James Gasson didn’t set out to become a recording engineer. There wasn’t a grand plan, no deliberate march towards the control room. 

Instead, like a lot of people who end up doing the thing they’re most themselves inside, he arrived there sideways. For James, through years of late nights obsessively chasing the Albini sound. “I found myself accidentally in the position of being a recording person,” he tells us. “I never had a burning desire to do it.”

Before establishing his recording and rehearsal studio, Third Circle Recordings, there was Brighton: bands, gigs and drums. And before Brighton, there was a familiar time-capsule of teenage devotion. “I was obsessed with Dave Grohl's drumming, I was a huge Nirvana fan. I have a litany of embarrassing teenage photos where I have the white sunglasses and the eyeliner and the black and white striped jumper. I modeled myself almost exclusively on that one band.” 

His childhood was spent staying up late watching MTV, waiting for Nirvana videos to come on, poised to hit record on the VHS and ready to pound air drums into his pillows. Later, that fixation zoomed out from Nirvana to the figures that shaped their records: “The Nirvana supporting players, not least Steve Albini.” And further still, into the recordings themselves: the texture of a snare, the brutality of room sound, the way guitars create a sonic architecture. “When I was in a three piece band in my 20s, my guitar player and I became obsessed with Shellac, and anything that had Albini’s hands on it. We just wanted that sound. It was incredible. It was like nothing else we’d heard.” He lists touchpoints from Nirvana’s In Utero to The Jesus Lizard, PJ Harvey and Pixies.

The pursuit of that raw, unfiltered sound began as a hankering and evolved into something closer to a life-long scientific inquiry. 

“That formed a 10 year obsession for me: how do you get that Albini sound starting from nothing?”

So James and his band found a place where they could experiment loudly and often. “We had a studio in Portslade that we would rehearse in. It was really run down, which was great for us because it meant that we could go there at six o’clock in the evening, and just stay there all night long and make a God awful racket until the sun came up.” 

The space became a laboratory for exploring recording techniques. In the process of figuring out “the Albini thing”, he began to understand the mechanics behind the magic - mic placement, room acoustics, signal paths. The unexpected by-product was that other bands started asking him to record drums for them, eventually leading to James studying music production at Northbrook College.

There’s a moment in our conversation where James laughs at himself and the accidentalness of it all, the cracked software and the quiet compulsion. “I just started doing it and had a cracked copy of Cubase on old laptops that I used to lug around with me.” 

The romantic part of the story is that this first dilapidated studio he made a racket in is now the space he renovated and runs as Third Circle Recordings. “It’s the first studio I ever set foot in when I was a teenager and knew nothing about recording. It was a dive. It was nicotine stained and beer soaked and had light fittings falling off the ceiling and stuff. Now, 25 years later, I run it and that is testament to the depth of my obsession.” 

A studio that raised him, and he raised up in return.

But shifting DIY passion into a full-time profession is far less romantic than it sounds. “So difficult that you frequently have self-doubt and ask yourself why you’re doing it, and at times wonder if you do still love it anymore.” It's the voice of someone naming what it costs to keep caring. He describes one crisis after another: landlords, neighbours, leaks and repairs, all whilst trying to remember the bit that you’re supposed to be passionate about. And yet, without sounding too disparaging, he has the answer: “It’s all I know how to do, it just is my thing.”

James is critical of what happens when technology creeps too far into recording and begins to dictate taste. “So many recordings nowadays have a kind of production line sound to them.” For him, the aim has always been fidelity to reality; a band should sound like themselves. That philosophy is deeply tied to method. “I’m from a family of scientists,” he says. “I’ve got two older brothers who are both PhDs in a science of some kind. I’m from a sciencey background, and Steve Albini very much resonated with me for being a kind of clinical scientist who had no time for bullshit.”

What he admired most in Albini’s approach was his rigorous and uncompromising commitment to recording naturalistic sound. “You don’t just spout received wisdom. You don’t just use these microphones because Sound On Sound say they’re amazing. You don’t just indulge marketing bullshit. You actually perform your own experiments and come to your own conclusions.”

That admiration took him straight to the source. After saving up for three years, he and his bandmate flew to Chicago and spent five days recording with Albini at his studio, Electrical Audio. In music mythology, this is where the story becomes a tidy triumph: the hero, the pilgrimage, the blessing. But reality rarely obeys narrative arcs.

“Steve Albini was a technical genius,” James says. “I’ve never met someone so encyclopedic in their mastery of every factor of what they do.” Albini, to James and countless others, contained multitudes, “acoustics and electronics and building management and psychology”, and could “at the slightest provocation… sit and give you the whole history of magnetic tape recording.”

But then he shifts. “As a person, he was kind of a weird guy.”

During their first session, Albini was professional and helpful. Outside of it, something didn’t quite connect, and the image James had carried with him began to shift. “We found him kind of distant, a bit weird, but inside the recording session, he was a total pro and affable.”

Two years later, James returned to Chicago to intern and that’s really where the emotional core of his story sits, in the discomforting bruise of unmatched hopes. An anxious 20-something alone in Chicago, “there were people in that studio who were very welcoming. Steve Albini was not one of those people.”

He tries to articulate the contradiction: a man whose principles looked like humility from afar but a man who was ultimately unreachable, even up close. “He was sardonic and with his intellectualism... he liked to flaunt it in a weird intellectual dominance kind of way.” 

Perhaps it’s simply what happens when a person is built into a symbol. As James puts,

 “Here’s this guy that I’ve idolised, and I’m not getting what I wanted from him. I’m getting all the stream of technical insight but I’m getting zero connection of any kind with this person.”

Almost a decade later, James returned in 2017, this time not as an anxious intern but to record drums and document Albini’s methods on camera. The resulting interview-turned-documentary offers rare insight into his approach to selection, placement and processing. The YouTube video has since taken on a life of its own, amassing over 700,000 views and close to a thousand comments - many from musicians paying their respects to the late engineer and reflecting on the impact of his work.

When I mention the phrase, 'don’t meet your heroes', James pushes back in a way that crystallises the idea that’s been forming all along. “I wouldn’t say, don’t meet your heroes. I wouldn’t say that because in that case, you’re putting them on a pedestal. No, meet them and see who they really are."

"I would say, either don’t have heroes or be very savvy and realistic about who your heroes are.”

His conclusion is gentle and human, rather than cynical. “People are people. They’re complex, they’re fallible, they have light and shade.”

With that understanding, James approaches his work with a grounded empathy, as open in his work as he is in our conversation. “I just feel such a kinship with everybody I work with. We’re all basically the same… when kids in their 20s come to the studio, and I see them sitting there, hunched and pulling their sleeves over their hands, I just look at them and think, ‘Well, that’s me! That’s how I was. I’m just you, 20 years later… All we’re doing is collectively nurturing an obsession we have that 95% of the people out there couldn’t care less about, so that’s fine, we’re all in here doing this.”

His humility is solidarity. He believes in the work because he believes in the people doing it. It’s about listening, testing, paying attention and then building something true, in essence and in sound.

By the end of our conversation, the studio reappears. Not as a romantic symbol, but as a living, precarious thing. There’s a floor collapsing downstairs and another crisis waiting in line. Survival has become part of the rhythm for James. Survival through persistence and through trusting your own capacity to sort it out.

Maybe that’s the real lesson in building heroes in the first place. When you stop casting them as semi-gods, you stop looking up for salvation. You take the blueprint and make it your own. You accept the mess. You allow people to be complicated. You choose empathy anyway. And you keep going because the craft matters.

 Read James' own words: Steve Albini, 1962-2024: Reflections On The Man I Met.