If you hadn’t seen a synth before, you’d probably think you’d stumbled into a secret military bunker. The narrow, unassuming door down the end of a narrow, unassuming alley houses one of the most well hidden sound studios in the city; a hollow block carved into concrete with a long red pipe running along its rooftop and dim, low hanging lights barely illuminating the entire space. Its walls were covered almost entirely with classic synthesizers which looked as far from a musical instrument as possible; one was a towering wooden thing laced with multicoloured wires and polka dotted with hundreds of identical little dials, another was a thick hunk of white rusted metal which looked looked more like some pre-war safe than anything else, a smaller one was built into a briefcase, alive with little flashing LEDs. The headphoned young woman at the back worked on a mahogany one, plugging outputs and carefully moving levers, with the occasional nod of the head probably approving whatever minor adjustment in sound she was hearing. It really did feel like part of some old underground lab, like we had all been plunged into one of Alan Turing’s long-lost memories, with headphones plugged in deciphering messages on these blocky, technological monoliths. The other end of the room was slightly more expected; the synths here were smaller, more modern, with flat boards equipped with single or double scale keyboards, each with an identical plastic chair perched neatly in front of them. Names like Roland, Moog, Oberheim jumped out, etched onto the corner of the apparatus in their embossed silver prints. It felt much more inviting. For a place filled with instruments, it almost seemed jarring how quiet it was; artists would work on their own projects in silence, there was no talking, no humming of low hanging lamps, not even the distant whoosh of an air conditioner. It was just a thin, concrete hollow, completely detached from the world.