engineers reading this probably should too, right now) but still can't cover my expenses and have a decent standard of living as through recording alone, so I get a day job
- between the day job and recording, I get burnt out and exhausted easily

I love recording, and I want to do it when I have the chance to work on music that's meaningful to me, music that's made by friends new or old. I don't think I'll ever want to record music as a full-time career, but I haven't found a way yet to maintain a facility of the caliber of Pink Noise (to say nothing of a better one) for those projects without having to work constantly, or raising my rates to a level that the people I like to work with (almost entirely self-funded, independent artists making their first or second albums) couldn't afford. Indie musicians in Boston already have to deal with sky-high costs of living, ludicrous rents, a dearth of decent small venues, and crowds who don't dance. Sometimes I feel like my clients and I are passing the same few hundred bucks back and forth, and while I'm proud to perform high-quality work that I think justifies my rates, I feel bad knowing how hard it is for artists to recoup any of that money, especially post-COVID.

I'd love to find some creative ways to keep recording into the future, full-time studio space or no, and I look forward to finding possibilities to do so that tie me less to the grind of hustling for gigs and searching for the one decent commercial lease remaining in the area. Is there a way I could work with musicians where I felt like I was a full-fledged member of a collective, rather than just a contractor charging a fee? Is there a way I can make the recordists and musicians with whom I collaborate feel like they're a part of my creative practice beyond just paying me for studio time?

More than anything, I'm proud of the times when it felt like there was a real community based around Pink Noise, whose enthusiasm for the space and for what happened in it matched my own. I wasn't able to reconcile the contradictions between Pink Noise as a community that was bigger than me, and Pink Noise as a difficult-to-maintain business with me as the sole proprietor. I'm hopeful that we'll see new opportunities for musicians and engineers in the future that are kinder, weirder, and more resilient than Pink Noise, and I'd be eager to help build something like that in community with you all.

Thank you,

Dan Thorn

Somerville, MA

2/2/2022