Lisa Bella Donna’s hidden sonic sanctuary

Join us as we take a detailed tour of Lisa Bella Donna’s legendary home studio, Appalachian Recordings, deep in the Appalachian mountains of the eastern United States. Lisa is a longtime friend of Jamie Stillman’s since before the inception of EarthQuaker Devices in the early 90s, when they would play punk house shows together. Lisa is a renowned recording artist, composer, sound designer, modular synthesist and educator. In this incredible episode of Show Us Your Junk, Lisa talks about her early inspirations that led her to start playing music, and eventually using electronic synthesis to craft the unique voice that she envisioned. After hearing Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” and Wendy Carlos’s “Switched on Bach” and “Sonic Seasons,” it became clear that music was her destiny. Her stories include recording and editing commercial jingles in the 80s, selling her car to put a down payment on an Arp 2600 synthesizer, and discovering the rich characteristics of recording to 8-track tape.