Its been a very crazy time this past month. Between a slew of shows with the Winter People, I’ve been completing a few freelance projects (will post on the design / development story there in a week or two) and about three weeks ago we got a call from Los Angeles to say that Rich Costey wanted to mix the rest of the Winter People record – after the excellent Peter Katis had to drop out.

This had always been talked of as a potential with our managers, but given the man’s intimidatingly impressive discography I considered it quite out of the ball park of the reasonable (i.e. Muse, Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against The Machine, Bruce Springsteen, Aphex Twin, The Shins, Interpol, Bloc Party, The Mars Volta, Philip Glass, Fiona Apple etc.).

But just before we played a show (on a boat!) I got a call from our managers to say that it was all on, leaving me about three days to organize, pack and leave for LA. So I’ve flown, mixed and returned – bringing the Winter People album one step closer towards its completion.

Similarly to having Peter Katis involved with the mixes, I personally got a great sense of validation from Rich wanting to do the project. These are the guys who mixed records from bands who are for me the top-of-the-top of contemporary music game in my opinion. To be a part of that, even vicariously, was pretty exciting stuff. Speaking of bands who are in that top echelon Omar from At The Drive In and The Mars Volta was hanging out in Studio B the whole time we were mixing the record, so I got to hang out with him, and he was a pretty awesome, friendly and funny fellow.

Now I tried to document the journey with some photographs, but I have to confess that I was (rightly so) distracted by the mission at hand, which was to mix the record as perfectly as possible. Hence the relative lack of documentation.

I’ll leave with this quaint factoid of Americana (which I didn’t know): you can buy guns over the counter at a sporting goods store!