Howl Street Recordings

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[photos by Cj Foeckler. Words by Charlie Wallman]

Located in Bay View, the walls of Howl Street Studios are covered not in tacky wallpaper or tortured adolescent graffiti, but rather giant strips of bark. Shane Hochstetler, sole proprietor of Howl Street recordings, appropriated the method from a source that one of us can’t remember, although for the sake of ethnic coloration let’s say he acquired this knowledge via a three-fingered Belgian gypsy with a mouth like a sailor (alas, forearms like a gypsy) and a book full of holistic reverberation-damping effects, and also let’s say she smelled like epoxy and looked sort of like Helena Bonham Carter.

Though Shane is loathe to be anything but humble about it, 12-hour workdays are the norm at Howl Street. The studio’s business model operates with an unilateral disgust for the economic barriers to entry confronting all but the richest and most suburban of modern rock and roll bands; Shane charges way less than you’d expect, works way more, and lets karma split the difference, or something. It encourages such an eclectic batch of musicians that Howl Street has become the welcoming open arms of the local music industry. The gatekeepers are few whether you’re in music, authorship or online poker, but the golden gates have a dual requirement; talent, and high-quality recording. Either because of or in spite of this business model, Howl Street is frequently booked months in advance, and acts as a common denominator for Milwaukee bands far and wide – burly man metal rubs shoulders with anarcho-robot-punk shakes hands with girl-pop makes awkward eye contact with Chris DeMay who sits on a couch next to two bearded children from a blog (that’s us!), and so on, like Escher’s Metamorphosis, everything more connected than it seems and united under a tattered constitution of organic drum sounds and long winters.

I’m tempted to label Shane as Milwaukee’s version of Steve Albini (probably just because his band Call Me Lightning recorded their sophomore effort, Soft Skeletons, at Albini’s Electric Audio in Chicago), but that implies a patronizing hierarchy – the comparison implies that Shane is taking notes from Albini like Wolfmother “takes notes” from Led Zeppelin or Bush “took notes” from Nevermind, which I would like to stress is probably insulting (apologies to Mr. Stefani) and probably not true. However, there is at least a passing resemblance between the locus of angry white guitar music that’s clumsily united by Albini’s production work (In Utero, The Jesus Lizard, mclusky, Brainiac, namedropping, Killdozer [!!] etc.) and Milwaukee’s own humble sub-cluster of angry white guitars – Ifihadahifi, The Get Rad, Red Knife Lottery, more namedropping, Hochstetler’s own Call Me Lightning, et cetera ad infinitum.

Maybe it’s just something about the Midwestern hellscape that causes garage rock bands to wear their noise on their sleeve like so many poorly-stitched merit badges – though the sleet in our air, the beer in our veins, and the cryptosporidium in our lake has made smaller men out of larger ideas. But, were one looking for a point of entry into the ever-growing Howl St. catalog, it would be safe to start with any of the aforementioned, along with a few raspy and volatile 90s punk-rock records of your choice, a t-shirt with no armpits and a principled hatred of Winger or Warrant or whatever – a lingering resentment for the peak years of corporate rock, dehumanizing and lowest-common-denominator and about as exciting as a threesome with Whoopi Goldberg and Garry Shandling.

A cursory look at any Billboard chart of the last several years reveals that corporate rock, though as nauseating and predatory as ever, is trending downwards – the days of million-unit first-week sales and TRL and megalomanical toad-king svengalis are, if not gone completely (Allah willing), at least in a recession mirroring that of the economy as a whole. Yet in spite of this downturn, Hochstetler and Howl Street are consistently booked and have been for months, so frequently utilized by the full sonic spectrum of bands that the studio could be considered a Milwaukee rawk Mecca – a destination to which all aspiring Milwaukee bands dream of financing a pilgrimage someday, if only to kneel down before its wooden walls, delight in its echoless drum chamber, marvel at its fully-functional couches and chairs, and sip on Hochstetler’s packed fridge of ice-cold Pepsi. That’s Pepsi! Obey Your Thirst! Just Do It!

A few of Shane’s favorite records he’s worked on recently:

Northless – Clandestine Abuse
Scarring Party – Loosing Teeth
Concentric – V
Juniper Tar – Howl St EP
Liarbirds – Cut The Slack
Get Rad – What The Fuck Happened To Common Sense
John Burks – (pretty much every record I’ve done with him!)
Andrew Ehlers
Testa Rosa – II
Father Phoenix – Father Phoenix Finds a New Planet
Disguised As Birds – New Demons
Protestant – The Hate, The Hollow
Terrior Bute – Realm Dwellers
Evenstar – Perihelion