This episode’s guest is one of those rare studio minds who makes the control room feel less like a workplace and more like a laboratory with excellent taste.

Sylvia Massy is a producer, mixer, and engineer whose credits stretch from punk grit to arena-scale rock and beyond. Her name is often spoken as she produced Tool’s Undertow, but her story doesn’t start with platinum plaques. It starts in the mid-’80s trenches, making compilations, working with punk bands, engineering metal records, and learning the kind of hard-won lessons you only get when the tape is rolling and the stakes are real. From there, she becomes a crucial behind-the-boards force in Los Angeles, intersects with the Sound City recording studio mythology, and winds up in the orbit of Rick Rubin’s American Recordings era, touching projects that helped define what “big” sounded like in the ’90s.

But the reason I wanted Sylvia on the show isn’t just the résumé. It’s the method. Sylvia is obsessed, in the best way, with recording technology and the physical stuff of sound. Consoles, mics, outboard gear, oddball techniques, and the kind of creative decisions that make an outsider sit up and pay attention. Her approach is curious, practical, fearless, and frequently hilarious.

We also talk about Studio Confidential, a new live, in-person onstage conversation series launching in New York City. It’s designed to pull back the curtain on legendary sessions and the people who actually built those records from the inside out. The official residency runs February 3 through March 1, 2026 at NYC’s Sheen Center for Thought & Culture, with multiple shows each week.

If Studio Confidential is about pulling back the curtain, Sylvia’s the person you want holding the flashlight.

Some conversations begin with music. This one begins with language. A little French. A little English. When this interview takes place, it's a late night in Brussels, where the streets are quiet, the restaurants are closing down, and Lucien Fraipont (fray-pon), who records and performs under the names Robbing Millions and DUID, is generous enough to stay awake a bit longer and talk about his multifaced career in music.

What follows is less an interview and more a map of how a musician becomes himself. How jazz training folds into electronic textures. How a teenage obsession with Nirvana morphs into a lifelong interest in improvisation. And how a home studio project grows into something restless and alive. Here, alter egos are less about costume changes and more about giving different parts of the same creative mind room to breathe.

We talk about playing alone onstage with samplers and pedals, the strange discipline of improvising inside machines, the Brussels underground, working with Mark Hollander on Aksak Maboul records, and the beautiful problem of wanting to do everything at once: produce, perform, collaborate, wander.

If you care about how music evolves, how scenes survive, and how curiosity keeps artists young, this conversation is for you.

There are musicians who treat tradition like a museum, and then there are musicians who treat it like a passport. Stéphane Wrembel belongs firmly in the second category.

You may know his work from the soundtracks to Midnight in Paris or Vicky Cristina Barcelona, those melodies that drift in from another time but somehow land right in your lap. His newest release, Django New Orleans II: Hors-Série, leans into that same sensation. It’s a record that threads Django Reinhardt’s Jazz Manouche through the brass-soaked spirit of New Orleans, recorded with a nine-piece ensemble of some of New York’s most serious improvisers, and shaped by Wrembel’s own restless sense of exploration. The album moves easily from classic repertoire to new original compositions, and along the way, Wrembel steps into new territory by singing for the first time on record, offering up two Serge Gainsbourg songs with a shared Parisian accent and an almost disarming sense of vulnerability.

“Hors-Série” means special edition, but this feels more like a field journal. It captures an artist testing new ground without abandoning the old maps. Today we talk with Stéphane about that journey, about what happens when Django meets New Orleans, about why Gainsbourg mattered enough to get him to finally step to the microphone, and about treating music not as something fixed and finished, but as something alive, breathing, and in motion.