BLOG 23/10/2018
The Jan Diaries — No Man Is an Island (The Art of Collaboration)
Day two at the Red Bull Music Academy was reserved for Kevin Saunderson, one of the three fathers of Detroit techno alongside Juan Atkins and Derrick May — but this entry of The Jan Diaries is really about something else. Starting from a morning tour of the Funkhaus with Red Bull’s Avril Ymayo, and a main control room Jan Kinčl describes as a museum of legendary studio equipment, it grows into a column about collaboration and ego.
What the piece covers
Kinčl starts from studio economics: technology has lowered the entry barrier to a laptop and a decent pair of headphones, while piracy gutted the budgets that once paid for professional rooms. What a real studio still offers, he argues, is not just monitoring that reveals the whole spectrum — it is the people whose job is to pull the best out of a recording. He admits he long believed that accepting help diminished authorship, and names the two people who changed that: Regis Kattie, a French keyboardist with a Zagreb address who became his equal partner in the studio within a year, and Igor Fabris, the Zagreb engineer who ended up mixing their album. For scale he points to 4hero’s Play With The Changes — three years of work, several studios and a long list of names in the credits, and still unmistakably a 4hero record.
The part that stayed
The Fabris story is the heart of it. Kinčl had come to borrow microphones; while he stepped out for a ten-minute phone call, Fabris pulled up one track and started adjusting the mix. That night, playing a nine-hour set with Matija Duić, Kinčl played both versions — and watched the floor answer Fabris’s. The next day he called and proposed remixing the whole album, a job that took about five months. What bothered him at first was Fabris’s trademark sentence — “imam viziju za ovaj miks”, I have a vision for this mix — until the visions kept turning tracks into better ones, exactly the way Mandy Parnell described the engineer’s job in her Berlin lecture: connect with the emotion in the music, then bring it forward.
Read the full piece
The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Eight minutes.
The Jan Diaries | Nitko nije otok (aka umjetnost suradnje) → redbull.com