Laud Mx was a Mexico City recording studio and label built around one idea: capture artists as they actually sound, with as little standing between performance and tape as possible. I started there at 17 — already years into making my own music by then, but this was my actual entry into the industry side of it: a room, a console, and whoever walked through the door that day. The studio doesn't exist anymore. This is what it was, while it did.
Laud built its identity on live-session recording — full bands and solo acts captured in the room, in close to one take, with mic placement and gain staging doing the work usually hidden behind overdubs. That format doesn't forgive a bad day at the board; it also doesn't lie about a good one. Alongside the sessions, Laud operated as a label in its own right, releasing artist singles and co-producing with other independent labels in the city (Discos Diablito among them) — which meant the work wasn't just engineering a room, it was engineering a catalog.
I was 17 when I started, already several years into writing and recording my own music but with zero professional studio time logged anywhere. I was studying audio engineering at SAE Institute at the same time, which gave me the vocabulary and the theory — but Laud was where that theory met a room that didn't care whether I understood gain staging in the abstract, only whether the take in front of me was usable. I learned the actual craft by being physically present for it every day: watching how a producer salvages a take that's almost right, how an engineer twice my age decides a vocal needs three more decibels and not four, the hundred small decisions that never show up in a credit line but are the entire job. Coursework taught me what the knobs were called; Laud taught me when to touch them.
The honest version of this credit isn't a list of sixteen sessions — it's that for a period, this was where I was. Every day, a different signal flow: a full band load-in in the morning, an acoustic duo stripped down to voice and strings by the afternoon, a single's vocal comp running late into the night. Some days the room held an artist already filling venues across the city; other days it held someone three songs into ever existing publicly at all. Laud didn't really distinguish between the two — the standard for what got captured was the same either way, and that's rarer than it sounds in a scene this size.
What made it specific wasn't any single session — it was the density of it. Producers moving between rooms on the same afternoon. A co-production with another label landing the same week as a festival call time two hours outside the city. The kind of proximity to a scene that doesn't get arranged on purpose; it just happens because you're there enough days in a row that everyone passing through Mexico City's independent circuit eventually passes through the same room you're in. That circuit, that specific room, and the studio itself are gone now — Laud doesn't operate anymore, and the exact configuration of people and momentum that made those years what they were isn't coming back in the same shape twice. Which is most of why it's worth writing down here as one continuous account, instead of leaving it as sixteen separate, quieter credits that don't say what it actually was.
Sixteen credits across one era — five Pachará releases (the clearest example of one continuous studio relationship across a catalog), ten live sessions and festival showcases for a range of Mexico City artists, and the official video shoot for Matao's "Black Mamba," also produced through Laud.