Gordon Raphael was living in his studio when he made the record that changed everything. Not metaphorically. He was sleeping in the basement under Avenue A in Manhattan's East Village, in the same room where, a few months later, he would record “Is This It.” The Strokes found him at the Luna Lounge on Ludlow Street, where he’d gone after a local promoter tipped him off that a band needed a producer. The fact that he was there at all is one of those small accidents that turns out to matter quite a lot.
By the time “Is This It” arrived, the conversation around it was already about the band: five kids from New York, leather jackets, cigarettes, the ghost of the Velvet Underground hovering somewhere nearby. Julian Casablancas wrote the songs. The band looked the part. The mythology assembled itself quickly and neatly. What the mythology left out was the room, and the man running it. Before Gordon Raphael, The Strokes had already attempted the album with Gil Norton, who had worked with the Pixies and the Foo Fighters. Those sessions were scrapped. The band called them “too pretentious” and “too clean.” Then they went back to the basement.
Raphael’s studio, Transporterraum, was not a prestige facility. It ran on a single 888 interface with eight mic inputs, a Pro Tools Mix Plus system, Logic Audio, an Avalon VT-737 SP preamp, and four rack-mounted API preamps without EQ sections. The album was recorded in March and April 2001, in roughly six weeks, and the approach was almost confrontationally simple. For guitars, Raphael hung a Sennheiser 421 in front of each Fender DeVille amp on opposite sides of the room, fed directly into an API preamp with no EQ, and left that setup unchanged for the entire month of tracking. Albert Hammond Jr. played a white Strat. Nick Valensi played a semi-hollow Gibson fitted with an old single-coil P90, a combination their mentor JP Bowersock described as “the guitar that Gibson forgot to make.” No processing. No layering. What you heard was what happened in the room.
The vocals are where Raphael’s background made the strangest and most lasting contribution. He hadn’t come up through rock. Growing up in Seattle, he fell in love with an ARP Odyssey synthesizer in high school, and spent the late 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s playing keyboards in bands ranging from progressive rock groups to purveyors of dark, industrial music. While everyone else was chasing grunge, Raphael was in a world where synthesisers were distorted, drum machines were distorted, and vocals were, in his words, “shredded into nuclear oblivion.” When Casablancas came to record and offered no particular direction on his vocal sound, just “use your best judgement,” Raphael drew on that industrial instinct. The resulting chain was an Audio-Technica AT4033A condenser microphone running through the Avalon VT-737 SP, pushed until the signal had a particular compressed, slightly wrecked quality. Raphael described the process: he and Casablancas would work for up to an hour dialing in the tone, and Casablancas would remain suspicious and unhappy until the result had “some kind of messiness or not-quite-rightness about it,” at which point he’d smile and say it was right. That sound, that specific combination of mic and preamp and gain setting, stayed consistent across “Is This It,” the “The Modern Age” EP, and the second album “Room on Fire,” released October 28, 2003. Casablancas liked it enough that he reportedly took the Avalon unit out on tour and had the live engineer dial in the exact same settings every night.
The album first appeared on July 30, 2001, in Australia, followed by the UK on August 27. The US CD release came on October 9, delayed in part by the September 11 attacks, which also prompted the replacement of “New York City Cops” on the American tracklist. By then the lead single “Hard to Explain” had already been out since June 25, and “Last Nite” followed on October 23. In the UK, the record hit number two on the Albums Chart. In the US, it reached number 33 on the Billboard 200. Those two numbers tell you something about where the record landed first and where it had to earn its way more slowly.
Rolling Stone placed “Is This It” at number two on its list of the 100 best albums of the 2000s. The record that landed at number one was Radiohead’s “Kid A,” an album built on the premise that guitars were finished. The irony is quiet but it’s there. Raphael went on to produce “Room on Fire,” which gave the world “Reptilia” and “12:51,” and he also produced Regina Spektor’s “Soviet Kitsch” in 2004, which is its own kind of argument for range. In 2022 he published a memoir, “The World Is Going To Love This (Up From The Basement With The Strokes),” which is where most of these details finally surfaced in one place, two decades after the fact.
The sound that made The Strokes feel urgent, the guitars that seemed to be playing in the same room as you, the vocals that sounded like they’d been run through something slightly broken, the whole record’s quality of being simultaneously vintage and present, was a set of specific decisions made by a specific person in a specific basement. Raphael understood, from his years in electronic music, that distortion is character. He applied that understanding to a rock band that wanted to sound like a room, and the room he gave them turned out to be the one that a generation of bands tried to build again afterward, in their own rehearsal spaces, with their own cheap gear, chasing something they could hear but not quite name.
