THE HIVE MINDS

A retrospective on the famed Vancouver recording studio on the occasion of their 10th anniversary

By Julie Colero

It was the Spring of '97, I believe, when I first met Colin Stewart of the Hive. He was a friend of a friend of a friend, and it didn't really look like he'd ever be much more than that, as the man was as shy as they come, and pretty much ensconced in the basement life. Colin was riding high on his fledgling studio's first success story: The Ids. The Vancouver three-piece, a staple at the (sugar refinery), was destined for big things and had recently been signed to Nettwerk Records, home to super-diva Sarah McLachlan. The Hive, a little nowhere studio with engineers who took the time to record with bands who didn't have the money to pay up for anything other than (hopefully) the tape they recorded on, had struck major label gold.

"That Ids record became the least-selling album in Nettwerk history!" jokes founding Hiver Rob Leickner, a statement that comes easy nine years after the broken-hearted fact. Terry Stewart, Colin's wife and business partner since the early '00s, has invited me out to the studio's new digs in Burnaby on one of February's wetter nights to participate in a reunion of sorts. I found myself in Studio A's spacious control room with Rob (who now works on independent films and is putting together a documentary about the PNE's Super Dogs), Colin, and herself. The Ids never really panned out for the Hive the way Colin and Rob had hoped at the time, but now it's the spring of '06, and the Hive is doing better than ever. Ten years on from its humble basement beginnings, the Hive is busy, busy, busy and has rightly earned itself a shiny reputation with artists at home and away.

"Every major city has its own 'hive'," comments Colin early on in the evening's stroll down memory lane, as he tries to provide likely grounds for why his studio has flourished. But did he really expect his Hive to be Vancouver's "hive", in that sense? "Honestly, no!" he jokes. Rob and Colin, who met when they were "humping gear" for their friend Terry Miles' band Cinnamon, felt that Vancouver was lacking a proper studio for indie artists. "There was nothing going on in the city, but there were all these great bands. We thought, 'there's gotta be something we can do.' We figured we needed a studio to record Terry's band...and there was a Cub side-project that needed to be recorded." Much laughter ensues. Rob's use of the word 'need' tells you a little something about the way things came about--there really was no other option but to take things into their own hands and get the job done. When Colin tries to put his motivation into words, it's totally charming; "It's always those young kids that are making music beyond their years. Those are the ones I'm always interested in. You know that you'll make that first one or two awkward records, and then you'll make the really good one, but it's worth making the awkward ones to get to the good one."

One of the Hive's first awkward recordings was for The Ids. In a story that repeats itself again and again throughout Hive history, a gifted, perhaps visionary singer-songwriter (in this case, Sean McDonald) found his way onto the Hive's doorstep, and his music inspired the Hivers to take a chance. Explains Colin, "The Ids, which was really the first major thing we did, was six months in...[We told them] 'We don't know what we're doing, so we'll record you for free.' I recorded the record and we gave it to this friend of Rob's who ended up being an undercover scout for Nettwerk. The next thing we know, we've got the vice president for Nettwerk totally in love with this kid."

The Hive teamed up with Nettwerk to release a 7" single, financed by Nettwerk but bearing a Hive label, because "they wanted it to look indie," according to Rob. Lo-fi recordings were all the rage at the time, with bands like Sebadoh coasting on careers made of half-baked home recordings, and it made sense that the majors were trying to buy in. What looked like a godsend turned into a nightmare as The Ids' full-length recording, Psycho Babylon, fell flat with audiences outside of the Vancouver scene. Colin and Rob learned an important lesson, although it took a few failures (just ask them about Kym Brown): steer clear of major labels. "For the longest time I couldn't listen to The Ids," says Colin, but thankfully the years have healed those wounds. It turns out that The Ids have done good things for the Hive, even if they didn't make the studio any money. "A lot of people came to the Hive because of The Ids," attests Rob, citing friend and engineer Jordan Koop as proof, and Terry backs him up. "Nick from P:ano thought the lyrics were great." Nettwerk came knocking again some years later, this time chasing P:ano side-project Burquitlam Plaza, and Terry, arguably the most business-savvy of the Hivers, didn't even give them the time of day.

Colin's relationship with his recordings is often very intimately tied to the reactions they garner. Strange, then, is his willingness to put his name to records that sound...bad. "Almost every record that I do gets criticised for sounding lo-fi or like a demo, but somehow bands keep on coming to me. There must be something else there," Colin muses. "What's funny is that a lot of people I record don't care about the way things sound. Maybe I have the reputation of being an engineer who's willing to have something sound bad, in a sonic sense, as long as the performance is good. If you think about it, a lot of the records you love actually sound really bad, but purely in a sonic sense, where the music transcends that." An example of this is found in his working relationship with Nick Krgovich of P:ano.

When I spoke to Nick Krgovich, he couldn't quite put his finger on how his connection with the Hive came into being. "Was I in high school still? Do you remember?" he asks, and it sounds about right to me. I met Nick back when I was music director at CiTR and he showed up with a homemade tape in tow, requesting airplay. I was happy to comply, as that tape contained early versions of some of the songs that would end up on P:ano's first CD release, When it's Dark and it's Summer, songs that today remain favourites to many. "P:ano were certainly a band of just friends from high school then, and we played sporadically. The show I met Colin at was [when] we played at the Brickyard." As Nick remembers it, "we were loading outside, 'cuz I guess we had to go home to bed, because we had to leave as soon as we finished playing, and Colin was in the line-up and he hopped out of nowhere, like out of some sketchy alley, just like 'I've heard all about you, I loved your set, I wanna record you, here's my number.'" Like I've said, the Hive likes the boy geniuses. (I'd like to think that I played a matchmaking role in the P:ano-Hive romance, something Colin alludes to during our conversation but I'm hesitant to pursue. It does look like my gushing may have paid off for once, though.)

"We had no concept whatsoever of recording," continues Krgovich. "We had no idea that a mic would pick up a sound a certain way. We were so ignorant of that process. We thought we were making perfectly fine recordings onto tape decks and onto the computer above our drummer Russell's garage in the summertime. The idea of going into a studio was just this far-flung thing at the time. I think it took a few months before I actually called Colin and inquired about it." And so another budding singer-songwriter found a home at the Hive. When it's Dark... was recorded in the basement du jour and released on Hive Records to great success. Terry says that according to Keith Parry of Scratch Records, who helped with distribution and continued to help throughout the Hive-Fi Recordings years, that album was one of the best-selling Scratch distribution titles ever. It's currently out of print, but not for lack of public interest. Based on North America's warm reception to P:ano, things got a little out of hand when it came time to record Album Number Two.

The Den caused some sleepless nights in the Hive house at 5th and Nanaimo. P:ano had been given a Canada Council grant, and Krgovich had lofty aspirations as to the sound he wanted, and the liberty to do things just right. "When we were recording the first record, I was just such a hippie, like, 'let's do this vocal track in the back yard!', or, like, I'd play a note on the organ and it was making one of the furnace pipes rattle, and I'd be, like, 'I really like that! Why don't you put a mic up there?' Colin still does this--he'll give me a face, but then he'll do it. He totally humours me, and I think that that's a major part of...people need to do that when they work with me, 'cuz I often have a lot of, not bad ideas, just ones that one might find silly." Terry credits this record as being the reason why the Hive had to move out of the basement and into a building separate from their living quarters. There were nights when she would notice the spot in bed next to her empty, Colin parked in front of the mixing console in the basement, fiddling away with the layers of recorded sound in all their intricacies, trying to create the perfect record. If you've heard the record, you'll know that Colin's dedication to the task paid off. "It doesn't take much for [Colin] to understand what I'm trying to go about doing when we're in the studio. He gets there, at some point or another," explains Krgovich, who continues to work with Colin whenever possible.

Until recording The Den, basement studios had always been well suited to the Hive's modus operandi. Hives A, B, C, and D were all in living spaces spread out across our fair city. The only material catastrophe to befall the studio was at Hive B, and is something that Rob refers to as "The Great Studio Flood of Christmas 1998." According to Colin, "Everyone went on holiday and the pipes had frozen in the house. We left the tap on in the bathtub, and then the landlord brought in some contractors to work in the bathroom, and they left the plug in the bathtub. I got a call saying 'you have water flowing out your back door!' Water was pouring down onto the console and spraying on all the gear. Luckily, for some weird reason, I don't even know why, I had unplugged all the gear." Crisis averted. Hive D, "the best Hive," if you believe Rob, where they recorded Hot Hot Heat, Destroyer, the first two P:ano records, Ashley Park, and Radio Berlin's second and third records, also suffered from flooding.

Not all crises are as easy to live through as a little bit of water damage. Without going into too much detail (read: I was afraid to ask about it), it's worth mentioning that the Hive has lost musicians--and friends--to suicide and drug addiction over the years. The loss of Adrian Rout, percussionist for The Ids and a solo performer under the moniker Chruth?, in 1999 hit Colin and Rob particularly hard. I can't help but think that the (sugar refinery)'s closing [at the end of 2003, I think--the years have gotten fuzzy] must have been a downer as well, as many of the musicians who recorded at the Hive made names for themselves by performing regularly at that charming locale. Hive regulars Beans and The Secret Three were so entirely suited to that space. Ida Nilson, former Hive roommate, (sugar refinery) employee and owner, and regular Hive musician, muses, "I don't remember thinking about this much at the time, but certainly both places provided an environment for certain kinds of music to develop that may have gotten lost in the shuffle otherwise. I'm sure both places would have been different and less interesting without each other."

Rob cites recording Beans as one of his Hive highlights. Ida's recollection of those recording sessions hints at the painstaking care and attention that Rob and Colin provide when they're working with artists they're passionate about. "When I first came to the Hive in '98 it was pretty much constantly keyboard jams and hot knives. While recording what became the Beans records Crane Wars and Tired Snow, I remember spending an afternoon dripping water into different jars and listening to it with max reverb in the headphones. We had a lot of time then. Too much, probably. I appreciate how Colin prefers to capture the right sound as you record instead of working on it after. He's quite traditional and it makes recording simpler to me. Also I think he is naturally gifted at capturing a certain quality of sound."

But let's get back to the basement, or the move out of it. Four basements and seven years later, the Hive was ready to go above ground. They found a dream-come-true location out in Burnaby (short-term home to a studio that had gone broke after putting in the $10,000 window between the studio and sound booth--alright!) and decided that, in order to pay the rent, it was time to look for new partners.

In the Hive's early days, Colin and Rob had been joined by studio partners Jim Routhier and Travis Lacombe, both of whom left the business prior to the big move. In order to make the move financially viable, Colin called upon colleague Jesse Gander, who was recording out of Profile Studios for his own company, Rec-Age Records, and asked him to join the Hive team. "When the Hive asked me to join them, I asked 'Can Stu come too?'" says Jesse, when I finally reached him for a chat. He's referring to the Hive's night-owl engineer Stuart McKillop, master of the pop-punk and hardcore recordings, originally a master of mastering at Rec-Age. And thus the current Hive engineering trio was born!

According to Jesse, expanding upon a comment made by Colin, the Hive works on a sliding scale like so: "What you see is what you get with Colin. He'll print the effects. Once a sound has been established with Colin, then that's the sound of the record. With Stu, it's all about getting clarity at the source and changing that to be as large as you can make it. It's quite the uber-production. My influence comes from 80s indie rock and 80s punk, because that's what my taste leans towards. Most of the records I record are tracked live, but I tend to do more work in the mixing stages. I will use Pro Tools and effects and stuff--I like to mess around more. Sean Maxey from the Doers says I go for the loud vocals and drums." Most bands interested in recording at the Hive know who they want to work with based on familiarity with the engineers' work and a whole lot of word of mouth. "I'm ending up with bands that just want to sound like themselves," continues Jesse, rather proudly. "Colin loves 60s recordings and he loves that particular sound; dark reverbs. Stu likes the very modern sound." Bands know what to expect when they lug their gear through those big Burnaby doors.

There is so very much I didn't cover, couldn't possibly cover, in this article. Look for the exciting sequel next month, as the history lesson continues with Hive-Fi Recordings, home to Great Aunt Ida, John Rae and the River, P:ano, Chet, and sometimes Thanksgiving. There are probably tons of other bands who I ought to have name-dropped, but since I didn't, why don't you? If you have any special Hive memories you'd like to share with the world, send them over to pillowcasekisser@gmail.com.