Facilities | Manifold Recording and the Miraverse

The Facility

The studios are situated on 16+ acres of beautiful pastoral land that is half forest and half meadow, with ponds, nature trails, and a variety of gardens throughout. Designed by Wes Lachot, the buildings exemplify Frank Lloyd Wright's most ambitious goal: Organic Architecture. In this design, which you will experience from the moment you enter the environment, form and function are not only one, but were conceived and grew as one, naturally.

Using Nature as our basis for design, a building or design must grow, as Nature grows, from the inside out. Most architects design their buildings as a shell and force their way inside. Nature grows from the idea of a seed and reaches out to its surroundings. A building thus, is akin to an organism and mirrors the beauty and complexity of Nature.

— Eric Corey Freed, What Is Organic Architecture?

The starting point of our design—literally starting from the tip of a freshly pointed pencil—was the service of music. Musical space grew out from that point, reaching the heights, widths, and depths proportionate to the full acoustic range of the concert grand piano, full-scale acoustic drums and percussion, and of course, ensembles. As Daniel Lanois explains:

There’s [] an automatic depth of field that you get by having 11 people playing together in a room. Every microphone is open literally to someone 50 feet away, who’s going to sound literally 50 feet away through the vocal mic. As a result, Time Out of Mind is dripping with ambiance. It paints such a picture that you can really feel the presence of people in the room, and that’s an exciting sensation. It’s like hearing a great Miles Davis record, where you know that everyone was doing it in the room at the same time.

By supporting authentic playing, authentic recordings come naturally. Which brings us to perhaps the most innovative aspect of our organic design process: the complete integration (and integrity!) of the art of recording. Our solution to this challenge was to define two fundamental environments, one optimized for analog audio, one optimized for digital video, and then to cross-link them so that they could work as a combined unit, or with one as master and the other as monitor, or as each operating on a completely stand-alone basis. The following video portrays the complementary and cooperative nature of the 4000 sq ft Main Studio and the 1700 sq ft Studio Annex:

An Integrated Facility

Virtual Facility Walkthrough (HD 720p video, 05:19 mm:ss)

The Loggia and The Lounge

The Loggia is the Front Porch of the Main Studio and the gateway to the West and North Patios, beyond which the meadow, forests, and ponds await. The outside is never more than two door-swings away.

The Lounge is located in the Studio Annex building, but it's actually closer to the Control Room than is the far corner of Booth A (thanks to the sheer size of the Music Room).

The lounge can be reserved by or shared between the two studios according to the needs of the project and the people participating.

The Bed & Breakfast

Up the hill lies the Windsong Bed, Breakfast, and Retreat Center. Windsong features a beautiful Meadow Room (34'x36' floating plywood floor, 1,224 sq ft, 50 people max capacity), a rustic Sun Room with an adjoining and equally large and rustic sun deck (16'x48' total, ~700 sq ft usable), a kitchen, three additional "living rooms", and three upstairs bedrooms, the largest of which is configured to sleep 6 in bunk beds (or 8 in a pinch). Windsong can be booked through the studio to provide additional facilities for workshops, catering, client accomodations, or it can provide additional services and amenities to further enhance the studio experience: Yoga classes, meditation rooms, holistic health therapy, etc.

Wherever you go, you will appreciate the organic harmony of the studio and its surroundings.