On How History Gets Made & Lost
I met singer-songwriter Bambi Lee Savage in Los Angeles and we immediately hit it off. I knew a little bit about her impressive musical background and knew she was working on an album but I didn’t know much about her past. Eventually I found out she’d spent a few years working at the legendary Hansa Studios in Berlin as an audio engineer, which I thought was really fascinating (especially as I’d studied the magical dark art of audio engineering myself and not really managed to master or retain many of those skills).
Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust For Life’ and ‘The Idiot’ were recorded at Hansa Studios with David Bowie who also made ‘Heroes’ there in 1977, part of what he calls his ‘DNA’ or his ‘Berlin trilogy’ along with ‘Low’ and ‘Lodger’, imbuing the building with an awe summoning mythos that made other bands like the Birthday Party and Depeche Mode and Einstürzende Neubaten want to record there too, in the hope of getting a magic lick of whatever fired those albums that went before. Stories have power.
When I saw the documentary Hansa Studios: By the Wall 1976-90 promoted I was excited to watch it, presuming I’d see Bambi in the mix, but she wasn’t interviewed - and you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a ‘men only’ club, (bar the post-punk artist Gudrun Gut and sensational underground performer / nightclub owner Romy Haag, who was Bowie’s lover and credited with inspiring his Berlin trilogy). It really bothered me that Bambi’s voice was missing from this official narrative of who was there. Now, Bambi was not a producer nor responsible for the sound of the recordings she worked on, but in a world where less than 5 percent of audio engineers identify as female, it’s important to take note of those outliers that are contributing and working in that realm. So many women are just written out of history. We need to witness each time someone kicks down a door or shifts a cultural norm.
