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    Plotting the Future of the Most Storied Studio in Jazz

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    ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, N.J. — Hidden along a commercial strip north of the George Washington Bridge, surrounded by car dealerships and characterless corporate offices, is hallowed ground for jazz.There, tucked in a one-acre wooded lot, sits a squat concrete-block structure built in 1959 by Rudy Van Gelder, the polymathic former optometrist who became the genre’s most influential recording engineer. On thousands of albums made at his studio there by the likes of John Coltrane, Horace Silver, Dexter Gordon and Bill Evans, Van Gelder developed ways to capture sound with renowned clarity and depth, earning the respect of musicians and the envy of other engineers.“History was made there,” Herbie Hancock, who recorded at Van Gelder’s studio numerous times, said in an interview. “History that defined what jazz was then and what jazz is now. The roots of it are from those records that were made at Rudy’s studio.”Yet after Van Gelder died in 2016, at age 91, the future of his studio — known to jazz fans everywhere from LP credits, but seen by few besides the musicians who recorded there — was left in doubt. Van Gelder willed the property to his longtime assistant, Maureen Sickler, but gave her no instructions about what to do with it. Sickler remembers only that her mentor had been devastated by the demolishment of his parents’ house in nearby Hackensack, where he began his recording career, capturing Miles Davis and others in the family living room.Van Gelder at his recording console in the late 1980s. The building housing his studio was designed by David Henken, an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright.James Estrin/The New York TimesAfter about five years of work to restore Van Gelder’s equipment and obtain historic-property status for the building, Sickler and her small team — including her trumpeter husband, Don, and Perry Margouleff, another audio engineer and studio owner — are now midway through a plan to make Van Gelder’s haven a full-service recording studio once again, and create a nonprofit organization that would assume ownership of the space and ensure its longevity.How that transition will work — and even whether the contemporary music industry will have use for a 63-year-old studio built for acoustic jazz — is an open question. In recent months, the Sicklers, with Margouleff’s help, have been busy booking sessions, tidying up the overgrown grounds and even getting the studio answering machine working again. But Sickler, 76, said she is determined to see it through.“I feel very strongly that musicians should have the opportunity to record in that incredible acoustic space, and to feel the history and the inspiration that lives there,” she said. “Musicians who come into the space are awed about who has recorded there. They need the opportunity to make their own history in that unique room.”INSIDE VAN GELDER’S studio, the sense of history can be almost overwhelming.The building was designed by David Henken, an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright, and its wide, square main room has a cathedral-like ceiling of cedar planks, supported by four Douglas fir arches that meet at a 30-foot apex. Most recording studios are windowless caves; Van Gelder’s has calming views of trees in the backyard. One recent sunny afternoon, a Hammond C-3 organ that was played by Ray Charles and Jimmy Smith sat uncovered on one side of the live room. Inside an isolation booth was a 1950s Steinway grand, in what looked like perfect condition save for some marks gouged on its lid — by Thelonious Monk.The Van Gelder console today. In recent months, Maureen Sickler, who is overseeing the studio, and a small team have been busy booking sessions.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesUnusual among major studios, Van Gelder’s was purpose-built and not adapted from another space, like Abbey Road in London or Columbia Records’ former studio on East 30th Street in Manhattan, which had once been a church, the jazz historian Ashley Kahn said. It was also owned and operated by one man, and doubled as Van Gelder’s home, with a modest but spacious apartment just up a set of stairs from the studio floor.Many jazz fans would immediately recognize the studio interior from photos on albums released by labels like Blue Note and Impulse!, two of Van Gelder’s biggest clients. The cover of “A Love Supreme” pictures Coltrane in front of a railing just outside the studio door. The master saxophonist’s recording, captured on Dec. 9, 1964, is perhaps the most famous one made there.A visionary engineer who always sought out the most advanced microphones and other equipment, Van Gelder was also a persnickety character who forbade most musicians from touching anything. Hancock remembers the time, after years of recording there, when Van Gelder, speaking from behind glass in the control room, finally gave him permission to plug in his headphones.“I looked around at the other musicians; they were staring at me,” Hancock recalled. “‘Did Rudy say I could actually plug it in?’ ‘Yeah, we heard that, too.’ So I did. I was like, ‘Wow, I finally rose to the top!’”Van Gelder was secretive about how he achieved his sound; over the years that secrecy has become the audio equivalent of urban legend, with stories circulating that mingle fact and fiction. Did he really substitute “dummy” microphones when photographers came to shoot sessions? Probably not. Did he wear white gloves when handling equipment? Maybe, though the truth is unclear. “White gloves was an exaggeration,” Sickler said. “Reality is different.” She did not elaborate.From left: Maureen Sickler, her husband, Don, and the audio engineer Perry Margouleff. All three are working to restore Van Gelder’s haven as a full-service recording studio and create a nonprofit organization that would ensure its longevity.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesBefore Van Gelder brought on Sickler as his assistant in 1986, he had long run the studio entirely by himself, even setting up the musicians’ chairs. Sickler’s apprenticeship began modestly — “I got to set up chairs,” she said — but he soon showed her the ropes of all of the studio equipment. If anyone knows Van Gelder’s recording secrets, it is her.“I think I was closer to Rudy than I ever was to my own father,” Sickler said.After decades of running sessions almost daily, Van Gelder began to slow down in the mid-2000s, as his health deteriorated. Even then, his studio was little known outside music circles. “It was hiding in plain sight all these years,” said Jennifer Rothschild, a local historic preservation consultant.One Sunday afternoon in August 2016, Rothschild and other members of the Bergen County Historical Society met Van Gelder at his studio, after one jazz-loving member placed a cold call. They encouraged the engineer to apply for state and national status that would designate the property a historic building, but he wasn’t persuaded, Rothschild said, and the historians decided to return with a sharper pitch. Four days later, Van Gelder died in the apartment upstairs.By then, the studio was cluttered with medical equipment, and the custom Neve recording console that had been installed in 1972 was in rough shape — only six of its 24 channels were functioning properly. In 2018, Sickler met Margouleff, who was well versed in Van Gelderiana but had never set foot inside the studio. “Rudy wouldn’t let other engineers in the door,” said Don Sickler, who works with his wife in booking and running the space.During the pandemic, Margouleff, a Neve specialist, renovated the console piece by piece in his workshop. His dream, like that of the Sicklers, is for the facility to return to its former glory.“The idea is to make sure that this studio lives in perpetuity,” Margouleff said, “as a facility for people to continue to record music together in an ensemble fashion and in an acoustic environment.”Recently, the studio has had at least one recording session a week, Sickler said. In April, a few weeks after winning the Grammy Award for album of the year, Jon Batiste, the jazz pianist and bandleader, booked a one-day session at the Van Gelder studio, after learning that the place he had seen cited on countless records that had shaped him as a musician was finally available.“To visit and record there was a pilgrimage,” Batiste said in an interview. “There’s some sort of spiritual, metaphysical reality there that makes it feel like you’re stepping into a ritualistic space.”Instruments and equipment at Van Gelder’s studio.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesTHAT FEELING OF awe will certainly be the greatest calling card for the revitalized studio. But it may also be an obstacle, said Kahn, who, with Rothschild, helped write the studio’s applications for the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places. (It was added to both listings this spring.)“The challenge for the Van Gelder studio now is how to deal with its history and also go forward as a commercial enterprise,” Kahn said. “You don’t want people to come in there only saying, ‘I want the studio where Coltrane recorded.’ You want it to be a studio that can meet present-day standards, and not marginalize it as just a historic shrine.”The building’s presence on the state and national registers does not protect it from being altered or even demolished by a future owner, Rothschild said. To gain that protection, Sickler has applied for a preservation easement, which would be attached to the property’s deed and involve periodic inspections. It also costs $10,000, and Sickler said that the studio’s recent recording work has raised only enough money to cover the property tax, which is nearly $40,000 a year.One decision facing Sickler and any future operators is whether to stick to jazz, or open the studio to other kinds of music. Jazz, of course, was Van Gelder’s great passion, and what the facility was designed for. But even at its peak, the space was also used for blues, folk music, polka and spoken word; the first recording session there, in July 1959, was with the West Point Cadet Glee Club.Don Sickler, who has been devoted to classic jazz repertory for decades, said he favored sticking with acoustic jazz, and gruffly dismissed the idea of recording Broadway cast albums or rock ’n’ roll. (For Weezer’s latest album, “OK Human,” released in early 2021, a string section was recorded at the Van Gelder studio.)Batiste also urged the Sicklers to hold fast to jazz. “Sticking to their guns of it being acoustic music, making it something that is an outlier in the culture, is what will actually be the right thing to do,” he said.Sickler is more open-minded about what the future of the Van Gelder studio might bring.“Of course, musicians familiar with the studio’s history, and with the work of Rudy Van Gelder, should have access,” she said. “But the live room loves all sounds.” More

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      in Movies

      The Secret Sounds That Make Up ‘Dune’

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      Denis Villeneuve and his sound team explain how far they went to achieve an aural experience that would feel somewhat familiar, an unusual approach for sci-fi.Sand in Death Valley was manipulated in different ways for the “Dune” soundscape.“Dune” is in the details, and Denis Villeneuve knows nearly all of them. The French Canadian filmmaker grew up obsessed with Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi novel and has spent the last few years of his life adapting that 1965 book into a budding film franchise. The first installment came out in October and the second one will begin shooting later this year, so if there’s anything you want to know about the inner workings of “Dune,” Villeneuve is the man to ask.But last week in Malibu, Calif., as he regarded a blue cereal box with evident amusement, Villeneuve admitted that one key detail had eluded him until now.“I’m learning today there were Rice Krispies in ‘Dune,’” he said.We were at Zuma Beach on the kind of warm March afternoon that New York readers would surely prefer I not dwell on, and Villeneuve’s Oscar-nominated sound editors Mark Mangini and Theo Green were nearby, pouring cereal into the sand. This wasn’t meant to provoke any sea gulls; Mangini and Green wanted to demonstrate the sound-gathering techniques they used to enliven Arrakis, the desert planet where the “Dune” hero Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) discovers his destiny.Theo Green, left, and Mark Mangini, demonstrating their work in Death Valley, were part of the Oscar-nominated sound team on “Dune.”“One of the most compelling images in the film is when Paul first steps foot onto the planet,” Mangini said. Since the sand on Arrakis is laced with “spice,” a valuable and hallucinogenic substance, the sound designers had to find an audible way to convey that something special was underfoot.By way of explaining it to me, Mangini ground his work boot into the soft patch of sand that he had dusted with Rice Krispies. The sand produced a subtle, beguiling crunch, and Villeneuve broke out into a big smile. Though he’d heard it plenty of times in postproduction, he had no idea what the sound designers had concocted to capture that sound.“One of the things I love about cinema is the cross between NASA kind of technology and gaffer tape,” Villeneuve said. “To use a super-expensive mic to record Rice Krispies — that deeply moves me!”Green using Rice Krispies to explain how a crunch was achieved in “Dune.”“Dune” is full of those clever, secret noises, nearly all of which are derived from real life: Of the 3,200 bespoke sounds created for the movie, only four were made solely with electronic equipment and synthesizers. Green noted that with many science-fiction and fantasy films, there is a tendency to indicate futurism by using sounds that we’ve never heard before.“But it was very much Denis’s vision that this movie should feel every bit as familiar as certain areas of planet Earth,” Green said. “We’re not putting you in a sci-fi movie, we’re putting you in a documentary about people on Arrakis.”Explore the 2022 Academy AwardsThe 94th Academy Awards will be held on March 27 in Los Angeles.A Makeover: On Oscar night, you can expect a refreshed, slimmer telecast and a few new awards. But are all of the tweaks a good thing?Best Actress Race: Who will win? There are cases to be made for and against each contender, and no one has an obvious advantage.A Hit: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” is the season’s unlikely Oscar smash. The director Bong Joon Ho is happy to discuss its success.  Making History: Troy Kotsur, who stars in “CODA” as a fisherman struggling to relate to his daughter, is the first deaf man to earn an Oscar nomination for acting. ‘Improbable Journey’: “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” was filmed on a shoestring budget in a remote Himalayan village. In a first for Bhutan, the movie is now an Oscar nominee.To that end, Green and Mangini made an early expedition into Death Valley to collect natural noises that could be used later for the film’s sonic palette. “When an audience hears acoustic sound, there’s a subconscious box that gets checked that says, this is real,” Mangini said. But within that reality, Mangini isn’t afraid to push things a bit: While working on “Mad Max: Fury Road,” for which he won an Oscar, Mangini mixed the sounds of dying animals into the crash of the movie’s most formidable vehicle.For another “Dune” demonstration, he began to bury a small nub of a microphone in the sand. “This is an underwater microphone, a hydrophone,” Mangini explained. “It’s the sort of thing you’d usually drop in the ocean to record a humpback whale, but we found another way to use it.”In “Dune,” the characters use a staked device called a thumper to rhythmically pound the sand and summon massive sandworms. To get that sound, Mangini and Green buried their hydrophone at different depths in Death Valley, then used a mallet to whack the sand above the buried mic.One sound involved a microphone normally used underwater.A mallet was then used to whack the sand above the mic.“We’d also record it above ground to get the actual sound of the impact,” Mangini said, demonstrating his method for me with a few sharp thwacks into the Zuma Beach sand. “Each one of these hits is the ka-dunk of the thumper, as you see it in the film.”To give the sandworm’s gaping maw some grandeur, Green recorded a friend’s dog as it gnashed its teeth, while Mangini added grumbling whale noises that matched the rhythm of the thumper — gunk, gunk, gunk. And how did they convey the sandworm rushing through the sand, liquefying every particle in its path?“I had this idea of taking a microphone, covering it with a condom and furrowing it under the ground,” Mangini said.“I was not aware of that,” Villeneuve said, trailing off. His sound designers laughed. “We never told Denis about the condom,” Green said.Green and Mangini worked with Villeneuve on his previous film, “Blade Runner 2049,” and the director brought them both on board as soon as he nabbed the rights to Herbert’s novel, instead of waiting until postproduction, as is more customary.Denis Villeneuve brought the sound team on board early so it could have “the proper time to investigate and explore and make mistakes.”“I wanted Theo and Mark to have the proper time to investigate and explore and make mistakes,” Villeneuve said. “It’s something I got really traumatized by with my early movies, where you spend years working on a screenplay, then months shooting and editing it, and then right at the end, the sound guy comes and you barely have enough time.”By hiring his sound designers early and setting them loose, Villeneuve could even take some of their discoveries and weave them into Hans Zimmer’s score, producing a holistic aural experience where the percussive music composition and pervasive sound design can sometimes be mistaken for one another.Our Reviews of the 10 Best-Picture Oscar NomineesCard 1 of 10“Belfast.” More

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      in Music

      From Claire Rousay, Field Recordings for a Modern World

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      With her new album, the emo ambient musician has learned to embrace everyday pleasures.One spring evening, the San Antonio-based experimental musician Claire Rousay was in the driver’s seat of her parked car, smoking cigarettes and sipping a well-concealed beverage, when she picked up the Zoom H5 field recorder that is never far from her reach. “I track my whole day every day,” Rousay says. “If I’m home, I’ll have a pair of stereo microphones in my living room, and a field recorder in my bedroom. I’ll probably have 18 hours of field recordings … I basically record my whole life.”She turns these found sounds into musique concrète that locates grains of emotion in the mundane — a car door slamming, a lighter igniting, the plink of an Apple keyboard mid-text. What a songwriter might convey in poetry, Rousay evokes with raw audio. You could call it sound art, but it’s viscerally vulnerable. More appropriately to Rousay — who declines to confirm her exact age but identifies as “a millennial sun, zoomer rising” — her work has been tagged as “emo ambient.”Last fall, Rousay released the 20-minute composition “It Was Always Worth It,” for which she spun the contents of real love letters she’d received over a six-year relationship through a robotic text-to-voice program. In a year widely lacking in new, intimate conversations of the unguarded 3 a.m. caliber, it was a heartbreaking revelation. In a world of endless distraction, Rousay’s is an art of paying attention. Her immersive new album, “A Softer Focus,” is her first to draw in melody and harmony (“the pleasure of making music,” as it’s been called), and though she’s posted 22 releases to Bandcamp since 2019, it feels like an arrival.In her art as in her life, Rousay seems intent on breaking through the perceived super-seriousness that her work might portend. She calls karaoke “an intimate soul endeavor” (her go-tos are Taking Back Sunday and Lil Peep) and lights up when discussing, with equal reverence, the composer Pauline Oliveros’s book “Deep Listening” (2005) or her longtime favorite band, Bright Eyes. “Being a real person is what I care about most,” Rousay says. “Being present and open.” Evidence of this abiding commitment to honesty can be found in last spring’s “Im Not a Bad Person But …,” another text-to-voice piece that ends on a bold admission: “I think Avril Lavigne’s album ‘Let Go’ is better than Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps.’”Building on her unconventional style, Rousay produced “A Softer Focus” as an equal collaboration with the San Antonio artist Dani Toral. The pair met in middle school there — after Toral had relocated from Mexico City, and Rousay from Canada — but were soon in constant motion, with various tours and residencies, until the pandemic forced them to stay put. In addition to the floral cover art, Toral made a video, took photos, designed a T-shirt, named the record and several songs and created 30 ceramic whistles to accompany the release. The common thread, Toral said, is a “glowy” sense of comfort. The whistles, inspired by Mexican folk art and a 2006 book about the history of ceramic instruments called “From Mud to Music,” were an especially fitting addition. “I love clay because it holds a lot of memory,” Toral says. “It holds every touch that you put into it.”Rousay’s pieces function similarly, and for “A Softer Focus” she even recorded Toral in her backyard ceramics studio sculpting one of the whistles, playing it and reflecting on the process — putting their conversation into the music. On the album, that snatch of dialogue also finds Rousay and Toral contemplating the stresses of Instagram for visual artists — the anxiety of being expected to post not just your work but your life. “It was us smoking joints and talking,” Rousay says, “and I think the recording is like six joints deep.” It’s a detail that speaks to the whole project’s ethos of presence and growth: Toral had never made digital art before and, as Rousay puts it, “I had never really made a listenable record. The only thing that was familiar was the feeling of being in the zone. We were learning together.”Rousay records the minutiae of her life to magnify the joy of simple moments.Liz MoskowitzThe artist Dani Toral made ceramic whistles, inspired by Mexican folk art, to accompany Rousay’s new album.Liz MoskowitzROUSAY GREW UP in a strict evangelical Christian household in Winnipeg, Manitoba — secular music was forbidden — and was 10 when her family moved to San Antonio. She drummed during church services before untethering herself from Christianity and searching for meaning around her instead. After dropping out of high school at 15, she toured with an indie rock band and, after discovering jazz, turned to free improvisation. She traveled as a solo percussionist, doing 200 gigs in 2017 alone.The awe-inspiring swarm of “A Softer Focus” can feel like an amalgam of this all. On the highlight track “Peak Chroma” — named by Toral to evoke “the highest saturation of a color” — Rousay adds a pitch-shifted vocal line about listening to “the newest Blackbear song,” a reference to the Florida emo rapper and Justin Bieber co-writer Matthew Tyler Musto. It’s a conscious nod to a realm of contemporary pop that Rousay finds “infinitely more experimental” than many artists would allow. “I don’t want to be pigeon-holed,” she says. “Experimental music is so limited as it is. There are so many fake rules that the whole thing is not really that experimental anymore. What can I do to change that?”It was around the time that she embraced emo ambient as a descriptor that she decided to stop avoiding her unique confluence of interests. “I couldn’t do it anymore, just being like, ‘Oh, yeah, I really love Stockhausen’ — are you kidding me?” she jokes. “I don’t know how you can go through life being so selective about parts of your personality.” Ultimately, though — and in another nod to Oliveros — Rousay says her greatest influences are likely in the sounds of her own environment.“Sitting on the back porch, listening to the sounds of my backyard — that’s what should matter,” Rousay says. “But if I listen to Fall Out Boy every Friday night after 11 p.m. when I’m blackout drunk, that’s the way it is. Some people have the cicadas in their backyard. And some people have Fall Out Boy.”Rousay has both. And this duality of an almost meditative stillness and earnest emotion runs through “A Softer Focus,” as well as “It Was Always Worth It.” “I know things have been rough lately,” a dispassionate automated voice announces on the latter, “but I want to remind you that I love you, and I’m working hard to be with you. You’ve got a great heart. You are so loved. Even if you weren’t, all you’d have to remember is to love yourself above everything else. That’s the most important love you can experience.”I ask Rousay when she began to feel that self-love was the most important kind. She says it was two years ago, when she came out as trans. “I have a really strenuous relationship with my immediate family,” she says. But she speaks with conviction about where she does find contentment: “Enjoying simple pleasures is a huge part of my work,” she continues. “I love lying in my backyard and having a picnic with me, myself and I. It’s so fun to make a cute meal for yourself and get the sun on your face. I don’t understand why that’s always left out of things.” Capturing the delicate rustle of these small moments is Rousay’s way of magnifying the inherent joy in them.Recently, Rousay took a walk along the San Antonio River with her dog, Banana. She had brought her recording gear — headphones, a couple of mics — and at some point, she and Banana sat down for a drink of water. In the audio, there’s the sound of the river, the jingle of Banana’s collar, birdsong and the hum of traffic in the distance. There are also traces of Rousay texting, sniffling, taking deep breaths. “I’m crying because I’m so invested in that moment,” she says. “To have a dog that loves me, to be able-bodied and walking in a park when the weather’s perfect, to own a field-recording device that I was too poor to own for a while … ”“There were so many points in my life where I would not have been satisfied by simple pleasures,” Rousay says. “But sitting with headphones on, listening to what the microphone’s picking up — that’s the closest to any kind of internal peace I’ve ever experienced. Even if I’m recording essentially nothing. Because I’m in the moment. When you slow down and actually think about what’s happening — it’s beautiful.” More

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      in Television

      Overdue VHS Tape of 'Sabrina the Teenage Witch' Prompts Arrest Warrant

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      The charge was related to a “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” tape that had been rented from a video store in Norman, Okla. Prosecutors dismissed the case on Wednesday.They once dotted shopping plazas in America with ubiquity, beckoning binge watchers with shelves of VHS cassettes, microwave popcorn and boxes of candy — and a reminder to “Be Kind, Rewind.”Video rental stores, pushed closer to the brink of extinction by streaming services like Netflix and changing technology, may be a thing of the past but an overdue rental became an issue of the present for a Texas woman.The woman, who was identified in court records as Caron Scarborough Davis, recently learned that there was a 21-year-old outstanding warrant for her arrest in Oklahoma.Her offense?Prosecutors said that Ms. Davis had failed to return a copy of “Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” a television sitcom that aired from 1996 to 2003. She rented the tape of episodes from a video store in Norman, Okla., in 1999, according to court documents.Court papers valued the unreturned tape of “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” episodes at $58.59.Randy Holmes/Walt Disney Television, via Getty ImagesShe was charged with embezzlement of rented property, and a warrant was issued for her arrest in March 2000. The store where she rented the tape, Movie Place, closed in 2008, according to KOKH Fox 25 in Oklahoma.In a charging document, prosecutors said that Ms. Davis “did willfully, unlawfully and feloniously embezzle a certain One (1) Videocassette Tape, Sabrina the Teenage Witch of the value of $58.59.”Ms. Davis, 52, discovered the outstanding warrant for her arrest after she got married and tried to change her name on her driver’s license, KOKH reported on Thursday.“I thought I was going to have a heart attack,” she said.Ms. Davis said motor vehicle officials referred her to the district attorney’s office for Cleveland County, Okla., where a woman explained the charge against her.“She told me it was over the VHS tape and I had to make her repeat it because I thought, ‘This is insane,’” Ms. Davis said. “This girl is kidding me, right? She wasn’t kidding.”Ms. Davis could not be immediately reached on Sunday.On April 21, prosecutors dropped the embezzlement charge against Ms. Davis in consideration of the “best interest of justice,” according to court documents. KOKH Fox 25 had contacted prosecutors the previous day about the charge.Greg Mashburn, the district attorney for Cleveland, Garvin and McClain Counties in Oklahoma, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday, nor did Tim D. Kuykendall, who was the district attorney when the warrant was issued.Sandi Harding, the general manager of the world’s last Blockbuster video store, in Bend, Ore., said in an interview on Sunday that bringing criminal charges for an unreturned movie seemed overly punitive.“We’ve definitely not sent out a warrant for anybody for that,” she said. “That’s a little a bit crazy to me.”Blockbuster assesses daily late fees of 49 to 99 cents for overdue videos up to 10 days. After that, the store charges customers up to $19.99 to replace one of its DVDs or Blu-ray discs, Ms. Harding said.In some cases, the store, which does not rent VHS cassettes, will refer past-due accounts for collection, she said.“We would never charge someone $100 for a copy of ‘Scooby-Doo’ that they never returned,” she said.It was not immediately clear who owned the now-shuttered video store where Ms. Davis rented the tape or whether she owed any late fees. She told KOKH Fox 25 that she had no recollection of renting the video, saying that she lived with a man at the time who had two young daughters.“I’m thinking he went and got it and didn’t take it back or something,” she said. “I have never watched that show in my entire life — just not my cup of tea.” More

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      in Music

      Lou Ottens, Father of Countless Mixtapes, Is Dead at 94

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLou Ottens, Father of Countless Mixtapes, Is Dead at 94He led the team at Philips that changed the audio world in 1963 by introducing a small, portable way to play and record: the cassette.Lou Ottens in 1988, 25 years after he led the team that introduced the cassette tape to the world.Credit…Philips Company ArchivesMarch 11, 2021, 6:58 p.m. ETIn these digital days, it may be hard to appreciate how radically Lou Ottens changed the audio world when, in 1963, he and his team at Philips, the Dutch electronics company, introduced the cassette tape.“As the story goes, Lou was home one night trying to listen to a reel-to-reel recording when the loose tape began to unravel from its reel,” Zack Taylor, who directed the 2017 film “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape,” said by email.Mr. Ottens was in charge of product development at the Philips plant in Hasselt, Belgium, at the time.“The next morning,” Mr. Taylor continued, “a frustrated Lou Ottens gathered the engineers and designers from the Philips audio division and insisted that they create something foolproof: The tape had to be enclosed, and the player had to fit in his jacket pocket.”The cassette was a way to play music in a portable fashion, something not easily done with vinyl, and to record it conveniently as well. Artists started using cassettes to record passing ideas. Bootleggers used them to record live concerts for the underground market. Young lovers used them to swap mixtapes of songs that expressed their feelings.Soon record labels began releasing entire albums on cassettes and automakers were installing cassette players on dashboards.Another portable technology, the bulkier 8-track cartridge, was introduced in the same period, but cassettes, smaller and recordable, quickly doomed those devices, and also cut into the vinyl market.The cassette was a way to play music in a portable fashion, and to record it conveniently as well. “It was a big surprise for the market,” Mr. Ottens said in 2013.Credit…Philips Company Archives“It was a big surprise for the market,” Mr. Ottens told Time magazine in 2013, the 50th anniversary of that wallet-size breakthrough. “It was so small in comparison with reel-to-reel recorders that it was at that moment a sensation.”Mr. Ottens died on Saturday in Duizel, in the Netherlands, Tommie Dijstelbloem, a spokesman for Philips, said. He was 94.In the 1970s, after spearheading the development of the cassette, he contributed to the development of the compact disc, a product Philips and Sony jointly unveiled in 1982. The new format soon pushed the cassette aside.“The best thing about the compact cassette story,” the newspaper Nederlands Dagblad wrote in 2011, “is that its inventor also caused its downfall.”Not quite. Cassettes remain popular with some aficionados, in a retro sort of way. Mr. Ottens, though, was not one of them.“Now it’s nostalgia, more or less,” he said in the documentary. “People prefer a worse quality of sound out of nostalgia.”Lodewijk Frederik Ottens was born in Bellingwolde, the Netherlands, on June 21, 1926. He graduated from what is now Delft University of Technology with a degree in mechanical engineering and began working at Philips in 1952.He became head of product development in Hasselt in 1957 and began overseeing the development of a portable reel-to-reel machine in 1960. Olga Coolen, director of the Philips Museum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, said that when he conceived the idea of a cassette tape, he carried a wooden block in his coat pocket that was the size and shape of what he envisioned.“His wooden block prototype was lost when Lou used it to prop up his jack while changing a flat tire,” she said by email. “However, we still have the very first cassette recorder he developed on display, a testimony to his foresight and innovation.”The company unveiled the cassette in 1963 at a product exhibition in Berlin. The old saying about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery was quickly proved.“Our cassette was extensively viewed and photographed by the Japanese,” Mr. Ottens told an interviewer in 2013. “A few years later, the first Japanese imitations came, with a different tape format, different dimensions, different playing time. Not shocking, but too many hit the market. Then it becomes a big mess.”Mr. Ottens in 2013. When he conceived of the idea of a cassette tape half a century earlier, he carried a wooden block in his coat pocket that was the size and shape of what he envisioned.Credit…Jerry Lampen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPhilips made its licensing available free, largely at Mr. Ottens’s urging, and its version of the cassette soon became the standard.“That’s the reason that it didn’t become obsolete too early,” Mr. Ottens said in the film, “and it’s taken 50 years to die.”Philips says 100 billion cassettes have been sold worldwide.After the cassette, Mr. Ottens worked on an unsuccessful videodisc project before shifting to the CD. And before that innovation was released, he had shifted his focus to Video 2000, a system intended to compete with VHS; it, too, did not catch on.He retired from Philips in 1986. Information on his survivors was not immediately available.The makers of “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape” took a romanticized view of the cassette and its importance to the countless people who made use of it in myriad ways, but Mr. Taylor said Mr. Ottens had a much more utilitarian view.“Lou was never comfortable taking credit for the cassette, or for the incalculable impact it had on the history of music,” Mr. Taylor said. “What I saw as a deeply personal medium, Lou saw as a pragmatic answer to the cumbersome nature of the reel-to-reel.”In the film, Mr. Ottens and three of the men who worked under him on the cassette project reminisce. Mr. Ottens still seems surprised by the impact of the little gizmo.“We expected it would be a success,” he says, “but not a revolution.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Rupert Neve, the Father of Modern Studio Recording, Dies at 94

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRupert Neve, the Father of Modern Studio Recording, Dies at 94His equipment became the industry standard and influenced the sound of groups like Nirvana, Fleetwood Mac, the Grateful Dead, Santana, Chicago and the Who.Rupert Neve in 2009 at a mixing console at the Magic Shop recording studio in New York City. His revolutionary Neve 8028 console (not shown here) had a huge impact on the music industry.Credit…Joshua ThomasFeb. 19, 2021, 2:43 p.m. ETWhen the Seattle grunge band Nirvana recorded their breakthrough album, “Nevermind,” at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, Calif., in 1991, they used a massive mixing console created by a British engineer named Rupert Neve.The Neve 8028 console had by then become a studio staple, hailed by many as the most superior console of its kind in its manipulating and combining instrumental and vocal signals and as responsible in great part for the audio quality of albums by groups like Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd.For Dave Grohl, Nirvana’s drummer and later the leader of Foo Fighters, the console “was like the coolest toy in the world,” he told NPR in 2013 when his documentary film about the California studio, “Sound City,” was released. “And what you get when you record on a Neve desk is this really big, warm representation of whatever comes into it.”He added, “What’s going to come out the other end is this bigger, better version of you.”In 2011, long after forming Foo Fighters, Mr. Grohl purchased the console as Sound City was closing, took it to his garage and used it to record the band’s album “Wasting Light.”Mr. Neve’s innovative, largely analog equipment has been used to record pop, rock, jazz and rap — genres distinct from his preferred one: English cathedral music, with its organs and choirs.After his death last Friday, the influential hip-hop engineer Gimel Keaton, known as Young Guru, tweeted: “Please understand that this man was one of a kind. There is nothing close to him in the engineering world. RIP to the KING!!!”Mr. Neve (pronounced Neeve) died in a hospice facility in San Marcos, Tex., near his home in Wimberley, a Hill Country town that he and his wife, Evelyn, moved to in 1994. He was 94. The causes were pneumonia and heart failure, according to his company, Rupert Neve Designs.Arthur Rupert Neve was born on July 31, 1926, in Newton Abbott, in southwestern England. He spent most of his childhood near Buenos Aires, where his parents, Arthur Osmond and Doris (Dence) Neve, were missionaries with the British and Foreign Bible Society.Rupert developed a facility with technology as a boy taking apart and repairing shortwave radios. It accelerated during World War II, when he served in the Royal Corps of Signals, which gave communications support to the British Army.After the war, working out of an old U.S. Army ambulance, he started a business recording, on 78 r.p.m. acetate discs, brass bands and choirs as well as public addresses, like those by Winston Churchill and Queen Elizabeth II when she was a princess.His future father-in-law was unimpressed. When Mr. Neve spoke to him about marrying his daughter, Evelyn Collier, the older man couldn’t imagine recording as a way of making a living.“He’d never heard of it,” Mr. Neve told Tape Op, a recording magazine, in 2001. “To him a recorder was a gentleman who sat in a courtroom and wrote down the proceedings.”During the 1950s, Mr. Neve found work at a company that designed and manufactured transformers. He also started his own business making hi-fi equipment.With his expanding knowledge of electronics, he recognized that mixing consoles performed better with transistors than with vacuum tubes, which were cumbersome and required very high voltage.He delivered his first custom-made transistor console to Phillips Studios in London in 1964, and its success led to thousands more orders over the years — bought by, among others, Abbey Road Studios in London (in the post-Beatles years), the Power Station in Manhattan and the AIR Studios, both in London and on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, founded by George Martin, the Beatles’ producer.The singer-songwriter Billy Crockett bought a Neve console about eight years ago for his Blue Rock Artist Ranch & Studio, which is also in Wimberley. He is quick to extol its “warm, open, transparent” sound.“It’s all about his transformers,” he said in a phone interview, referring to the components that Mr. Neve designed that connect microphone signals to the console and the console to a recording medium like vinyl or a CD. “They provide something intangible that makes the mix fit together. So when people get poetic about analog, it’s how the sound comes through the transformers.”Mr. Neve received a Technical Grammy Award in 1997. In a 2014 interview with the Recording Academy, which sponsors the Grammys, he said he was pleased with the loyalty that his consoles had fostered.Mr. Neve in 2013 with the musician Dave Grohl at a screening of “Sound City,” Mr. Grohl’s documentary film about the famed recording studio in Los Angeles. The film was being shown at the SXSW Music, Film + Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. Mr. Neve’s pioneering mixing console was at the heart of Sound City.Credit…Michael Buckner/Getty Images for SXSW“I’m proudest of the fact that people are still using designs of mine which started many years ago and which, in many ways, have not been superseded since,” he said. “Some of those old consoles are really hard to beat in terms of both recording quality and the effects that people will get when they make recordings.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Neve is survived by his daughters, Evelyn Neve, who is known as Mary, and Ann Yates; his sons, David, John and Stephen; nine grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.Mr. Neve was more aware of the engineers who handled his consoles than of the singers and bands whose albums benefited from his audio wizardry.That preference was borne out when rock stars approached him after the screening of Mr. Grohl’s “Sound City” documentary at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin in 2013.“They all wanted to take pictures with him,” Josh Thomas, the general manager of Rupert Neve Designs, said in a phone interview. “And after each picture, he asked me, ‘Why is he important?’”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Pauline Anna Strom, Composer of Enduring Electronic Sounds, Dies at 74

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPauline Anna Strom, Composer of Enduring Electronic Sounds, Dies at 74Her blindness, she said, enhanced her music, which included homemade recordings from the 1980s prized by aficionados.Pauline Anna Strom in 2017, when her music from the 1980s was rereleased, drawing a burst of attention and new fans.Credit…Aubrey TrinnamanJan. 28, 2021, 6:28 p.m. ETIn the early 1980s, a blind woman stood in her San Francisco apartment with one hand in a bowl of water and the other holding a microphone, recording the burbling sound as she stirred and splashed.“It’s a wonder I didn’t kill myself,” she joked years later.The woman was Pauline Anna Strom, and her beguiling homemade synthesizer recordings were prized by aficionados of electronic music. The water sounds went into one of her first compositions, which appeared on her debut recording, “Trans-Millenia Consort” (1982).Ms. Strom died on Dec. 13 at her home in San Francisco, two months before her first new music in 30 years was to be released. She was 74.Matt Werth, the founder of her record label, RVNG Intl., announced the death. He did not specify the cause.Ms. Strom, who was blind from birth, found in synthesizers a way to create compositions that reflected her complex internal landscape, one that was not confined to the present but roamed freely through time and emotions.“I consider myself the ‘Trans-Millenia Consort,’” she wrote in the liner notes to that recording, “by which title I wish to be known. This to me is a personal declaration that I have been in previous lives, that I am in this life, and that I shall in future lives be a musical consort to time.”“Trans-Millenia Consort,” which Ms. Strom recorded on her own equipment at her home in San Francisco and which was issued in a limited release on vinyl and cassette in 1982, was followed by six more recordings, the last released in 1988. In 2017 a broader audience discovered Ms. Strom when Mr. Werth’s label released “Trans-Millenia Music,” a compilation of pieces from those 1980s efforts.“Angel Tears in Sunlight,” Ms. Strom’s first new music in 30 years, is scheduled to be released in February.Credit…Rvng Intl.“Trans-Millenia Music,” a compilation of her work from the 1980s, was released in 2017.Credit…Rvng Intl.“’Trans-Millenia Music’ captures an artist expressing herself freely and without fear or hesitation,” Daniel Martin-McCormick wrote in a review for Pitchfork, “and it makes good on its title. Work like this may fade into obscurity, but it remains fresh to all who seek it out, still vibrant and pulsing with energy in any age — new or otherwise.”Mr. Werth said his label will release a new recording, “Angel Tears in Sunlight,” on Feb 19.Ms. Strom did not dwell on her blindness (“The blindness to me is a nuisance more than anything,” she once said), although mastering her synthesizers was a process of experimentation, since in the 1980s, when the instruments were relatively new, there were no users’ manuals for the blind. Ultimately, she thought, her lack of sight enhanced her music.“My hearing and inner visualization have, I feel, developed to a higher level than perhaps they would have otherwise,” she told the publication Eurock in a rare early-career interview in 1986. “And it doesn’t affect my abilities from a technical standpoint, either. It’s quite possible to program synthesizers, effects units, accurately record one’s work and handle a mixer. I do this all by sound.”“In fact,” she added, “I rather like working in the dark.”Pauline Anna Tuell was born on Oct. 1, 1946, in Baton Rouge, La., to Paul and Marjorie (Landry) Tuell. She grew up in Kentucky in a Roman Catholic household and said that chants and other types of church music influenced her musical ideas, but that so did the works of Bach, Chopin and others.She was married twice, to Bob Strom and then to Kevin Bierl, but the dates of those marriages and how they ended are, like many details of her life, hard to come by. She moved to San Francisco when her husband — it is unclear which — was stationed there while in the military. Reclusive by nature, she lived in the same San Francisco apartment for decades. (“Thank God this city has rent control,” she told the website listentothis.info in 2018.)Her early musical efforts included some do-it-yourself sound effects like those in “Emerald Pool,” but she gradually became more adept at creating whatever sound she wanted with the multiple synthesizers she accumulated. She was influenced by the work of the German band Tangerine Dream and the German composer Klaus Schulze, pioneers in electronic music.“The spaciousness of it, the timeless quality, where it can be in any universal realm — that’s what captivated me,” she said. “It didn’t make you sad, it didn’t make you romantic. It was just driving, and it made you want to explore.”Ms. Strom in 2017. Blind from birth, she found in synthesizers a way to create compositions that reflected her complex internal landscape,Credit…Aubrey TrinnamanMs. Strom’s music was sometimes classified as New Age, but she disliked the term and the people who identified with it.“I think there’s a lot of phoniness in the New Age movement,” she said in a 2017 interview for the Red Bull Academy. “I can’t stand this. I’m a realist. I’m down to earth. I’m practical.”Ms. Strom is survived by three sisters, Loretta Hoffman, Barbara Boniakowski and Anita Burnett.When her 1980s music was rereleased in 2017, Ms. Strom was surprised at the burst of attention and the new fans.“A friend of mine called me and said, ‘You’ve got 20,000 people out there that know you exist and liked your music,’” she recalled in the Red Bull interview, “and I said: ‘What? Why?’”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More