L ive room
Prior to leasing the space, Bonenfant
had been working at the Orange Lounge.
When he left Orange, he began looking for
another studio with Walter and Gough. “We
found this space and started it up, initially as
a place for us to work. And initially, we were
living here; it was our residence, our place of
employment, and our studio. But we decided
that wasn’t well suited to our lifestyle,”
Bonenfant says, laughing.
Living and working in the same space
and with good friends sounds great on paper,
but, unsurprisingly, comes with challenges:
“Like a bass cab blaring into your room at 2
a.m.,” Bonenfant offers as an example. “So that
lasted roughly six months, which was enough.”
The rooms they’d been living and
working in became four production rooms in
which they’ve had a variety of tenants over
time – “People who are young and up and
coming,” says Bonenfant. “Producer rooms in
Toronto are really at a premium. It’s hard to
find a place where you can make noise at any
hour. We found that they’re in demand and
since the day we started renting those rooms, I
don’t think we’ve really had any vacancy.”
There has been turnover in the seven
years since they started out, a result of people
cutting their teeth in the industry, establishing
and working on the foundation of their
careers, and then moving on as their careers
develop. In short, Dream House functioned
as kind of an artist incubator. “And I think to
this day it still works very much that way,”
Bonenfant adds, “but I wouldn’t limit it to
artists.”
In truth, it’s really just an extension of
what they’d been using the studio for in the
first place.
Bonenfant describes the path of his
career as fairly traditional for an engineer/
producer. He studied at the Ontario Institute of
Audio Recording Technology (OIART) and then
took a position as an engineer at Toronto’s
Cherry Beach Sound, where he spent a great
deal of time with his first mentor, Inaam Haq,
who’s been the senior staff engineer at Cherry
Beach since 1998 and worked with a diverse
array of artists, ranging from Rush to Mark
Ronson to Rihanna. From there, Bonenfant
moved on to the Orange Lounge for two years
before going freelance in 2009.
Gough started out as a musician, a
saxophone player, which, he says, ultimately
led him to hip-hop and pop production,
working alongside Walter, aka Cirkut. “I’m very
much not an engineer, but I know a lot about
music and rely on Alex’s strength in terms of
him being a gear guy,” Gough explains about
their creative synergy. “I think it’s important
to have people around the studio, and in
the community of the studio, who aren’t
necessarily the gear people, who just want to
help foster the creativity of songwriters and
musicians.”
Having someone who’s not directly
working on the tech side, who is there to
offer guidance from a different standpoint is,
according to Bonenfant, invaluable. “The way
I look at it is [it’s like] therapy. It’s a sanctuary.
I