It’s a music recording studio built to redefine studios, a three-story instrument that blurs the line between organic and digitally manipulated sound, and a playground for sound waves and instruments. It’s Spears’s giant, concrete rescue breath for an industry that underwent a bad digital overhaul in the 90’s and lost its identity in the process.

The tall, boxy and gray exterior hardly advertises aural pizzazz, but when you walk through the door of Squid Hell, it’s like taking the Magic School Bus inside a vessel that’s part guitar, part xylophone. Close the door: sound waves travel in two directions – echoing one way and abruptly halting in the other, as if someone hit the damper pedal and the soft pedal of a piano simultaneously. The effect is created by careful construction that shapes sound from the building’s foundations to its rafters. Within the same room, a listener might be acoustically transported from a cathedral to a cozy piano bar.

Spears’ vision of his analog/digital studio formed when the digital recording age emerged in the 90’s. Around this time, he started a recording business out of a room in his apartment in Boston with mostly digital equipment. Eventually, he realized something was missing from his recordings. The sound was unnatural and perfect … too perfect. It lacked the distortions characteristic of recording environments, which sometimes shape sounds unexpectedly into what become new, innovative masterpieces.

Digital music sends sound waves down a direct path with no opportunity to stray, and straying is precisely what our ears are accustomed to enjoying in music. We hear in analog, which is why the distortions that screamed through Jimi Hendrix’s amplifier could not be reproduced authentically without a non-digital, analog system, and the haunting echo in Radiohead’s “OK Computer,” recorded in an empty English castle, could not be duplicated using a personal computer. Digital recording, Spears realized, lacked the unpredictability of live sound. It lacked personality.

When commercial studios began failing as home studios boomed, Spears bought up their analog gear. He bought an old paint warehouse in an industrial neighborhood in Jamaica Plain for storage, and eventually realized it was the perfect space to reconstruct what was lost in the recording industry. Raising the money from private investors, Spears tuned the warehouse into an acoustical masterpiece: Squid Hell Studios, named after an actual person – his high school band mate Richard Hell, nicknamed Squid.

To get the perfect sound in analog, the recording environment should have properties fundamentally different from the editing environment. In order to create those differences within the building, Spears constructed the studio and control rooms on two distinct foundations within the building – one for the studio, and the other in the middle of the studio for the control room. The control or editing room requires components that blunt sound – that essentially allow the sound engineer to hear the baseline of whatever is coming out of any stereo, without flare. To control the bass sound waves, which sink because of their longer wavelengths, Spears attached small compartments with hanging panels in the basement below the control room to work as shock absorbers that prevent sound waves from echoing below the room. Above, in the main level control room, a giant, curved window looks into the studio over a large analog sound board equipped with a jumble of keys, levers and dials. The rear wall is covered with a beautifully carved, smooth wave of wood that stretches to the ceiling. From a distance, it looks like the pipes of a large church organ, or the strings on a giant autoharp. The front and sides are designed to absorb sound, simulating the base noise heard from any normal stereo so the sound engineer can guarantee a perfect performance through any speaker.

Virtually every foot of the studio room plays differently with sound waves – the height of the roof, the shape and the materials that make up the walls, the chambers below the floor that echo at varying degrees from one side of the room to the other. Sound moves through different parts of the room like a rat in a maze – hitting barriers, getting lost in dead ends, zapping to the finish line – crashing into an ear or a microphone. It’s this journey that makes the waves analog– the sheer organic nature of them is impossible to duplicate digitally.

But in a digital age when hard drives are cheap, and a computer can record and store thousands of hours of sound at a miniscule fraction of the cost of analog tape, it is uneconomical for musicians to record completely in the traditional way, no matter how good the gear is. With this in mind, Spears designed his masterpiece to employ both digital and analog. Using the studio space as an instrument, and funneling sound through an analog sound board, sound waves are finally channeled into a digital system. By leaving the digital step until the very end, his system preserves the integrity of the natural sound as much as possible.

Despite the sophistication of Squid Hell, recording there is still much more labor intensive than just recording digitally. Analog recording is very much a labor of love, and the business of making music these days is a practice without patience. Finding the perfect spot to record in a room takes time, and adjusting levers and dials on a 10-foot long sound board is an overwhelming task for many sound engineers who are used to working on a relatively compact PC. Many view this type of recording as inefficient and archaic, but the most sophisticated of sound engineers know that it’s the most natural route for recording sound. Geoff Abramczyk , a sound engineer and musician who has periodically worked in the studio for five years, summed it up best saying there’s nothing quite like Squid Hell, and that playing music there is like feeling you’re funneling chaos into something beautiful, both carefully honed and left unpredictable.

Though the studio is already completely functional, a family tragedy and difficult financial times astringed the flow of funding meant for the building’s final touches. Sadly, the only things keeping the studio from officially opening its doors are just a few exit signs, an elevator permit and a paint job – all are required for a business operation permit. But despite the speed bump, Spears is still doing a small amount of recording in the studio while he looks for investors to help him complete the project. All who have recorded there are blown away. Spears describes it as an “acoustical theme park” – but you have to see it to understand.

Click below to hear a song recorded in Squid Hell:

Go Children Where I Send Thee

Photo courtesy of www.squidhell.com, Song by guitarist Travis Pullman and DJ Geoff Abramczyk of The Harsh Mistress for the album, Christmas Regrooved 2, released by KOCH Records.

Video by Jennifer Berglund and Julia Darcey

photo by Ian Boyd

In the spring of 2007, Jennifer Campbell and her husband received a shockingly high $375 water bill. Their house, which was a mere 800 square feet in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee had somehow generated a bill that was twenty times higher than their neighbors were paying. Either the whole block was poaching their water, or they were footing the bill for a serious leak somewhere in the system. “It took the utility company three trips to our house to convince them we weren’t operating a water park in our backyard,” Campbell said. “There was just one hell of a leak right outside our house that they conveniently overlooked.” The 100 year-old pipes that connected their house to the municipal water supply were worn out and leaking, but the city had no system in place to either prevent or detect leakages. The city’s wasteful and irresponsible inaction is not unique to Nashville. In fact, cities across the country with similar attitudes are costing Americans billions of gallons of water every single day.

The U.S. population is outgrowing its water supply. Water shortages are rampant across the country, and more and more states are looking for new sources to exploit. Georgia has tried accessing four different rivers to feed a thirsty Atlanta. Las Vegas is in a constant crisis and is trying to access more of the Colorado River, and several small townships in Massachusetts north of Boston have all but drained the Ipswich River and are desperately looking for better options. What they have all failed to recognize is that the solution might be flowing under their backyards.

Rather than updating the infrastructure that’s already in place, states are looking into exploiting more resources. Despite their desperation, they have failed to recognize that conservation is the best and most responsible way to cope with the problem at hand. There are a number of effective methods out there for conserving water — storing storm water, planting native plants and using drip irrigation systems –, but perhaps the most important thing urban areas can do is look inside the system they’ve already built. If cities concentrated more on efforts to update the plumbing infrastructure and promoted water conservation, perhaps they could avoid having to find other water sources altogether.

Many states haven’t bothered to estimate how much water they waste because of leaky pipes; but for the cities that have, the numbers are staggering. Every day, Atlanta loses 14% of the water it pumps. That’s roughly 17 million gallons, enough water for 170,000 people, according to the City of Atlanta Bureau of Water’s website. According to the USGS, this percentage is average compared to other major cities across the country. Yet for most cities, fixing leaky pipes never has been a top priority.

The current philosophy is that as long as pressure in the pipes is high enough to prevent bacteria from growing inside of them, the pipes are perfectly functional, said Randy Gentry, a hydrologist from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. As far as the water utility companies are concerned, healthy, high-pressure pipes are happy pipes, regardless of how much they leak from the system. The philosophy with the plumbing infrastructure has always been to “throw the pipes in the ground, cover them up, and forget about them,” said Gentry, but in a time of increasing water shortages nation-wide, that philosophy is no longer practical. In most parts of the country, Gentry said, the existing plumbing was designed for much smaller populations, and isn’t appropriate for supporting populations of this size. Inadequately sized pipes are being pushed to their limit, which is decreasing their life spans. But rather than installing more adequately sized pipes, cities are allowing the old pipes to accrue damage and develop significant leaks. In order to adequately and efficiently provide for a population, plumbing systems must evolve with the populations they support.

Fixing pipes is expensive and inconvenient. For a city the size of Atlanta, a large-scale repair on the system would cost billions of dollars – not far from the cost of building a pipeline to Tennessee, said Eric Evenson, Coordinator of the Water Availability Initiative at the U.S. Geological Survey. Additionally, no one wants to deal with the inconvenience of large-scale, citywide construction. Fixing all of the plumbing that needs to be fixed in the city could mean ripping up all of its roads, which might take years. Fixing municipal plumbing could very well be a project that could outlast a politician’s entire term in office. It would increase citywide traffic and be a daily reminder to all citizens that their tax dollars are going towards something that seems like a long-term inconvenience. Approving such a project would hurt any politician – it’s a more tactful political decision to build a 100-mile pipeline that avoids Atlanta, which is home to over half of Georgia’s population. But diverting money into projects that access other water sources is what Gentry calls, “a band aid, not a solution.” It completely lacks foresight.

Fixing the plumbing infrastructure has proven to be an effective remedy in the past. During the 1960’s, a massive drought in the mid-Atlantic states of New York, New Jersey and Maryland caused the states to focus a lot of energy toward drought-proofing the area. States created new reservoirs for water storage, began accessing and storing alternative water resources such as storm water, and interconnected public water systems so adequate supplies could be moved to inadequate ones. Since then, these states have been able to cope with large droughts. Responsible systems like these reservoirs need to be employed in more areas of the country.

But responsible plumbing practices aren’t necessarily what dictate how most voters cast their ballots. A $20 monthly water bill is, for the average American, not large enough to complain about. As long as bills are low, a quickly dwindling resource will continue to be treated like a limitless commodity. As long as voters are happy, there is little motivation for the government to think more about the big picture and correct this problem that is quickly growing into a disaster. Jennifer, her husband and the average American cannot fix this problem – only the government can.

This is Greg Mosman’s favorite spot. 24 acres of ancient, majestic trees guard one of the most magnificent centerpieces in Boston, Massachusetts – the Boston Public Garden. It’s a living monument that symbolizes Boston’s appreciation for aesthetic beauty, and is a testament to the botanical talents of many generations of Boston’s great arborists, the freshest of which is Greg Mosman. From where we sit admiring the view, it’s hard to notice the growling and screeching of Boston traffic that moves just a few meters away.

“This is my favorite spot,” Greg Mosman said to me, “when I’m at work here, I often forget that.” Greg Mosman is an urbanite who fell in love with trees – he’s both a tender botanist and a thrill-seeking adventurer. In addition to being the Chief Arborist for the City of Boston, he’s also an avid Tree Climber. Mosman maintains 3,600 total acres of a smattering of trees across the city, including those in the Boston Public Garden. He prunes and primps, shapes and heals more than 200 different varieties, each with its own medley of needs. Unlike most arborists, he opts not to take the bucket truck into the canopy. Rather, he uses ropes and levers, carabiners and brute strength. Today, he’s dressed the part of a hard-core outdoorsman – adorned with Carhart pants and sticky rubber Lowe Alpine shoes. With him, he’s brought a pile of heavy, clanking tree-climbing gear.

Mosman didn’t discover his interest in trees until college when he was studying to be a golf course manager at UMass Amherst. A friend introduced him to tree climbing and as he got more into the sport, his interests grew taller than turf. He dropped out of UMass, and began studying horticulture at Essex Aggie College. To stay closer to the canopy, Mosman decided to become an arborist.

Surprisingly, Mosman’s love for trees never left the city. Adorned in climbing gear, he seems like a misplaced logger, but he will take a Red Oak tree in the park over a giant Douglas Fur in the forest any day. “Greg would rather drive up to a tree, plop down his gear and start climbing,” Andrew Joslin, his climbing partner said. “He hates hiking to a tree.” In fact, Mosman’s philosophy is that of a true city arborist. He cares for his trees not as a population, but individually – it’s about the tree, not the forest. Only in the city can an arborist take such time and precision with every tree.

Seven years ago, Mosman applied for a job as Chief Arborist for the City of Boston. “I was kind of surprised I got it,” he said. Boston, a city known for its myriad old, beautiful trees, is one of the more prestigious jobs among arborists. However, when you talk to Mosman about trees long enough, his appointment makes sense.

Three years ago, Mosman and Joslin met through a tree climbing website. They began climbing together regularly and eventually decided to form the Boston Area Recreational Tree Climbers (BARC), an organization for both novice and experienced climbers. Through BARC, they ran climbs for several groups of school-aged kids but were shut down by park rangers. “They thought it was too dangerous for kids,” Mosman said, “when actually it’s safer than rock climbing when you do it right.” As a result, they started getting some negative attention from a reporter for the Jamaica Plain Gazette, who implied in an article that Mosman and Joslin conducted unsafe, illegal climbs around the city. “It just couldn’t have been any farther from the truth,” Mosman said, “he didn’t even bother interviewing us before he published it.” Despite the reporter’s eventual retraction, BARC fizzled. Since then, Mosman has been struggling to keep tree climbing legal in a few pockets around the city. “Without Greg, no one would be allowed to climb in the city at all,” Joslin said.

As we walk through the Boston Public Gardens , Mosman reaches up and grabs the budding branch of a tree. He asks me to touch one of the buds – it’s sappy and sticky. “That’s how you know it’s a Weeping Cherry,” he said. “Apples leaf before they flower, Cherries flower before they leaf.” Just by looking at a tree, he can tell its life history. Mosman can tell that a scar on a tree’s trunk happened ten or thirty years ago. If a tree is misshapen, he can tell when and where there were drainage issues in the soil. Joslin, who is also incredibly knowledgeable about trees, claims that he learned virtually everything he knows about trees from Mosman.

He points to another tree that seems to have been rammed into the trunk of another – it looks like it’s growing out of a collapsed, brown birthday cake. It’s a Camperdown Elm that has been grafted onto an American Elm. Every few decades, a new disease or pest will come around and kill off a certain variety of tree – the American Elm was killed off by Dutch Elm disease, but before that, Chestnut Blight Disease killed all the Chestnuts. Currently, the Asian Longhorned Beetle, which primarily prays on Norway Maples, is on Boston’s doorstep. Worcester, just an hour west, already cut down nearly 10,000 infested trees. Mosman said that he already has a game plan should the beetles infiltrate Boston. “Cut down all the host species,” he said, “if you leave a single one of them, you’re almost guaranteed to have a big problem on your hands.” When Worcester began to see signs of an infestation in 2001, Mosman advised them to do just that, but they didn’t listen. 75-85% of their tree cover was Norway Maple, Boston’s is only 44%. “We’re ready to cut down all of the Norway Maples at the first sign of infestation,” he said, “luckily, it won’t be as devastating to us as it was for Worcester.”

As the Chief Arborist for Boston, Mosman wears many coats, most of them foreign to the average urban-dweller. Rather than worrying about the economy, Mosman worries about the next arboreal epidemic. Dead limbs over roads always need to be removed, park trees always need to be manicured. As long as there are trees in the city, Mosman will climb them for a living.