Tiny Dead Recording Spaces

I have seen people enter pubs and bars where the Buena Vista Social Club CD is playing and look around for the source of the music; they seem startled to be entering a three-dimensional acoustic space. There were many recordings already on the market with similar Cuban singers and material when Buena Vista was released. Its success is usually ascribed to Cooder, the film or the brilliant marketing, all of which were certainly relevant. But I am convinced that the sound of the record was equally if not more important. Not only is it music from another era, magically preserved in the time capusule of Castro’s communism, but was recorded using equally outdated techniques and painstakingly transferred to a digital master so that it retained as much of its analogue warmth as possible. The old Egrem studio in Havana is huge, an excellent but unforgiving room. Jerry [Boys], [Ry] Cooder and [Nick] Gold experimented a great deal with microphone placement. The recording captures the full sound of the three-dimensional space in which the musicians performed — live. If it had been made at one of the new digital studios in Havana, trying so hard to be ‘modern’ with their tiny dead recording spaces and big control rooms, I doubt very much whether anyone beyond a few thousand Latin music enthusiasts would even know it existed.