London-based keyboardist and producer Joe Armon-Jones is an artist that has made an impression right across the UK’s vibrant music scene. As a musician, Armon-Jones is a member of recent Brit-winners Ezra Collective, as well as being a prolific sideman for lauded jazz artists including Moses Boyd and Nubya Garcia.
It’s in his solo work that the purest form of Armon-Jones’ vision shines though, combining elements of jazz, dub and the more atmospheric ends of UK electronic music, via collaborations with artists such as DJ/producer Maxwell Owin and dubstep figurehead Mala.
This year sees Armon-Jones return with his first solo album in six years, which represents his most ambitious statement to date. Split across two installments, All The Quiet sees Armon-Jones collaborating with the likes of Greentea Peng, Wu Lu, Hak Baker and Yazmin Lacey, along with some of his other regular collaborators.
The two-part album is released on his own Aquarii Records imprint, and Armon-Jones has also recently completed work on Aquarii studio – a custom designed space built around his dub-influenced approach to production and mixing.
We visited Armon-Jones in his new studio to discuss the creation of the studio and album, and how a few pieces of gear define his spacious, rough-edged sound – which you can watch in action in our studio video.
"I spent quite a long time getting very frustrated in houses that I used to live in,” he tells us. “I'd set up a studio in the back of the house in a very far from adequate room, with very far from adequate treatment. Not to mention no soundproofing.
“Apart from just pissing other people off with your kick drum and bass going for hours and hours, it just wasn’t the right environment to get stuff to sound the way I like it. I’d be running from the studio to other speakers in the house, basically going insane trying to get mixes to sound correct.”
Aquarii Studios is built in a conveniently sized room at the back of the garden in Armon-Jones’ house, equipped and soundproofed with the help of Praxis Audio’s Aiden Wallwork.
"I was very impressed how fast he did it – basically on his own as well,” Armon-Jones explains. “Most of the manual labour was Aiden, with me trying to help, but not really helping – mostly making things harder.”
While the design of the studio has been built around Armon-Jones’ distinctive approach to recording and mixing, he tells us the look and feel of the space was of equal importance to the sound and layout.
"I was just trying to design it how I liked it. Things like, the wood and the colour of it, which sounds like a bit of an extra thing when you're talking about a music studio, but actually, if you're spending your whole life somewhere, it's good for it to aesthetically feel like ‘you’.”
Any musician or producer that’s spent long sessions trying to work in unpleasant or uncomfortable rooms will likely agree with that sentiment.
“There are windows and there's sunlight, and there's the atmosphere that I like,” he tells us. “There's space to record drums. I have my organ in here. I have my Rhodes in here, my synths. I have space for my mixing desk and all the gear that I want to use. It's perfect for what I need, really.”
Mixing All The Quiet
While, as he tells us, the studio space has been designed as a home for his multitude of different projects, a key driving force behind its design was a desire to finish the process of recording and mixing the two parts of new album All The Quiet.
“Part of the reason I built the studio was to finish this album, because it's something I wanted to mix myself,” Armon-Jones explains.
Key to cracking that mix was creating a space with a sound Armon-Jones could trust and rely on.
“Every time I was speaking to other mixing engineers and unloading my mixing worries on them, I was just getting the same advice the whole time,” he says. “People would just say, sort your room out and everything will get easier.
“Big shout out to Joker. He's an excellent mixing engineer. He mixed the previous album that I made with Maxwell Owin called Archetype. He was just like, ‘you can be as good as you want at mixing, but if you don't have the right room, you'll just be making bad decisions’.”
Armon-Jones’ studio approach draws heavily on the influence of Jamaican dub icons such as King Tubby. At the heart of his studio is the Soundcraft Series 400B desk, which allows Armon-Jones to physically mix using the faders and route audio to effect sends.
“I really like the EQs,” Armon-Jones says about his choice of desk. “I like the smoothness of the desk and the faders and how they work. I like the saturation that I get from it.”
The dub effects make use of two classic hardware choices – a Roland Space Echo tape delay and a physical spring reverb.
“I have the Space Echo looped into the desk, which is something that a producer friend of mine called Kabir La Amlak showed me, which really changed the way I mix,” he explains of the setup. “It was a very small thing that he showed me, but it really has completely changed the way I approach the desk and the echo.”
The simple spring reverb, meanwhile, allows Armon-Jones to place his mixes in a unified space, as well as physically manipulate the sound.
“It's a very cheap reverb,” he says. “It's a physical reverb, but you can get a spring for 30 quid or something; it's not loads of money. It’s better compared to buying a plate reverb, which is just an enormous plate that you need to keep in a corridor. Also, I think there are very good emulations of plate reverbs, but I haven't heard so many emulations of spring reverbs that really do them justice.”
While there’s a decidedly old-school and physical side to Armon-Jones’ production techniques, he’s adamant that he’s not simply leaning on classic gear for the sake of it. Rather, the physicality of the desk and effect sends actually speeds up his workflow, as opposed to drawing automation in a DAW.
“You'd have to record it in and then do a whole load of automation and do a whole load of track muting,” he explains, comparing using his hardware echo to a plugin equivalent. “It'd be a five or 10 minute job. There are some things that the desk actually speeds up in terms of production and workflow. It's not just, I like old stuff and I use old stuff instead of new stuff. I really like this workflow.”
Joe Armon-Jones’ All The Quiet Part 1 is released 28 March via Aquarii Records.
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