The Cement Room in Cotati

Prairie Sun Recording sits on a former chicken ranch in Cotati, California, about an hour north of San Francisco. Late in 1991 Tom Waits walked through the main tracking rooms there, past the well-tuned isolation booths and the polished console, and stopped at a small concrete utility space at the back of the building. It had been a storage closet. The floor was bare cement, the walls were rough plaster, and there were no acoustic panels of any kind. He pointed at it and told the engineer that this was the room.

What got made there became most of Bone Machine. Waits sang from the cement, banged on a chair that became the kick drum, and tracked a percussion sculpture called Conundrum — a welded cross of industrial metal his neighbor had built in a barn — that hit the walls and came back wrong in the most useful way. The record won a Grammy. Critics tried to describe its sound and kept arriving at the same metaphors, that it sounded like it was being recorded inside a coffin or a furnace or the inside of a skull. What they were describing was a storage closet with a microphone in it.

The lesson is not that any room will do. The lesson is the opposite. A purpose-built studio is a room that has been taught to disappear — corners diffused, parallel walls broken, low-end traps in the ceiling — so that the only thing on the recording is the thing you put into it. That is a great gift, and it is also a particular aesthetic. There is another kind of recording that wants the room to be in the picture. For that kind of recording, the question is not how good is this room but what does this room know.

A purpose-built studio knows how to be invisible. A cement closet knows about hardness, about reflection, about the way a voice asking a difficult question comes back to the person asking it. A church knows about height. A wooden farmhouse knows about footsteps overhead. A car parked at the edge of a highway knows about the tires of trucks. None of these spaces were built for music, but each of them has been listening for a long time, and what they have been listening to is a kind of life. When you put a microphone in one of them, the room arrives as a co-writer.

This is not romance. It is engineering. A room with a long decay time will not let you crowd it; it forces a sparser arrangement, which forces a slower vocal, which forces a more committed lyric. A room with a short, dry slap will not let you hide behind reverb; it forces a stronger performance because there is nowhere for a weak one to go. The architecture is making decisions about the music whether you notice it or not. The question is whether you have chosen which decisions you want it to make.

This is the work of pre-production no one writes about. Before any take, the producer and the artist are choosing what kind of weather the song will live inside. A cement closet is a kind of weather. A live wood floor is another. The microphone is just the instrument that translates the choice into a recording.

Most rooms you walk into already know what they are. You just have to be quiet long enough to hear them.