On a sunny day in Salem, Kurt Ballou squints against the noon sun as he opens the door to his apartment cum recording studio, GodCity. He retreats into the dim interior, closing the door on two bums arguing at his doorstep. "You're the first person I've seen in days," he tells me, and his disheveled hair and 5 o'clock shadow -- and something shifty in his demeanor -- make that statement easy to believe.
As both guitarist and engineer for his band Converge, Ballou has spent the past few days laying down guitar tracks for their next album, No Heroes (due October 24 on Epitaph). The work has been painstaking and solitary, and with bed and workplace occupying the same duplex, Ballou fell naturally into a hermit-like existence. "Some days the whole day will pass and towards the end of it I'll realize that I haven't used my voice at all, so I'll just start calling people or talking to myself," admits the 32-year-old.
A musician with a more practical side, Ballou went to school for a different kind of engineering — aerospace — and jokingly refers to himself as the only recording engineer with a degree in rocket science. Post-graduation, Ballou worked yet another kind of engineering stint — this time biomedical — but after six years in the field his company cancelled the project he was working on and handed Ballou a pink slip, as well as a hefty severance package. He used the money to buy his latest studio and living space, the fourth incarnation of GodCity in his recording career.
Ballou never intended for the recording work he did with his own bands, or even the bands themselves, to materialize into a fulltime job. But as Converge continued to grow in the hardcore and metal scenes, Ballou was solicited by like-minded bands hoping to get some of that “Kurt magic.” Everyone from the Hope Conspiracy to Cave In to Modern Life Is War sought Ballou’s help in realizing their recording visions. And Ballou took them on, viewing the recording sessions as opportunities to experiment with his equipment and practice for his own records.
How did you first become interested in engineering and production?
Well, mostly I’ve always been interested in having maximum control over my own music, artistic and otherwise. When Converge was first starting out the hardcore scene was incredibly small, particularly the kind of hardcore that we play. It was completely different than the way it is right now. The idea of earning a living playing hardcore, or even the idea of going on tour and not losing money, we couldn’t even fathom that, it wasn’t even a possibility. None of the bands that we looked up to ever made a dime. There was really no money in hardcore to put out a well recorded record, so the burden of that ended up falling on us — if we wanted to do anything, we had to do it ourselves. That could be booking tours, which I’ve done, that could be putting out records, which I’ve done, or recording records, which obviously I’ve done – there just wasn’t a market for it, so everything we had to do, we had to do ourselves. There were other people around who recorded bands and stuff, but we didn’t have a lot of money to hire anybody. So I’ve kind of always had an interest in doing that because, if I recorded myself, then I could spend time working on it to get it right. I also kind of felt like the idea of recording myself and my friends was artistically fulfilling. I’d rather have an artistically fulfilling experience recording than one that ultimately sounds good.
