Streaming normalisation ended the fight over volume. It did not end the fight. Three Wire writers spent a month with the mastering engineers, playlist editors and bar owners now deciding what a record has to survive.
Vera Lune has never played a show outside her own city and records only between four and seven in the morning. We climbed five flights of stairs at an unreasonable hour to ask why.
Koji Marlowe inherited a television repair shop and turned the basement under it into a studio. Forty-one broken amplifiers, one soldering iron that is never off, and a fourteen-week waiting list.
Street width, render, tram rails and the local noise floor decide what a city sounds like long before anyone plays a note. A field guide to why Berlin rings for two and a half seconds and Lagos does not ring at all.
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