Hiding Places are a Brooklyn-based indie rock band with roots in North Carolina. This past spring they were on
the road supporting their debut album The Secret to Good Living, an album filled with fuzzy riff-driven rock and
spacey analog hum. Before their first Minnesota show at the 7th street entry, I got to sit down with all four
members of the band to talk about the tour and their recording process.
Hiding Places are: Henry Cutting on drums, Audrey Keelin on guitar and vocals, Nicholas Byrne also on guitar
and vocals, and Michael Matsakis on bass.

Is this your first tour of the Midwest as Hiding Places?
(Henry) I think so, yeah It's been very nice.
(Audrey) Yeah, everyone’s been really nice.
It's your second night of this run supporting Sluice, How do you guys know each other?
(Audrey) Michael and I both grew up in Asheville, and Justin from Sluice used to play in this band called Aunt
Sis, who I would see play all the time in Asheville. He also played in various other bands, but that was the way
that I got introduced to his music, like, ten years ago... and then the person who runs their label is our manager.
So it was a very natural, like, sort of thing.
How long are you gonna be on the road now?
(Audrey) Well we’re playing with Sluce right now...
(Henry) It’s like two weeks more Sluice
(Micheal) The 22nd is our last show, but the last week is four solo shows... when we’re back in Georgia and
North Carolina.

Was this new record the first one that you wrote after moving to New York?
(Nick) Yeah, well ... all the songs came from, like, a three-year period... some of us living in North Carolina and
some of us living in New York for that period.
(Micheal) I wasn't there for any of that.
(Audrey) No, he was not there for any of the writing.
(Henry) Some of it was written in Athens, I guess, some of it was written in Carborough, and then Brooklyn

Was it all recorded in New York?
(Audrey) Yes. Yeah, mostly recorded there... there's some songs that started as demos that I recorded, like, in my
bed, but then we added to them in the studio. Those songs are Piles of Thought and Forget It All, which are...
the 3rd to last song and the last song.
Do y’all find that a sense of place influences your writing very much? Like either in the sense of where
you're from, where you grew up, or where you are when you write and record the songs.
(Audrey) Yeah, I mean, when you say a sense of place, I immediately think of the fact that we were recording
these songs, like, after midnight for the most part in New York. Michael works at NYU, so we were recording at,
like, the NYU recording studio, and we could only do it after 11 PM... so I think that as the place really
influences how dark it sounds.
(Nick) I think it also sounds like people from the south living in New York, you know, and kinda experiencing
that duality of place.

I totally hear that... the duality of place... also, did I see when I was reading about you guys that at one
point you were in London recording?
(Audrey) Yeah, yeah, our last EP that came out before the album, we recorded it in London. I lived there because
I was studying there. So they came and visited and I had some friends who were studying audio engineering, so
they graciously let us use their studio. So yeah, also I feel like Hiding Places has been a very academic
band...[laughter]
(Henry) ...that way it’s free.
(Micheal) that’s the way to do it.
(Audrey) Yeah, yeah. It was really fun recording in London, though... a lot of friends who weren't studying were
coming in and playing, like, sax or clarinet or whatever.
(Nick) Flute!
(Audrey) Yeah, Lucas F. Jordan.
(Nick) In Elephant key there’s flute

Your new record sounds quite different from your previous EPs, was that something you were
thinking about when recording?
(Audrey) Can you tell me more about what you mean by that?
Like... your early EPs, there's a sort of a fuzzy magic far-awayness when I listen to it. And then the
new record, it sounds more immediate, like you're in the room with the sound.
(Audrey) Yes! Yes.
(Michael) A sense of depth, right?
(Nick) It’s the first thing we put out that Michael has recorded.
(Micheal) Yeah, I'm an audio engineer... and so I essentially produced the record. When they started recording
with me, we had some demos... and then I chose the ones that I thought would translate well to a recording in a
bigger style. From there, we just kind of plan out, we try to do everything with minimal edits.
The thing about recording in a decent studio is that you have bigger rooms... like in this room (green room at the
7th St Entry) you can hear some early reflections [Micheal snapping his fingers loudly] it's mostly really
reflections, and then there's the late reflections, which are, like, the decay maneuver. With the early reflections...
getting them clean can be really hard to do in a room, but if you have a nice room, you can do it. But then
simulating early reflections in the reverb is, like, really difficult to make it sound real because there's so much
nonlinearity in the early reflections. Just randomness. So we were in these rooms where we can essentially record
the spot mic and the room tone, with each thing, and so that's a big part of my recording style... and the sense of
depth comes from [that]. It’s this thing where... we're not just recording the amp right up on the amp, There’s
another mic pointing up to the sky, and that’s getting the depth.
Then when you're mixing...[for] doubling vocals instead of reaching for an EQ to thin them out we'll just back
up in the mic, and that does the same thing. We're trying to do things acoustically before we reach for
technology.
(Audrey) I feel like our earlier recordings were very much like a painting. And our later recordings are now a
sculpture. Because we have more dimensionality, because we've been doing this for longer now.
(Nick) In that early version of it I was doing a lot of the recording and mixing, and we were trying to do
everything [ourselves]. I was aware of some of these things, but like, I was trying to do all of it with no mastery of
any of it. And Michael has a mastery of the subject and is able to, like, make artful decisions where as... I was just
trying to do it and make it happen. So I think that's the difference.
(Micheal) Yeah, there's a lot less going on, so there's a lot more space, so we can get it a lot louder.

(Audrey) Also, it's like, we have two brains now in the band who have an interest and skills with recording music
rather than only one brain.
(Nick) But I would say... that I'm not using that part of my brain so much. [laughing]
(Audrey) Hell Yeah
(Micheal) Most of the songs were recorded straight to tape... [or] touch tape at some point... I mixed them on an
analog desk on a Neve 8088, 40 channels, so thFey were all mixed on that and an API legacy console... and then
bounced to a studer. The Neve was next to a two track studer tape machine, and the API is on an Ampex, a
more high fi machine.
I actually mixed Waiting on the API into the Ampex, and [that song] you can tell it was bounced to tape,
because the tape machine was malfunctioning when I bounced it... I don't know if y'all even knew.
(Audrey) No [laughing]... That's awesome.
(Micheal) I didn’t tell y'all cause I was like, ‘Is this an issue?’ but I was like, no, I kind of like how it sounds...I
bounced it at 30 inches per second, 30 ips on the machine, which is the highest fidelity it can go, but the
machine clock was messed up and it couldn't really do 30 ips. So Waiting has an intense amount of, like, flutter...
a really fast vibrato on the whole song.
(Henry) We also recorded a few of these songs by playing the drums and the bass faster than the actual recording
and then slowing it down to match the tone.
(Michael) So that's like, if it's 15 ips normally, we record it at like 15 point something. And so we transposed
using a pitch to BPM calculator. Say, like, if we want it to be in the key of C at 100 BPM, we gotta play it in the
key of D at 109.5 BPM. Then if we turn it back down to 15 ips, we go back to 100, and the pitch goes down.
And so what ends up happening is the drums and the bass, the formants start to get deeper. One hand and The
Secret to Good Living have the bass and drums pitched down like that.
(Audrey) Do you want to describe [formants] to us?
(Michael) Foremant is... why my voice sounds like my voice and Audrey's voice sounds like her voice... essentially
the overtone series and how loud each frequency in the overtone series is.
We’re not really double tracking anything either, it’s really bare...instead of layering everything, like they would
do in the early 2000s to like 2016 or so... we're leaving space and creating the depth rather than doubling because
in a lot of like early 2000s rock, all the guitars were doubled and tripled. That's like a Dave Grohl thing.
(Henry) Can we talk more about Dave Grohl? I have a lot of thoughts.

(Audrey) Oh yeah?
(Henry) Just kidding.

I want to ask about writing too, I've heard that you write pretty collaboratively, right? How do your
songs usually start?
(Audrey) I guess the way it works is that Nicholas or I will have the seed of a song, like a couple verses or a chorus
or a full song that we've written and then we bring it to Henry and Michael, and then we jam or we all listen to
it, and we share ideas, and we write the song together. I guess stage one of writing the song has already been
done, but stage 2 of writing the song begins with all of us... and then maybe stage 3 is playing it live at a show
and seeing how it feels and then stage 4 is adding another part or changing the key. There's definitely infinite
stages, but at some stage it gets captured as a recording.
(Nick) I would say too that there’s an openness with bringing a song... like open to changing in whatever way we
all decide, and there's openness to trying different ideas like, what if we remove this part? Or what if we only do
this part once? Those are the kind of things where only the minds of the other people in the band could
produce, so then it becomes like a Hiding Places song.
(Audrey) Yeah, we're doing that a lot with these new songs that we've been writing and recording. For example,
Heat Lightning is a song where Nicholas wrote a lot of this song and it started as a story based on somebody
who he and Henry met in an airport shuttle. Then Nicholas brought the song to me and I was like, we need to
make these chords fucked up sounding... I want it to sound more fucked up and then... It was sort of like a
collage, or an exquisite corpse of adding different words and like adding different chords... just making it more
deranged.
(Micheal) Yeah, and withholding.
(Audrey) Withholding... that's another big thing
(Micheal) not showing your whole hand... ever. Like, it shouldn't be loud the whole time, it has to be dynamic.
For the lyricists in the band I’m curious, would you say you were always into poetry and writing
growing up, or did you just get into writing for writing songs?
(Audrey) I love that question, I want to hear you [nick] first. I'm excited to hear what you have to say.

(Nick) I mean, I just love songs, singing songs and listening to songs... as far as poetry, I was more interested in
lyricists. Words with melody feels like home to me.
(Audrey) I was obsessed with poetry when I was younger.
(Micheal) Did you do slam poetry?
(Audrey) I never did slam poetry, but I was really obsessed with writing poetry and writing stories and being in
plays and learning monologues and shit. Like... I was always writing. But I was also a big fan of music in high
school and I would do exactly what you're doing when I was in high school, interview bands and photograph
them and stuff and I had this music zine that I made. And I guess I never really thought to bridge the gap until
meeting Nicholas, honestly, when we started recording music together...I was like, oh, wait, I'm obsessed with
music and also I like to write stuff, So I mean, I'm done.

Interview by Elvy Ruchie
05/06/2026