Hot Chip’s London Studio Is Built to Capture the Band in Real Time

Hot Chip’s earliest recordings were shaped as much by cramped space as by creative instinct. Joe Goddard’s home setup for the band’s first albums—Coming On Strong, The Warning, and Made In The Dark—placed a computer and a small amount of gear beside his bed, with cables across the floor. The group wanted to capture full-band performances, but the tools were not there yet.

That changed when Al Doyle built the east London studio the band now uses. With multiple rooms, vintage synthesisers, and a Trident TSM desk at its centre, the space was designed to make collaborative writing immediate. “Because we’re in this studio that Al built, we have space to make things very readily from scratch,” Alexis Taylor says.

For recent material, that often means starting without a finished idea. A beat on a drum machine might be joined by a keyboard part, then another keyboard across the room, with layers built in real time. Doyle says the key is that everything stays plugged in. “There’s no barrier to capturing a performance that’s happening on any instrument in any space in here,” he says. It is a direct continuation of an instinct the band had from the beginning, even when the room was just a bedroom.