Andrew Sarlo is a mixing engineer best known for his work with Big Thief, Dijon and Bon Iver. He works across a variety of genres but the most interesting of his work to me is his folk/country mixes, particularly on ‘Absolutely’ by Dijon and ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You’ by Big Thief. The characteristics of these albums that stick out to me are the roominess of the sound, which was achieved through a variety of techniques.
Absolutely was recorded with mostly omnidirectional microphones in an untreated room, with very few studio overdubs (Handley, 2022). This meant that instead of each microphone purely picking up the instrument it was assigned to, it’s picking up the space and instruments around it and how they all interact with each other. This is a step away from most modern engineering that is very cleanly produced in treated rooms that pick up as little of the space as possible with the exception of things like room microphones.
During the mixing stage of this album, very little processing was done, with a hefty use of graphic eq to attenuate the mids, slight compression and little else.
A big part of Andrew Sarlo’s philosophy is the “belief in the chemistry of people working together”. (Jeffers, 2019) The idea that a perfect clean recording will never have the same energy and soul in it that an imperfectly captured yet authentic moment in time will. This can be heard throughout all of his work, including the more ‘proffesionally recorded’ ones – there is a sense of every decision being made out of emotion and feel rather than how something is ‘supposed’ to sound.
This philosophy is inspiring to me as it puts the focus on the joy and passion of music and sets the goal of recording and mixing to capturing that feeling as clearly as possible, as supposed to capturing the instruments as clearly as possible. Using this philosophy in my own future productions will allow me to keep my workflow feeling loose and authentic with an emphasis on the emotion of the music.
References:
Handley, J. (2022) ‘Dijon Talks “Absolutely” and His Omnidirectional Process’. Reverb, Available at: https://reverb.com/news/dijon-interview (Accessed: 1st September 2025).
Sommer, R. (2019) ‘Andrew Sarlo: Sanctuary of Possibility’. Issue 134. Available at: https://tapeop.com/interviews/134/andrew-sarlo (Accessed: 1st September 2025).
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