When culture is made, it doesn’t always leave a neat and tidy record of itself. This is especially true when it happens outside of a creative infrastructure — take the bands survived by anecdote alone, the online histories of legendary concert venues and the Bunchofuckingoofs logo written in cement outside this former punk space off Nassau Street. Here, the effort to bring Toronto’s self-made culture beyond the ephemeral continues: the location now belongs to musician James Anderson and producer/engineer Jeff McMurrich, who’ve worked tirelessly for the past two months to build the right creative space for their colleagues, musical and otherwise.

“It’s the missing link,” says Matt Smith (a.k.a. Nifty, formerly of Les Mouches), who has laboured “over a day, every day, without pay” (Anderson’s words) for a month to be involved with the project. A recording studio by definition, 6 Nassau will mediate between the conventional (often inaccessible) studio and the four-tracker’s bedroom — a space for projects that can’t be finessed in one’s apartment. Moreover, it’ll be a place for like minds to congregate. Performers hoping to collaborate can rent the space for the hell of it, and musicians galvanized by a show can drop by to test ideas rather than douse them with beer.

“I use the term sound studio because I don’t see it as a commercial recording studio. It would be great if there were other things done here,” says Anderson (The Creeping Nobodies, FemBots), who runs a small studio, the Observatry [sic], out of his Kensington Market basement. The Nassau location, a detached brick warehouse, has always stirred his acoustic instincts; when it went up for rent, he called McMurrich, whose roving studio The Sweatshop lost its latest home on St. Clair in February. “It is going to be a recording studio… [but] I want to do art things as well…. It opens up more potential for this to be considered more of a sound place, as opposed to a place where you spend money to record something.” The advent of home recording has rendered monolithic studios nearly irrelevant. Of course, self-production has aesthetic benefits of its own; the meek, who understand the benefits and limitations of the basement arts, might inherit the market.

“It’s more of an extension of everybody we know, and what they like,” McMurrich says. Even under construction, the space has been a venue and impromptu gallery: in November, Nifty played with Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, and artists/musicians Amy Bowles and Milosh Rodic presented their work on the studio’s yet-unpainted walls during a three-day exhibition.

Recently, several acts played an all-day release party for a cassette project. Planning has been word-of-mouth; five minutes after I arrive, Blocks Recording Club founder Steve Kado drops by to see what he refers to as “the talk of the town.” The studio will be available to musicians for a reasonable rate proportional to overhead costs (plus engineers’ fees, if needed), and the space will be used for curated events, more a community centre than a boozecan.

As Smith notes, this is a terrible time to start a business. But a location like this would be turned into condos in a healthier economy; as it stands, the studio has a five-year lease. McMurrich and Anderson have financed the project out of pocket, and neither regrets it: though the area is booming artistically, creative spaces are dwindling. “We’ve responded to a demand.… We’re not getting into this as a form of charity. This is something we can do, and this is the space where we can do it well,” Smith says. The goal is to get by, but not to get rich.

The studio’s operators comprise a representative sample of the scene they’re working on behalf of: McMurrich is the professional, having spent years recording local musicians (the Constantines, Picastro and The Hidden Cameras, to name a few); Anderson is the consummate artist and ambassador to the neighbourhood; and Smith is the tech geek with a knack for experimentation. The latter two are members of Blocks Recording Club, whose DIY ethos has slowly evolved as its releases gain in sales. The notion of conceiving, recording and packaging a record in one living room retains its charm, but with a wider array of musicians and a relatively new critical focus on the city, the cooperative model needs refinement.

The concept behind 6 Nassau is better community production. “The records I make, most of them are selling 500 to 1,000 [copies]… but the people who are listening to those records are also making records,” says McMurrich. “I want to make records that are being listened to by peers and musicians, people who appreciate music as something in their lives… and that begets work.” Smith agrees: “A band is [asked], ‘Who are your favourite musicians?’ and they’re like, ‘Well, my friends.’ Someone will respond, ‘Oh, it’s this incestuous, inclusive community’ but it’s actually not the case at all…. It’s like people who want to buy local groceries. There’s this ethic and popular change of opinion about it, you can wax poetic, [but] it’s just a really simple model — buy local because that makes sense.” Building a one-stop community space eliminates the need to outsource. In a way, the grassroots approach has never made more sense.