A.R.T. Studios

Spanish recording studios. A.R.T. Studios was the private music studio of music producer Michael Cretu, located in his mansion in the hills of Ibiza, Spain. In May 2008 the mansion together with the studio were demolished. The studio itself was used by Cretu until 2005, when he moved to a mobile computerized system "Alchemist" and from 2010 a new system named "Merlin". Previously, Cretu had utilised his Data Alpha Studio in Munich, in which A.R.T. Studios was modelled after. This studio was designed and built by Gunter Wagner and Bernd Steber (Sydney/Australia) and is used in the recording of all of Cretu's productions (Enigma, Sandra, Trance Atlantic Air Waves). Control Room: Bernd Steber came up with the idea of hiding all acoustical trapping behind a full-size piece of canvas which could be stretched from one side of the room to the other and painted like a picture. The artist painted a night sky with thousands of stars and some very close star nebulas, similar as seen on images taken from the Hubble Space Telescope. The walls are built with blocks of open porous sandstone and they seem to break in an irregular line just under the ceiling. The big monitor speakers and the outboard equipment racks are built into these sandstone walls and the entrance into the room is through two big Arabic sandstone arcs in the back. The floor is covered with a wall-to-wall carpet which was printed with a reproduction of the moon's surface. There is a huge arc-shaped window in the front of the room with a view down the hill to the sea. Technical Details: All external equipment is wired to a large digital mixing console which was custom built by AMEK and the German Company Mega Audio according to Michael Cretu's preferred working procedures. This console is physically small but it has 160 inputs to collect most signals coming from any midi source, computer or microphone without the need of any patch bay. This is possible because all active components are located outside in some huge racks in the machine room. This keeps all noise and unnecessary heat out of the control room and reduces physical size. All recording is done on a Protools system hardware and Emagic's latest version of Logic Audio Platinum software. Software samplers as Samplecell, Steinberg's Halion and the PC-based StudioSampler are all linked and sync-ed together on demand. There are several racks full of external MIDI modules and hardware samplers as well as a selection of reverb systems as the Lexicon 480 and 960 as well as some more exotic reverbs like the vintage Yamaha REV1, REV7 and REV9, the Eventide DRP9000 and the Dynacord DRP20. Integrated is Michael's old Waveframe 1000. This was the machine that made Enigma happening in the first place in 1990. It was the first real fully professional digital "Studio-in-a-box". Its constant sampling rate system is brilliant and the sample editing and archiving feature is still unmatched. The monitoring system was especially designed and built by Quested Acoustics. He owned the first A.R.T. Studios in Ibiza before moving to a new mansion in the Ibiza hills. His new house, on the western coast of Ibiza, is a Moroccan-style mansion and was designed and built over nine years by Bernd Steber and Gunter Wagner. It also features a brand new, state-of-the-art recording studio, which saved the original name, from which he hopes to release more albums in the future. History: His house with studio inside, was deemed ilegally built and in infringement of Spanish environmental regulations. It began to be demolished by Spanish authorities in May 2009, quote: "Tractor trailers worked without a license during six months in 1996 to shave the top of a hill in the zone of Corona in Sant Antoni de Ibiza. French musician, Michael Cretu obtained a construction permit one year after initiating the construction of a dream home that measures 3,150 square meters. Fourteen years and a pile of lawsuits after, other tractors are tearing down the house since a judge ordered this action. Michael Cretu has valued his house at over 18 million Euros. They had been warned it was illegal. This is a victory that we wished we had not celebrated but it is historic because it was a brutality”, said Neus Prats of the Studies of Nature Group (GEN-GOB), who headed the legal action against the house until it reached the Supreme Court. Cretu took nine years to build the house, with an architectonic style halfway between a monastery and a castle, reason for which he shaved off three meters from the hill. To absorb the visual impact, he surrounded the house with palms and other trees. Cretu’s house could have been used as a public space”, said the Populist Party (extreme right Spanish political party) mayor, Joan Pantaleoni, who denies that the musician will be paid the 18 million euros saying that he was only allowed to build on 700 square meters".