News
Here Brad is pictured with band mewithoutYou.
South Carolina band The Working Title will release their debut album About Face on Thursday July 18th, 2006. The album was Co-produced by Brad, with sessions taking place in late 2005.
Austrailan band Something for Kate' s new album Desert Lights recently hit No.1 on Austrailia's Domestic Top 50 album chart. The band's fifth studio album was recorded over four months in Los Angeles with producer Brad Wood. Here is a great little interview with brad and SFK member Paul Dempsey
Canadien band Stabilo's sophomore album "Happiness & Disaster" is out, it was recorded in LA with brad last year.
Here is a nice little article from Paste Magazine about Brad deciding to install a home studio. The recording of Ben Lee's album Awake is the New Sleep is documented and the article gives a good insight into some of Brad's work habits (love the Billy Corgan No Referencing quote!!
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Casey Rice moved to Chicago in the summer of 1988. "I came here to do visual art, not music," he says. "I sold all of my records." He'd studied political science and art off and on for several years at Ohio State University, while there playing guitar in a punk-rock band called Control and the art-punk outfit IDF. During his first year in Chicago, Rice mounted a show of paintings and several performance pieces. The following year he would returned to music, with a punk band called Dog.
Dog became the opening band of choice for other loud indie-rock acts. Rice befriended the movers and shakers of the early Wicker Park rock scene, including Precious Wax Drippings (with future Tortoise drummer John Herndon) and Friends of Betty (some of whom would go on to start Red Red Meat). When Red Red Meat drummer Brian Deck, who cofounded Idful studios with Brad Wood, pulled out of the business in 1992, Rice was offered an engineering position -- even though his resum� at the time consisted of one album for IDF and the first EP by Chicago punks Burnout. But he proved a quick study. "I was really interested in the physics of it," he says. "It was a chance to get paid doing something related to music instead of banging nails or painting houses. I had an interest in the job as a career for a while -- until I realized what it meant."
As it happened, when Rice took the job at Idful, Liz Phair was recording Exile in Guyville there. She had no band of her own, and since Rice could play guitar, he was drafted into service. When the record hit big, he became a regular collaborator, playing on Phair's second album and sometimes backing her live. Wicker Park was thrust into the national spotlight, touted as the "next Seattle," and the music industry placed some of its biggest bets on young bands that recorded at Idful, including Veruca Salt. Rice didn't like what he saw happening, and by 1996 he'd quit the studio.
"There's this myth about record producers," he says. "Here's this magical guy who gets this magical sound with a magical formula, when it's really about going to the right parties more than anything else. I didn't really want to do engineering that much, and I didn't want to play in a rock band. I was totally disgusted with all of the music industry horseshit after the Liz Phair thing. It made me feel like an ass. There were a ton of people hanging out all of the time, wanting to be your friend because you were the guy that played the second guitar parts."
His distaste for the rock scene dovetailed with a new obsession: the burgeoning English drum 'n' bass movement. "I first heard it by accident, when I went to England [with Tortoise]," he says, "this original music that had never been made before coming out of these huge bass bins, Blade Runner-style. Going to those DJ gigs got me excited." He began collecting the latest singles from England and sharing his discoveries with Chicago audiences as a participant in the Deadly Dragon Sound System, a DJ collective that for a time mixed dancehall, hip-hop, and drum 'n' bass every Sunday night at the Empty Bottle.
Rice is Designer, the drum-n-bass DJ ("I guess they call me a DJ," he says, "but that's not exactly it") who spins alongside DJs 3D and Snuggles, among others. Rice is also the permanent sound man for Tortoise ("I fill in the blank spots when the band stops playing," he says. "All this 'thanks for coming' bullshit in between songs has got to go.")
Rice would also expand his horizons through engineering and production work in multiple fields of music, including Jazz.
Jazz Trumpeter Rob Mazurek: Casey Rice is one of the most brilliant sounding people I know. He always comes up with good ideas and surprises. Of course he is able to get musical tones, his visual thing is excellent also. I always treat the engineer as a collaborator. Casey is always able to take my abstract thoughts and interpret them correctly, and usually expand on them also.
While touring with Tortoise on another one of their international tours, made his way to austrailia. it was their that he would meet his future wife, singer songwriter Via Tania (Tania Bowers).
Via Tania: "I met Casey in Sydney when he came out with (much-respected, US post-rock veterans) Tortoise, and afterwards we kept in touch by email. I really wanted to travel but I didn't have any savings and hadn't really planned anything. Then spontaneously I decided I was going to Chicago, and within two weeks I was there. I didn't even have a suitcase, I just had a big old duffle bag. Everything worked really easily when I got there, it was all kind of meant to be."
The two would work on Tania's music and would later marry. Casey would become an ex-pat, moving to Austraila with Tania.
Tania: "We always thought that we would move back to Australia but I guess I thought it would be in quite a few years. I had just got my green card, then a couple of months later I had this funny conversation with my mother. It was not that long after September 11 (2001) and my mum was like, 'Right! It's time to come home!' "I was just laughing, I put the phone down and said to Casey, 'OK, chop chop! Let's go!' But he said, 'You know, I wouldn't mind getting out of here. If we're going to do it later, what exactly are we waiting for?' "
The couple live for the most part in Austrailia now, though they did move back for a short while recently in order to promote Via Tania's new album. Casey is still involved in recording and producing bands, doing production for austrailian indie bands like Ground Components.