Bondi. If you want to hear the recorded sound of a real band, playing real instruments in a real space, check out one of the albums he's worked on. Considering how busy he his, I am grateful to him for taking the time to do this interview.

1) You are one of the few producers/engineers who is also a recording artist and songwriter... which one came first and how did you get started? How do you balance the two?

A lot of musicians I know have made forays into engineering and producing -someone I know recently joked about it being an "inevitable Darwin cycle" from musician to producer. It makes a lot of sense to me that as an artist you would wantto have an understanding and in that way some control over how your music translates into a recording, over the means of production. For me it came very naturally out of being an attentive, rapt listener and music fan, wondering what it was about certain textures and sounds or approaches to the "space" in a song or piece of music that pushed the right buttons for me emotionally as a listener, always finding myself asking the classic question "how did they do that?" Unfortunately I don't really make as much time as maybe I should to work on my own music - as a freelancer, I tend to take as much paid work as I possibly can and because of the nature of making records, that tends to be pretty all-consuming. Just keeping some balance in this life can be like a full-time job, as I am sure most engineers will attest to.

2) What albums were you listening to as a kid that inspired you to make your own music? What artists, past or present, would you want to work with now and why (You've already worked with some of my favs, Vic Bondi, Jeff Pezzati, Blake Schwarzenbach)...?

As a very little kid, I loved Black Sabbath and the Beatles, but as I got into my teens, I got really into movie soundtracks by Bernard Herrmann and Jerry Goldsmith (some of which, like Goldsmith's original Planet of the Apes score, hold up well as pieces of music unto themselves), and most of all modern "Serious/classical" music - Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Stravinsky, Bartok. I loved how music in films could really pull your emotional strings, usually without you even knowing it. That was what really made me want to make music. I didn't really get into rock until I started hanging out with punk rock kids in my high school art class - regular rock and pop were way too codified and totally bound up with what seemed like prefabricated teenage social roles for me. But I loved the punk rockers because they showed some imagination and the rules were being made up as they went along. So you had a chance of following your own idea of what was good or interesting and having someone else take it seriously on its own merits - which was very empowering and a lot more compelling than just playing piano in my parents' front room for hours, which is what I had done up til that point.

The most inspiring records I heard at that point are still some of my favorite records: XTC from Drums and Wires through English Settlement; John Cale's Honi Soit and his "greatest hits" comp Guts, Bauhaus, Joy Division, The Clash London Calling, Husker Du Zen Arcade. I think it could be amazing to work with John Cale - I've read that a lot of the music he made in the 80's - some of my favorite songs ever - came together really spontaneously and though I think it could have been a nightmare in one way to work in that (apparently very drug-fuelled) atmosphere, it's always incredible to see something good and interesting develop where there was literally nothing minutes before - that to me is a real gift. Joe Strummer is another one. I mean, it could be a VERY long list - what inspiring artist wouldn't you dream of working with? More recently, I always wanted to record Skeleton Key - I still want to. But I'm lucky because it's easy for me to find something inspiring in almost anyone I've worked with.

3) How would you describe your production style? What do you emphasize?

I tend to work more with bands rather than solo artists, which is not necessarily out of preference but it's just the way things have worked out. Though I do like the way a band's group dynamic as people comes through musically and I hope that's something that translates to the recording. Also, for better or worse I am obsessed with drum sounds and performances. I think I usually prefer to hear dynamics and dramatic effect come out of performance, as opposed to from some aspect of "production," if that makes sense. But I like to try to heighten whatever the inherent drama is within a song by whatever means work best in a given context. I want the song to be like a little world, but that world is more interesting to me if it's founded on the human interaction of the players. Even if, method-wise, we're talking about constructing an illusion of performance rather than capturing everyone playing live, I still like it to feel like a real-time moment more than something static and necessarily "perfect."

4) What are you presently working on? Any plans for future Channels releases or touring?

I am recording the NY band Rahim right now, who I absolutely love. Paint it Black are coming to the studio in August. Report Suspicious Activity, which is a band I play bass in with the songwriter Vic Bondi (he used to be in the first wave Chicago HC band Articles of Faith), Darren Zentek (also drummer of Channels), and Erik Denno (Darren's former bandmate in Kerosene 454 and Oswego), has just finished our second album. Channels will definitely record again and I hope we'll play live but it's hard to get that back into gear - it takes a lot of rehearsal to get to the point where we can feel like we're worth anyone's attention on a stage. It's OK with us if things go slowly - but we will do more as a band for sure.

5) I read your "Loudness Rant" on your site re: the competitive drive to make records louder (I completely agree, btw) but I also think that some of the responsibility is shared with the mastering engineer and not just the label or artist. I was wondering, how much input do you have or exercise when you or the band send a record to the mastering engineer? Do you get final approval as a producer or do you have to contend with the labels?

The final say is almost always between myself and the band. I've almost never had an issue with a label about this ... but the rant came mostly out of frustration because I have been second-guessing this issue forever, thinking "what is wrong with my mixes? I should make mixes that hold up to this approach," in other words, thinking I should be right in there playing the competitive volume game, as if that's job #1. But of course job #1 is really using your imagination to serve the music in the best way you can, and it's cartoonish and ridiculous to me that that somehow just boils down to making it the loudest thing on shuffle play. I finally concluded that I just don't like the 2007 "always-in-the-red" mastering aesthetic. It just doesn't flatter my mixes and it seems to me that the more I try to make mixes that work with that mastering approach, the more sort of generic and plastic-sounding they are. It's fine if you don't care about having a sense of space in the recording, or if you use triggers for all the drum sounds - if you want everything all crammed up in your face all the time. But the very idea that there's some absolute orthodoxy to this, and especially that it centers around something as juvenile as "make my record louder than his record" is just anathema to me. As a listener, a different-sounding or even weird-sounding record beats a "perfect" or "industrial-strength" record, always. It's fine to have a loud record, and I would never specify to a mastering engineer "make it quiet," but come on, how loud does loud have to be? That's why there's a volume knob on your stereo. When you have to work very fast, do a whole record in 5 days or something, sometimes you end up trying to address mix issues at mastering, and I used to fall back on that a lot a long time ago. But avoiding that approach is really important to me now.

6) I think your former band Jawbox was one of the seminal bands from the late eighties and early nineties... how did the move from Dischord to the major label Atlantic positively or negatively affect the band? Was there a difference or was it just a logical evolution?

There is a MASSIVE difference between Dischord and any major label. Dischord just isn't a part of the mainstream music industry at all, and that is a very special and wonderful thing that we were lucky to be a part of. But the move gave us a new lease on life in a way - we really needed a new context in order to continue. It wasn't about money or exposure necessarily, as much as just a change of venue and seeing what else we could do. The move definitely gave us the opportunity to make our best music and afforded us some great experiences. However we ended up in a bit of a weird middle ground by trying to move to a major but still do business our own way. With benefit of 20-20 hindsight, we should have either been totally careerist about it and consciously aimed for total rock stardom (because that's all the mainstream music biz really understands), or not have made the move at all. But it was stil a lot of fun and overall my only regret is that we agonized so much about it at the time.

7) Where is the music business headed (or do you care)? Have things gotten better or worse for artists with the advent of MP3s, iTunes, Myspace, Game Soundtracks, etc. Does this stuff affect you differently as a producer than as an artist?

There's no way to generalize except that the extremes seem greater: it's getting better and worse at the same time. It's so much easier to get music out to people but so much harder for them to take it seriously, to take it personally, because of the glut of information. But it seems like there are more potential income streams from music than ever before, if you are prepared for your art to be used in that way (in video game soundtracks for example). Anyway I hope that things are becoming more artist-centric. In the death-throes of the major music industry though we are going to have to cope with things like watermarked promo CDs that report back to HQ when they are illegally copied, which is so Orwelllian and a total drag.

8) To veer from music for one second... I've always admired your subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) implementation of socially conscious/political lyrics, what's a current event you've been contemplating? What role does or should art play in social commentary?

I just think it's valuable & necessary to get things off your chest, and it's also great to hear a song or experience any kind of art with a point of view that makes you realize you're not alone in an insane world. The arts are one of the last acceptable venues for asking "unacceptable" questions, which I think is a social necessity, but it's not like that's a substitute for cogent political thought and effort.

9) Let's follow that with a vapid and trivial question (you gotta mix it up): what's one piece of equipment you absolutely can't live without?

My API 3124.

10) What are you currently listening to?

Lee Perry "Blackboard Jungle Dub," Brian Eno "Another Green World," Liquid Liquid, and this great French band called Daria that Iain Burgess recorded at Black Box.

11) Last but certainly most important, how is your son Callum doing?

He's amazing. It's too big a subject to get into, but he's great, right now he's in good health and he's totally amazing to be around, he's growing so much every day, it's mind-blowing. Thank you for asking.