A curated monthly dose of lifestyle, culture, and rhythm from San Miguel de Allende.
Hurricane Hugo took Sir George Martin’s AIR Studios Montserrat in 1989, and a volcano finished the island six years later. The original blueprints survived. Thirty-six years on they arrived by email in Mexico, and the room is standing again on an old bull ring outside San Miguel de Allende.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Troubled Clef does not advertise, and until recently almost nobody in San Miguel knew it was there. We went out to Los Frailes to see what had been built behind the wall. This is what we found.
The walls are the first thing, and they tell you nothing.
Deep in Los Frailes, out past the train tracks where the town gives way, a concrete perimeter runs close to thirty feet high around the whole property. No sign. We were parked outside it working out how anyone gets in when a car pulled up alongside and a head appeared in the window. Oh, perfect timing. Should we follow you in? Sure.
Inside the wall: a building under construction on the right, and on the left something that reads, from outside, as a bunker. Before it, filling the space in front, roughly half a football field of solar panels. That is the whole visual argument the property makes. You cannot see what it is. You can see that whatever it is, someone was serious.
Myles Wakeham types a code at the front door. It closes behind us, and the sound of Mexico goes out like a light.
That is the point. From that moment the air changes room to room, each one tuned to do a different job, and there is no daylight anywhere in the building and nothing at all to hear from outside it. In the entry hall his gold records run along the wall. Past them is a control room, and through its glass a live room reproduced, to the millimeter, from the original architectural drawings of a studio that a hurricane and then a volcano took off the map thirty-six years ago.
In 1979 Sir George Martin, the producer who had built Associated Independent Recording off Oxford Circus in London and made it too successful to get into, went looking for somewhere else and found Montserrat: an island forty square miles across, green, quiet, barely touched by tourism, with a ridge five hundred feet above the sea. He put a studio on it and then put everything else around the studio. Villas. A fifty-foot pool. Dining rooms, lounges, a pool table, a dartboard. Thirty acres of reasons to stay.
The idea was not luxury. The idea was time.
Martin had spent a career watching bands arrive at London studios by the hour, keyed up, expensive, aware of the clock in a way that shows up on the tape. On Montserrat there was no clock and nowhere to be, and his finding, which he seemed to enjoy repeating, was that groups worked faster there than in the city. Musicians spent the morning in the water and came in at two. Stewart Copeland described the island as a twelve-hour flight from the nearest record company and meant it as praise.
What came off that hillside is a decade of the canon. Dire Straits made Brothers in Arms. The Police made Ghost in the Machine and Synchronicity. Duran Duran made Rio. Elton John cut “I’m Still Standing” there. Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Rush, James Taylor, Jimmy Buffett, Black Sabbath. The Rolling Stones finished Steel Wheels in the summer of 1989.
People who worked there talk about the sound of the place as though it were one of the players. It came from components that had to exist together: a live room of unusual proportion, a custom console designed by Rupert Neve himself, tape, engineers who could not fix anything later and therefore had to be right at the microphone, and above all the weeks. Six of them for the Police.
Hurricane Hugo came ashore weeks after the Stones finished, and took most of it. The island tried to bring the studio back. Then in 1995 the Soufrière Hills volcano buried southern Montserrat and left what remained inside an exclusion zone, roofless and unreachable, which is where it sits today. “You bring something out of nothing,” Martin said of it, “and it always goes back to nothing again.”
The man rebuilding it is an Australian recording engineer who spent his working life in Hollywood studios and left the United States for good in 2021 with his wife, Sandra. They looked at Mexico City and found it holds more people than all of Australia. Then they came to San Miguel de Allende.
His version of arriving here is everyone’s version. He noticed it first at Fábrica La Aurora, wandering among the sculpture and the painting, taken aback by the quality of what was simply around. A town five hundred years old with more working artists per block than places twenty times its size. He compares the pull to Sedona, near where he had lived for years, and like everyone else he cannot explain it and does not particularly try.
What he could explain was the arithmetic. An artist flying in from London or New York cannot afford to sit still at home. Here they could.
They tried to buy a property down the street and lost it while arranging financing. Then a friend mentioned land out past the train tracks: an old bull ring, out of use for years, sitting on an acre and quietly for sale.
“Wouldn’t this be the ideal place to create the world’s best music?” he asked Sandra.
They bought it, and four years ago they started building.
The blueprints came through a chain of people who had no idea they were part of one.
Wakeham had been researching the handful of destination studios that ever worked, a list short enough that everyone on it knows everyone else, and the research kept returning to Montserrat. It took him to the island’s Minister of Tourism, then to an introduction: a British caretaker named Peter, responsible for whatever remains of AIR inside the exclusion zone. A Brit and an Australian, so they got on immediately. Somewhere in that friendship Wakeham learned who Peter actually works for. Sir George died in 2016, and his son Giles, who inherited the property, had asked Peter to look after it.
“I need to introduce you to Giles,” Peter said.
What arrived some weeks later, Wakeham says, was an email with the original architectural plans for AIR Studios Montserrat attached. Not a magazine spread, not a floor plan reconstructed from photographs. The drawings.
“I said to my architect: build that.”
Here is the part worth sitting with. Martin built that room in 1979 with his ear, his experience and whatever the era allowed. There was no software then that could model what a shape does to a wave. He could not have known, in the precise sense, what he had made. He only knew that everything recorded in it came out sounding a particular way, and so did everyone who recorded there.
So Wakeham hired three acousticians, one of them from Dolby, and gave them eight months to work out why. They modeled the room on computers that did not exist when it was designed, and reproduced it in the Sierra of central Mexico inside a shell of solid double concrete, floors and walls and roof. Some of the men who physically built the first room, still on Montserrat and in London, consulted on the second.
The console is a Neve 8232, which Wakeham says is one of a handful still operational anywhere. By his account it was built for Peter Gabriel’s studio in New Orleans, left behind when Gabriel moved home to England, donated to a jazz school that discovered within two years that a board like this needs an electronics engineer on staff, sold on to a studio in Manhattan, then orphaned when that studio was sold for its real estate after the pandemic. He found it in a New Jersey storage locker in the dead of winter and flew Neve’s own technicians to Mexico to put it back together. Certain channel strips still overheat. He tells clients before they book.
The microphone arrived in a park. Bruce Brown, who built Albert Studios in Sydney in 1969 and kept a few choice items when it closed, had been living quietly in San Miguel for years. He was eighty, his wife had died, and he was going home to Sydney to be near his children. The day before the flight he asked Wakeham to meet him, pulled out a 1971 Neumann U47, and said it was no good to anyone sitting on a shelf. Every AC/DC vocal recorded between 1973 and 1978, Brown told him, had gone into that microphone.
Then a Yamaha C7 concert grand, found, Wakeham says, by a member of the Abbey Road staff to match the piano in their Studio B, and driven down from Austin in an empty race-car transporter. A 1960s Hammond B3 with a Leslie cabinet from the thirties, bought from a session player who drove it to the border himself. A drum kit Wakeham says came off Cher’s touring rig, bought over breakfast from her longtime drummer in Palm Springs and retuned here by Van Morrison’s drummer, who lives in San Miguel. A 1964 Vox AC50 he says George Harrison played on the Beatles’ Australian tour. Fifty-five vintage microphones, roughly what Montserrat kept. Nothing in the building was bought new, and Wakeham can recite the provenance of all of it from memory.
Walking it is the only way to understand what the money bought.
The control room comes first, and it is wrong in an instructive way. Most are cramped, built around the engineer, with one bad couch shoved in the back as an afterthought. This one has a full sitting room on the right, sofas and a table, the console and its glass on the left. Wakeham built it at roughly twice the usual size on purpose. Studio life, he says, is the management of anxiety: musicians arrive keyed up, then wait while three microphones are tested on a voice and a cue mix is built, and the waiting is where sessions die. So there is somewhere to sit. People order food. Arguments about the bridge happen sitting down, which is a different argument than the one you have standing up under a clock.
Then the live room, and the air changes again. Look up and the ceiling is not a ceiling but a set of engineered shapes, the physical output of those eight months of modeling, scattering sound so that nothing returns wrong. Then the vocal booth, different again, quieter, closer.
Which is the same trade Montserrat offered, arrived at by other means. The island gave artists weeks because there was nowhere else to be. San Miguel gives them weeks because it can be afforded. Abbey Road, Wakeham says, runs around sixteen thousand dollars a day for Studio B, and a five-piece band with a producer and an entourage can spend twenty thousand simply existing in London before anyone plays a note. Here the same budget buys three weeks instead of three days, and three weeks is when the song nobody planned gets written. He scrapped an early plan for casitas on the property once he understood that the town already supplies the rest: houses, restaurants, walking, mornings with nothing scheduled.
The back room is where the comparison to the island gets literal.
Montserrat’s great vulnerability was that it sat in the elements, at the mercy of weather and geology, and eventually the elements collected. San Miguel presents a gentler version of the same problem. Wakeham cannot run a session for a client in London and have CFE brown out, so the studio does not depend on CFE. That is what the solar field out front is for, with batteries and a generator behind it. The building runs on itself.
The rest of the room is servers, racks and, he says, about three and a half kilometres of network cabling. Sessions do not travel over the open internet, because an unreleased vocal cannot leak. The studio links by satellite to rooms in New York, Los Angeles and London, which is how the industry works now: decentralized since the pandemic, a band tracking in one country and mixed in another. Wakeham says the connection is fast enough to put a singer here and an orchestra elsewhere in the same virtual room, in real time.
The first session ran in early February of this year, he says, for one of the largest music publishers in New York. Since then he describes work for Grammy-winning artists, film studios, video game companies and television broadcasters. Only a fraction of what a working studio records, he points out, is music at all.
We sat for nearly two hours on those sofas, which is where the conversation stopped being a tour.
With us was Rodrigo Galindo Gómez, known to everyone here as Mixo, a Mexican producer who has run Toga Records out of Mexico City for fifteen years, a small independent label devoted to rock and roll, which he cheerfully describes as the least sellable music ever made. He has never taken a peso out of it. Everything goes back in. He played in bands, made three albums, drove to Austin and Los Angeles to play small rooms, and now records other people.
He studied audio engineering in Mexico and calls the experience a joke. In his final semester, in a class on mastering, the teacher played YouTube videos. He is still angry about it, mostly on behalf of the students paying for it.
That is one answer to a question worth asking, which is why a town this saturated with artists never developed any serious recording infrastructure. Part of it is training, and part of it is the shape of the work. Mixo knows the ecosystem from inside: excellent players working three bars a night, the same standards in rotation, venues that will not book original material because audiences will not come out for it. “It’s like a crazy circle,” he says, and he is careful not to blame anyone caught in it. They need to work. A scene organized entirely around the next gig produces superb live musicians and almost no records, and a place with no records leaves nothing behind. Whatever happens on a Thursday in a bar on the ancha is gone by Sunday.
Wakeham is blunt that a room at this level was not built for musicians playing for tips, and his clients are not from here. He had learned the same lesson from the other direction at the Guanajuato International Film Festival, where the studio hosted a masterclass on scoring for film with twenty-five executives and directors from Netflix, Apple TV and the labels in the room. He stopped presenting and started asking what makes filming in Mexico hard, and the answer surprised him: money is not the constraint, they have budgets. Orchestral work goes to Prague because the studios do not trust the local players. His response was to work on the input rather than complain about the output. He now teaches post-graduate audio engineering and was recently made a professor of music and sound at Universidad Anáhuac. Students come in for two days at a time to learn what no video teaches: solder a cable, crawl behind a rack, place a microphone so nothing needs repairing later.
Mixo pushed further. What about the musicians with no money at all, the ones in communities that will never book a room like this? Would he work with them, if the funding came from somewhere?
Yes, he said, and there is already a mechanism. Roughly ninety percent of the work is day rate, but four times a year, Wakeham says, he backs an artist outright. No cash from the musician: the studio advances the time, the artist accrues the cost at the normal rate, repays it out of whatever the record earns, and once the bill clears the studio keeps a small stake and the artist goes off to become whoever they are going to be. Four is the ceiling, because one mix takes him fourteen hours a song and an album has ten of them.
On one thing the two of them were identical. Mixo has listened to AI-generated music and his objection is not moral, it is aesthetic. It sounds fine. It is a boring way to make anything. “Put the AI to wash the dishes,” he said. Let us paint.
Martin hired Montserratians, and the island got into the music.
Listen to “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” recorded during those six weeks in 1981, a song that went to number one in Britain and top three in the States. There are Caribbean steel drums chiming through the chorus, reggae under Sting’s bass, reggae in Copeland’s fills. A rock forty square miles across went out to the world inside a pop single, and most of the people who loved it never knew where it came from. That is how a place travels.
Something like it is starting here. Wakeham is producing an album for a woman who wanted two of her songs to carry a mariachi feeling, and when he asked why, her answer was that she wakes up to it: the parroquia, the jardín, the centre of town every morning of her life. He has a standing intention to go to the Tuesday market, find the man playing accordion for people eating gorditas, and hire him for somebody’s record. “It could be Sting,” he says. “Who knows.”
That sentence is the whole possibility, and it is worth taking seriously rather than as a joke. The mechanism that put Montserrat into Ghost in the Machine was not atmosphere. It was employment. Martin’s artists hired the island’s musicians because the island’s musicians were there, and what those players knew ended up on records that went around the world. If that begins happening here, the people it changes are not the ones flying in. They are the ones already playing three bars a night, who would suddenly have a second thing to be: not only a live act working a circle that goes nowhere, but a session player whose part exists on something permanent, credited, and heard in places they will never visit.
Wakeham will not claim a San Miguel sound exists yet, and he is right to be careful. But a place gets into records whether anyone plans it or not, and this room cannot be picked up and moved. The artists coming are from London and New York and Mexico City, and they are staying for weeks in a town that hands them bells and accordions and a particular quality of morning. Some of that ends up on tape. What is left afterward is the part that matters, because for the first time this town would have music that outlasts the night it was played.
The studio exists because of a wager about what happens next.
The easy thing to make right now is a great deal of music quickly. Wakeham describes sitting in a waiting room during Sandra’s cataract surgery, watching a screen loop generated footage of a van by a beach set to generated music. His argument is that a record moves you because a person survived something and handed it over in another protocol, and the transaction fails the moment nobody survived anything. Without the struggle, the object is inert.
He also happens to believe, on the strength of a much-argued-over theory of eighty-year cycles, that a renaissance arrives around 2030. The theory is not really the point. The point is that a man spent four years and his own money, with no bank willing to underwrite the thesis, building a room for a future in which people want human-made things again.
And what he is rebuilding is not nostalgia for tape. Every album that came off that hillside in Montserrat had a sound listeners could identify, and it was never the console alone or the island alone. It was a specific room, particular machines, engineers who had to be right the first time, and weeks of unhurried company, all present at once. That combination cannot be simulated, because it was never one ingredient.
Not a museum of it. The working version, with the lights on.
Martin was right that things go back to nothing. The hurricane took his island studio, the volcano finished the argument, and the ruins are inside the exclusion zone where nobody can reach them.
But the drawings survived, and thirty-six years on they arrived by email in Mexico. Tonight the room they describe is standing on the other side of the world, in a town that has been drawing artists for five centuries without ever explaining itself, sealed against the weather and the noise, with the lights low and nothing at all to hear from outside.
A curated monthly dose of lifestyle, culture, and rhythm from San Miguel.
