| "Y’know, I sorta stopped keeping track, but yeah, it’s been a busy year," says Edmonton musical hyphenate Nik Kozub about the long list of recordings he’s had a hand in during 2004.
"I usually don’t turn people down, but it’s been so frantic that I’ve had to pick and choose the last while." Caught on his cell phone, Kozub is looking after a myriad of small details the night before he hops a plane to Toronto to help work on the new Luke Doucet solo album. He’s slightly frazzled as he muses over his resumé. "I’ve been doing a lot of the production and recording stuff, but I’ve also been involved in so many other things. I launched a club night this year, which also has turned into a production-promotion gig where I’ve been bringing people like Chromeo and Solvent to town. It’s good, because I’m not just sitting in the studio anymore, which I’d been doing a lot of. Now I’m getting out and into the other sides of the music business."
Kozub is typically modest about his achievements – he’s been an integral part of the Edmonton music scene for years, whether as bassist-vocalist (for the Cleats, and the Lackeys among others), Captain Tractor’s live sound engineer or in turning his home studio into the place du jour for local punk bands. He plays bass for Doucet’s other project, Veal, and has his own band, Shout Out Out Out Out, but recording still takes up a huge chunk of Kozub’s time. He’s known around town for charging reasonable prices as well as working quickly and efficiently.
"I could take a year to do a record," he says, "but most of the bands I work with are on such a tight budget that we have to get it done as quickly as possible. Also, a lot of them – they seem to sorta leave things till the last moment: ‘Oh, we have to have our record out in time for our tour, which is in a month.’ I wind up working fast out of necessity. But the more you do it, the faster you get anyways."
Quick and dirty is appealing to a young punk band barely able to scrape the necessary cash together, a condition Kozub is extremely sympathetic to.
"The punk-rock bands, I think, like coming to me because they know I’ve played in punk-rock bands and I’ll take them seriously. And they know that I know the sounds that they’re after."
But it’s not just the standard-issue thrash-and-burn units making use of Kozub’s studio. Former Calgarian Paul Coutts went to Kozub to record a seven-inch with Twin Fangs as did E-town rockers Whitey Houston and Vertical Struts. Saxophonist Brett Miles tapped him for Magilla Funk Conduit’s first album and was so impressed he offered him the chance to man the board for his latest jazz project.
"That might seem weird, but I listen to all kinds of music too," Kozub says. "I’m doing this DJ night at the Victory Lounge and there’s all these sort of old-punk-rock guys doing security there that have seen me play in punk-rock bands all my life and they don’t understand why I’m playing what is essentially techno music. I just sort of got into that stuff and I’ll listen to something like that, and then a Palace record or some sad-bastard folk music and then the Meters. I like a lot of different stuff, so to me it makes sense that I record a lot of different stuff."
Looking to get a reputation for being able to record any type of music, Kozub says that the sessions that he finds the most fun are the ones where he is doing something he has never done before. This means that Kozub can be working on traditional Polynesian music and then switch gears to take on a punk-rock project.
"The other thing is that I get really obsessed with different kinds of music," he continues. "So if I’m working on a certain kind of record I’ll probably be obsessive enough about it that I’ll go and research all the influences, try and trace the history of the music so I can understand it better. Having a good musical vocabulary is important for a producer to have. Knowledge of gear only goes so far." |
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