Iconic Brunswick studio undergoes its first facelift since its opening 10 years ago

It has housed artists from around the nation including The Getaway Plan, Northeast Party House and The VANNS under the name The Studio’s In The City and now, 10 years on, the Brunswick studio operated by Shihad’s Tom Larkins is reaching new heights with a new identity. We chat to industry guru Tom about his choice to rebrand his beloved recording space into Homesurgery Recordings.
What inspired the rebranding and was it a change you had been contemplating for a while?
Yep! It really came down to the fact that we built the studio over 10 years and in that process, it has changed quite a bit. When we first established it, the name was casual, something out of a joke really, and I think we felt that after 10 years we had evolved into something that had a theme/substance to it, so the name didn’t really fit any more. The actual work we had been doing needed a focus point.
How did the name Homesurgery Recordings come about?
I own a management company called Homesurgery Management and I’d done a joint venture with another party that blended that, so I was no longer using Homesurgery for the name of the management company. People were always referring to the studios as the Homesurgery studios rather than the name we had for it so it was a kind of a no-brainer, let’s do that moment. Homesurgery was a much better fit for the studio than it was for the management company because the studio itself is a really comfortable environment. It has an organic feel about it, like a home, and that was always the point; to make artists feel comfortable in that room. At the same time, there’s a high degree of attention to detail and a lot of care for the audio so there’s an aspect to what we do that’s very precise. I suppose that Homesurgery just kind of worked.
Describe how the studio has developed and altered since its opening all those years ago?
Well obviously there’s the experiences and the learnings you take away from working with multiple artists. I think the room itself has grown in terms of the facilities and the gear and everything like that… it’s really been a labour of love to turn it into what it is. I suppose the first thing is the environment itself has changed, we’ve moved the rooms around and chopped and changed things so that bands can record live, there’s a lot of separation but they can still play together. And the other one was the gear that we’ve got, so the mixing console and the preamps; we’ve been refined to this point where we are feeling really comfortable and able to deliver whatever we need to do.
Are there any emerging artists that are set to hit the studio that we don’t yet know much about?
I’m really excited. There’s a couple of things on that I actually can’t talk about, but there’s some amazing kind of conversations going on right now with some really strong artists so we’re looking forward to moving that ahead this year. We’ve been really busy and have had a lot of bookings come in so it’s been very positive; we’re just hoping that continues. It’s an artist-friendly workshop. We pride ourselves on the results that we get. We focus on the sound coming out of the artists first before we workshop anything. We’re really proud to be a part of the Brunswick music community and to have a facility like this, so please get in touch.
Best of luck to Tom and his amazing crew! To find out more, head to homesurgeryrecordings.com.
Written by Hannah Kenny