Show Notes
Studio Radicals is a brand new podcast series from dCS Audio and journalist Kate Hutchinson, featuring in-depth conversations with some of music’s most innovative minds. It celebrates the individuals who are shaping how music is made and bringing a fresh approach to production, from the composers building distinctive sonic worlds to the engineers helping translate artists’ ideas into sound.
What does it take to create a hit album? How do you craft a great sonic experience? And how can you push the record-making process to bring listeners daring and original sounds? You’ll find out across eight episodes, with Marta Salogni, Suzanne Ciani, Catherine Marks, Ebonie Smith, Hannah Peel, Maria Elisa Ayerbe, Ramera Abraham and Cicely Balston.
For more information and to see portrait photography, videos and playlists from the series, visit dcsaudio.com/studioradicals and instagram.com/dcsonlythemusic.
More from Studio Radicals
Mastering is the final part of the album-making process – where the songs are fine-tuned and all the elements are shaped into a cohesive whole. Cicely Balston is one of the UK’s breakthrough young talents. They’ve worked across leading London studios like Gearbox, Air and now the legendary Abbey Road, with its iconic zebra crossing out front.
This time we’re heading to the California coast with electronic visionary Suzanne Ciani. Her home studio overlooks a stunning bay, and has inspired many Grammy-nominated albums of meditative analogue synthesizer and neo-classical piano music. In the 1970s, she pioneered electronic music with her trusty Buchla modular synth, envisioning bold new horizons for where the sound could go, and designed inventive sounds for the advertising world, such as Coca Cola’s infamous “pop, pour and hiss”. She has returned to her Buchla in recent years, and uses the stage like a studio: she performs innovative shows in quadraphonic sound, manipulating and live mixing sound in real time.
In this episode of Studio Radicals, host Kate Hutchinson is in Miami, Florida, with Maria Elisa Ayerbe, who Billboard magazine named one of the songwriters, producers and engineers who is “Blazing New Paths for Women in Latin Music”.
Ramera Abraham is an award-winning vocal producer, recording engineer and songwriter who really gets great pop music. She has created arrangements and/or engineered for the likes of Victoria Monet, Little Mix, Jade Thirlwall, Arya Starr and Ivy Queen, and has also assisted on songs by Adele, Jess Glynne and Elton John. She won Vocal Producer of the Year at the 2023 MPG Awards and, as well as working with big names, helps up-and-coming musicians to find their voice.
Hannah Peel is a Northern Irish musician, producer, composer and BBC Radio 3 broadcaster based in Yorkshire, England, who blends electronic and classical music across her many film and TV soundtracks and solo albums, including 2021’s Fir Wave, which made the Mercury Music Prize shortlist.