Sarah Tudzin has been in demand over the last few years — and not just because of her cultishly beloved indie rock albums under the name illuminati hotties.
Having initially learned the ropes of production and engineering while studying Audio Production and Engineering at Berklee, she has gone on to work with the likes of Weyes Blood, Speedy Ortiz and Coldplay. Earlier this year, she won a Grammy Award for her production work on boygenius's the record.
For her latest solo project, illuminati hotties' fourth album POWER, she challenged herself by adopting what she calls a "pop approach." The track "YSL" is a prime example, with its augmented vocals creating the sense that she's teleporting in from multiple directions. "I was trying to make more use of modern tools, rather than sitting down with a guitar and singing into voice memos," she tells Exclaim! "There was an element of vocal production and how wacky I could get with that, using hard Auto-Tune and extreme sorts of format and pitch-shifting vocals."
Tudzin's studio setup takes over a spare bedroom, which provides more than enough room for her to track the essentials of any given recording, hopping to larger studios only when required to make use of bigger consoles and microphone collections.
"My setup is pretty chill. I try to make it as plug-and-play as possible" Tudzin says. "The main philosophy behind it is that, as soon as I have to figure out where something is, the moment is over. So, my keyboards go through a mixer that is on at all times and feeds two channels. There's always a vocal mic running and a mic on the guitar. The trick with the home setup is to have as few steps as possible."
Modern production requires less time in the studio, and Tudzin describes her computer as the most essential part of her setup. Being able to produce easily from home with tools such as Logic Pro and GarageBand was a huge reason why the bedroom pop genre gained traction in the 2010s. It now means that artists can make music on a tighter budget.
"There's gear that's accessible to us at a low price," Tudzin explains. "You can get a two-channel interface that sounds great and is portable; you can plug it into any computer. There are so many artists that I love where you walk into a studio and it's literally just a laptop and speakers. Pro Tools and Ableton, all these DAW's (digital audio workstations) come with so much out of the box, even cheaper ones like FruityLoops. All this stuff comes with incredible presets that are a part of the modern music you hear on the radio. As long as you have that desire to create, you can do it on the cheap."
Outside of her solo work as illuminati hotties, she emphasizes how important communication skills are to her process. "Collaboration is the name of the game," she says. "Being an artist is being in charge. The producer is just there to execute and help curate and smooth the edges or make them pointy — whatever the task is. When you walk into a room with other people, you have to let go of your ego and what you think the song should sound like, because that might not be the best for the person who has to play that on stage every night."
Three albums and one mixtape ago, illuminati hotties started out as a résumé project — an opportunity for Tudzin to try new production ideas away from her collaborations. But over the years, it has increasingly become an essential outlet for Tudzin. This is shown throughout POWER, her most personal offering under her solo moniker to date. Now, she can have the best of both worlds: a space to project her feelings while continually finding new avenues to push forward her production skills.
When speaking to Exclaim! in 2018, Tudzin described her approach to the album Kiss Yr Frenemies as done in a "producerly way," as she recorded each performance individually rather than with a full live band. It's an ethos she's carried forward.
"I have a very bottom-up approach of making records, where it's one step at a time," Tudzin says. One such step we hear on POWER is her use of field recordings: on "Sleeping In," there's a kettle boiling and a spoon skimming the rim of a mug, which instantly sets the tone for the album's most delicate and intimate moments. Tudzin points out that even a short couple of seconds can impact the world-building of a song: "It's a perfect example of including audio from life. That ambience can signal moments in our brain that create a universe for the song."