The Free Studio

The Trixx Studios in Kreuzberg have a guest list worth framing: Rammstein, DJ Hell, Wu-Tang Clan, Razorlight, Whitest Boy Alive. That’s a room with real history in it, a space that’s absorbed a lot of serious work over the years. Which made it a reasonable choice for the Converse Rubber Tracks program when it finally came to Berlin.

Rubber Tracks is the part of Converse’s cultural outreach I actually respect—a traveling recording studio that offers free sessions to emerging musicians, no strings attached beyond the implied goodwill of the brand association. It started at a permanent space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and has since moved through Toronto, Austin, Montreal, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Hamburg. Over five hundred artists have used it. The idea is straightforward: give young musicians access to professional recording conditions and experienced engineers, because the barrier between a song that exists in your head and one that sounds like something real is often just money.

I’m skeptical enough of corporate arts sponsorship as a category, but this model is hard to argue with. Nobody’s being asked to make music about sneakers. The sessions are genuinely free, the studios are genuinely good, and the output belongs to the artists. If a shoe company wants to fund that, fine. The music that comes out of it is real regardless of who paid for the room.