The room is above a fishmonger's, up a staircase that smells faintly of ice, and it has no windows because Sam Okereke bricked both of them up in 2013 and has never regretted it. Two monitors sit flush in a wall he built himself over four weekends, which is why the wall is not quite square and the sound is. There is a sofa, a kettle, a framed cutting lathe manual, and a hardback ledger on the desk with a rubber band round it.
The ledger is the reason we are here. Since 2011 Okereke has written down every master that has left this room: title, client, date, integrated loudness, true peak. Eleven hundred and some entries. He turns to a page near the front, puts a finger on a line, and covers the client column with his other hand before we can read it. This one, he says. This is the one I want to talk about, and I am not going to tell you who it is.
On learning to make things louder
Start at the beginning. When did loud become the job?
Immediately. I started as a runner in 2003 at a cutting room in north London, and by 2006 I was doing my own masters, and the brief was always, without exception, some version of: can it be as loud as this other record. Nobody said make it good. They said make it competitive, which meant loud, because a louder thing sounds better for about eight seconds and A and R people made decisions in about eight seconds. So I learned to do it, and I got good at it, and being good at it meant I was busy.
