Nicolas Becker is a leading French Foley artist and sound designer, with credits on hundreds of top-flight movies. Highlights such as Batman Begins, Gravity, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, The Impossible, Hellboy II: The Golden Army and a string of collaborations with Roman Polanski stand out on an extensive CV.
Now well-known and sought-after in Foley and sound design, Becker flaunts a willingness to engage with the creative brief of a project.
Flare Audio is relatively new to the loudspeaker market, but the company promises to bring with it a sea change in our understanding of loudspeaker physics and possibly set a new benchmark in loudspeaker performance.
With a background in applied physics, founder Davies Roberts’ ideas on fixing the ills of loudspeaker enclosure have evolved into a range of products that covers large-scale line-array components to close-field studio monitors.
With two MPG Mixer of the Year awards under his belt, music producer/mixer/engineer Cenzo Townshend opened the doors on his Decoy Studios in late 2014. The move follows time at London’s Trident in the 1980s, work with Ian Broudie and then Stephen Street at The Bunker in Olympic Studios.
In the Suffolk countryside, Decoy studio complex is kitted out with choice equipment, centred on Audient ASP8024 and SSL SL4000G mixing consoles.
English-born producer/engineer Adam Moseley got his start at London’s Trident Studios, where he worked with the likes of Phil Ramone, Tom Dowd, Mutt Lange and Steve Lillywhite. Now settled in Downtown Los Angeles, he operates a studio, owns the Accidental Muzik label and is an instructor at UCLA.
Having just finished an EP with Manchester artist Zoe Violet, he wants to talk studios and sound.
While centre stage belongs to studio and mixing console, the story behind the refurbishment of London’s iconic Church has an all-star cast – from new owner Paul Epworth through studio designer John Storyk, and the Miloco group that handled the build and will manage bookings, to the specialist techs who lent unrivalled expertise to the many aspects of the project.
MD Nick Young offers an insight into Miloco and the path to The Church.
While Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Welcome to the Pleasuredome album is anticipating an extremely limited anniversary re-release, London’s Science Museum is exhibiting a recreation of a pioneering 1929 loudspeaker design.
There is casual coincidence in the naming of the exponential horn and Pleasuredome producer Trevor Horn, but they also have a tangible connection in their pursuit of sound fidelity against a tide of lo-fi digital distribution.
It began with Waves’ announcement that it was accepting bitcoins as an alternative to established currencies in exchange for its plug-ins. A newsworthy move, and one that prompted a closer look at Bitcoin and its place in audio…
A journey through new money, new tech, crime and corruption ended at the door of a California recording studio, where Tim Moore sees an exciting future for Bitcoin in music.
Entering a vast, uncharted cave system, the team suddenly lose contact with their advance reconnaissance. A broken fibre-optic link has them fearing the worst, but our man is safe and the link is quickly repaired – then the real trouble begins.
If the monsters we later encounter as the team explore the secret depths of Bruce Hunt’s The Cave are somewhat far-fetched, terminating fibre with crimps and electrical tape is simply ridiculous…
The phrase ‘poor relation’ is uncomfortably familiar to most audio professionals. Whether in broadcast, live sound, club installations or even games, the achievements of audio technologies and technicians are regularly obscured by everything from lighting to CGI. Even conferencing systems suffer the same injustice – as elsewhere, audio gets most attention when it fails.
But conferencing is presently a hot topic – particularly for Symetrix.
Richard Ferriday and James Godbehear are in agreement – while their recent move from Midas to Cadac took the industry by surprise, it also presented them with something of a culture shock.
‘We’re now in a place where our contribution can make a difference to what goes on,’ Ferriday says. ‘It’s nice to be back in a position where you can make decisions and live or die by them.’
