Hidden Track

On a nondescript street on Manhattan's Lower East Side lies an architectural treasure that has been tucked away for 100 years. Up narrow stairs, through the back of a Chinese bakery and a laundry room, is a steel door. Inside, lit by votive candles and candelabras, are tiers for long-gone balcony seats, organ bays, walls painted blood red. These are the bones of the cavernous Clinton Star Theatre, built in the 1910s for vaudeville shows. Today, however, it is a one-of-a-kind recording studio. "This is the last private playhouse in New York City—and it's totally unknown," says its beaming proprietor, J. Ralph (also known as Josh), the 38-year-old composer, recording artist, and music producer who has retrofitted the vast performance space as an audio refuge—shown here for the first time. A giant central stage bears a clavichord, drum kits, an enormous Chinese gong, Duke Ellington's grand piano. Here and there, as if from some Tim Burton fever dream, are dioramas, altars, bordello-style sofas, an absinthe bar—and a huge cast-iron aquarium, around which he hosts salons that have attracted guests such as Saturday Night Live creator Lome Michaels and the late Lou Reed.

Josh got his first break at age 19 when rapper Chuck D invited him to direct a music video for Public Enemy. The composer has gone on to score two Oscar-winning documentaries (Man on Wire and The Cove), followed by the Oscar-nominated Hell and Back Again, and Chasing Ice, for which he was a 2012 bestsong nominee.

In the late 90s, J. Ralph happened upon the abandoned Clinton, Ending the old box theater so acoustically well proportioned—for the sound reverberations, the notes' decay rates, the tones it generated—that he transformed it into his own creative sanctuary. He brought in stratospherically high-end recording equipment (both antique and modern) calibrated to capture the essence of live performance so that he could then lay tracks onto his favorite medium: heavyweight vinyl.

As he went on to record his signature spacey themes for TV, film, and commercials, his lair became a hideaway for music insiders. And over the years, recording artists as varied as J. Ralph's tastes (Norah Jones and Joshua Bell, Liza Minnelli and Wynton Marsalis, Ben Harper and Karen O) have found their way up those stairs, through the laundry room, and into this timeworn vaudeville hall.

BASIL WALTER

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