Studio Radicals is a new podcast series featuring in-depth conversations with some of music’s most innovative minds.
Hosted by journalist and broadcaster Kate Hutchinson, it brings together visionaries with a unique approach to making, mixing and recording music.
These include from composers building distinctive sonic worlds, to the engineers helping translate artists’ ideas into sound and the producers finding those all-important details that can make a song stand out.
In series one, Kate travels to studios and mixing desks on both sides of the Atlantic – from the coast of California to the Abbey Road Studios in London – to speak with eight creatives about their craft, process and adventures in music.
The series explores the skill and dedication that goes into making a hit record, looking at musical artistry and inspiration, and finds out what it truly means to be a Studio Radical.
Episode one features Marta Salogni, an Italian recording engineer, producer and mixer based in London.
A true polymath, Pitchfork called her the luminary who all “your favourite artists want to mix their records”.
Marta has engineered albums for Depeche Mode, Bon Iver and Black Midi, produced English Teacher’s Mercury Prize-winning debut This Could Be Texas, and was hand-picked by Björk to work on her 2017 album Utopia in Iceland.
Kate also meets with rock heavyweight Catherine Marks, who won a Grammy for her work on the 2023 album from boygenius, before heading to Hollywood to speak with Ebonie Smith about her journey from gospel choir to engineering the Hamilton soundtrack, collaborating with Angela Davis and Roberta Flack.
She also talks about founding Gender Amplified, an initiative set up to support women and gender-expansive individuals working in music production.
From there, Kate travels up the California coast to meet with composer and electronic pioneer Suzanne Ciani, who started playing the Buchla analogue synthesizer in the 1970s, and has inspired various artists with her experiments in quadraphonic sound, as well as musical effects for films and ads.
Elsewhere in the series, Kate visits Miami-based engineer Maria Elisa Ayerbe, a genre-defying voice in Latin American alternative music who has mixed everything from salsa and reggaeton to rock and pop.
She also meets with composer Hannah Peel, who weaves together electronic music and environmental sounds in scores and soundscapes that explore themes of human connection.
Back in London, she visits rising vocal engineer Ramera Abraham, who has worked with UK pop greats including Adele and Little Mix, and Abbey Road-based mastering engineer Cicely Balston, who has been at the dials for everything from UK jazz star Nubya Garcia to David Bowie’s back catalogue.
The series, made by an all-women and gender-inclusive team, features some reflections on creative experimentation, artistic collaboration and the joys of making music, while exploring some of the challenges engineers, producers and artists navigate, and how they’ve broken into historically exclusive spaces.
Kate Hutchinson says: “This podcast has been such an incredible adventure in sound – what started as interviews with radical minds has evolved into a series that, I think, illuminates the different ways we listen to and hear music.
“It’s a series that shows what happens when you don’t accept the lack of opportunities open to you and how being bold pays off.”
Krysti Hamilton, Brand Director, and Rachael Steven, Head of Brand Communications at dCS Audio, say: “dCS has been fortunate to work with some incredible artists, producers and engineers throughout its history, and we’ve always tried to honour their work by creating products that reveal the full breadth of information within a recording, from the finest sonic details to the sense of rhythm, space and movement.
“With Studio Radicals, we wanted to celebrate a new generation of visionaries who we feel are shaping modern music: people who are dedicated to pushing their craft and bringing listeners a great musical experience.
The creatives featured in season one of Studio Radicals share a desire to create exciting, original sounds and be a positive force within their field, not just sonically but in their approach to working with others and the projects they choose to pursue.
“It’s been an absolute pleasure to collaborate with Kate and hear these luminaries share their stories.”
Studio Radicals is a co-production between Kate Hutchinson and dCS Audio and will be available on all podcast platforms from 23 April.
You can here the trailer here and on Apple and Spotify.
