Medford Rocks

Hendrik David Gideonse XIX, A94, G97

There's something indecent going on in the basement of a three-decker house just down the hill from the Tufts campus -- in fact, Indecent Music is being made.

Medford resident and Tufts graduate alumnus Hendrik David Gideonse XIX (his real name, not a stage moniker), bought the house a decade ago with two other Tufts graduates. They remodeled the basement to create a state-of-the-art recording and production studio called Indecent Music, of which Gideonse is principal engineer.

Step into the basement of the unassuming Victorian, past the usual flotsam and jetsam of tools and building supplies, and enter the recording studio, a small concrete-block room arranged with racks of pre-amplifiers, speakers and keyboards. An electric guitar leans against one wall and coils of black cable hang from wall hooks. Between recessed lights, the ceiling is decorated with the signatures and graffiti of artists and friends scrawled in black marker.

Opposite the studio door, a series of wooden soffets of varying sizes, creates an altar-like space above a central console, monitor, and keyboard. The wooden surfaces cause sound to diffuse and bounce back in all directions. Through a small glass window above the producer's chair, is the adjoining live room, where musicians and vocalists send sound bouncing off foam dampers and a tiled corner and into Gideonse's mixing board and digital recording equipment.

This is the space where the lyrics written by a folk singer in Nevada were transformed into an up-tempo arrangement with a techno beat brought to life by Latin and House vocalist Tammi Esquivel. Or where a budding rock, "anti-folk" artist from Dorchester, Bryan McPherson, just finished his first record with Gideonse. Other artists currently recording at Indecent include R&B singer/songwriter Courtney McCall, and the electronica group M-31.

"I write a lot of music for hip-hop," says Gideonse. "I use a lot of real instruments for production, which is unusual."

Gideonse specializes in composing tracks for R&B and rock artists who "need music to bring out great lyrics."

Gideonse says he created the studio to record and release his own records, but likes working with artists who are less established. He is able to charge more affordable rates than many larger studios and enjoys getting involved in all aspects of the creative process, from writing music and mixing sound, to designing the graphics for their records.

"I get to figure out what's good about them and learn how to bring it out," he says. "I really like doing the whole package."

Gideonse uses a combination of new technology such as Cakewalk's Sonar and older, tube preamp equipment that changes the tone of the music. Pure digital sound is "too clean -- no character," he explains. The tubes help create a "warmer, punchier," quality, he says.

Gideonse didn't set out to be a musician. When he first arrived at Tufts as an undergraduate in 1990 from his hometown of Cincinnati, he thought he wanted to be a painter. After he and his high school girlfriend broke up, he says he realized all of his paintings were really of her.

Gideonse began playing with a ska/rock band called Thumper that became popular on the campus frat party circuit, and later recorded a CD with Joe Cuneo at Downtown Records. He left that band in 1992. At the other end of the musical spectrum, he played contrabass with the Tufts orchestra.

He got a job making good money at Tufts Lighting, Sound & Video, which provided audio production for conferences and music events on campus. Gideonse says he cut his teeth in live sound reinforcement and mixing through this experience and learned a lot from his fellow engineers, Eric Barnes and Kris Umezawa. As his musical accomplishments accumulated, he decided that maybe he had found his calling. He returned to Tufts and earned a master's degree in music composition in 1997. Soon after graduation, he formed another band called Nineteen, which toured until 2000.

Gideonse met his fiancé, Laura Rótolo, when both were taking a Tufts music class on Paris and Vienna at the turn of the 20th Century and they spent a lot of time at the library listening to romantic music by Ravel and Stravinsky. Now an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, Rótolo occasionally sings backup vocals for Indecent Music.

Gideonse says it is hard to watch so many musicians deal with substance abuse.

"I had a pretty hard-core battle with addiction myself," he says. "As artists, we're pretty good at self-destruction."

Substance abuse often begins because "you get inspired by a different chemical, or whatever," says Gideonse, but then, "it stops working," and "for a lot of people, the music falls away completely."

After getting "clean" about four years ago, Gideonse learned about Right Turn, a support group in Arlington for recovering musicians, and began volunteering for them. From Right Turn, he was referred to his latest project, working with a pilot program at the Northshore Recovery High School to create a recording studio for an after-school program in Beverly, Massachusetts for teens dealing with drug and alcohol abuse.

His own life has taken a positive turn on many fronts, says Gideonse, and he is now so busy with Indecent Music that he has to turn some business away. In 2005, he also began teaching audio production and recording at the New England Institute of Art in Boston.

Gideonse is most grateful to Tufts for the training and fostering of creativity -- by professors like John McDonald (who taught composition) and David Cohen (who taught theory and is now at Columbia) -- that helped him become a professional musician. He even appreciates the stressful experience of having to perform music in front of faculty juries.

"The professionalism is something that really lasted," he says, "The professionalism, contacts, learning to meet people and being able to stand by your work is something that has stayed with me."

To learn more about Indecent Music go to http://www.indecentmusic.com/

Article by Lisa Hayden

Lisa Hayden is an Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning graduate student and a former reporter for newspapers in Connecticut and California.

Photos by Robert Bochnak