Brighton's music scene is one of the finest in the country.

Around every corner there's an aspiring DJ (or five), an ambitious student band or a bedroom producer creating dirty beats in an even dirtier dorm. It's something that contributes to the city's notorious Bohemian vibe, which has been sucking in creatives, beatniks, and musos since the dawn of time.

It's also responsible for Small Pond Recordings, a delightful little recording studio tucked away in central Brighton's residential streets. The hand-built space is home to a small team of dedicated music engineers who work tirelessly to provide a platform to the city's glut of musical talent.

Inside, every inch of the studio is utilised to its full potential with tetris-like efficiency, a process most Brighton residents will be familiar with. Speakers, amps and synths line every usable surface and yet the building somehow avoids a claustrophobic feel, due perhaps to its spacious foyer where artists can purchase an array of handy recording items - such as drumsticks, guitar picks, and rizlas.

Getting their start by shooting live sessions everywhere from festivals to living rooms, Small Pond now provide recording spaces, run a successful record label, promote live shows and still play in their own bands.

Basically, Small Pond is contributing to pretty much every aspect of Brighton's music scene one way or another.

On their roster of artists and musicians you'll find the likes of Valerian Swing, The Physics House Band, and Luo, along with a host of other genre-splicing analogue and electronic acts.

Coming up, they're hosting Slugabed (live) at Patterns on Nov 18, followed by Syd Arthur, Laucan, and Cousin Kula at Bau Wow on Nov 23, and Devin Yuceil at Nowhere Man on Dec 2.

We caught up with long-time employee Liam to prod him with questions about Small Pond and other things:

Hi Liam, thanks for doing this. So let's start from the top - Small Pond has its fingers in a lot of pies. It's a recording space, it's a record label, it's an online store and a live music promoter... How did that happen?

It's something that's sort of been a natural progression for us to get to this point. The first thing that we started doing was the videos. We started doing live sessions with bands we liked. The first one I think was with The Physics House Band, that was probably about four years ago now.

And then it sort of progressed into doing gigs, and then the opportunity came up to get our HQ, our building, where we now do rehearsals. Obviously the studio came along with that as well because we're all engineers, bar a couple of us, who started the place up.

So yeah, sort of a natural progression that came out of doing those videos and the events and then into rehearsal and recording and all the other stuff.

So you did the live sessions before you had the studio space - where did you film them?

So we did them all on location. I think that first one that we did was from Brighton Electric. We did a couple there, we generally would just try and find a cool location and then take our portable rig there. It was kind of difficult after a while - there's only so many places to do that sort of thing so after a while it was like... 'We kind of need to think of something else now.'

There's a fair few people in the office here - could you run me through the team? Who started the business?

Absolutely, it was a collective effort. We all started it, a couple came on slightly later down the line. I've been with Small Pond for 3-4 years now. There was an initial core team who were doing it and I got asked to help out with stuff, and then we picked up Sam along the way who does a lot of our digital stuff, we picked up Dave who does the booking side of things. So there's a core team of myself, Dave, Sam, Other Sam, Vlad, Joe, George, and Rosie now as well.

Is there a lot of overlap in duties or not really? Do you have a say in who you book, for instance?

Absolutely, there's a massive overlap in everything. We've only sort of just been trying to be like "maybe we should all just do one thing, as opposed to nine million things all at once?" 

Before I was doing this role I was the general manager of the [studio], so just keeping that up to scratch, organising maintenance, making sure the building doesn't burn down, generally that kind of stuff.

Ha, important stuff then?

Exactly, it is important because we built the whole of that place ourselves, so I was heavily involved in the building of all those rooms along with Dave, Joe, and a few others as well, we all put a lot of hard work into doing that.

That's a big task as well. I mean I don't know a lot about acoustics but I'm assuming that plays a massive role in building a recording studio.

Yeah, absolutely. So we had a designer that we booked on to help. Basically we went to a couple of construction firms with our figure and what we wanted to do and literally got laughed at. I mean, I've never experienced someone actually laughing in my face before, I didn't think that happened, I thought it was a turn of phrase, but there you go. [Laughs]

So we managed to find a guy called Robin who really helped us out, believed in us, took on the project and helped. He's a designer, an acoustician and a builder by trade, so he was on site three or four days a week, teaching us the skills, helping us to do it. I mean it was still... it was bloody hard. But yeah without his help we wouldn't have been able to do it. He was the one with the knowledge.

Shouts to Robin then.

Exactly, shouts to Robin for sure. 

So your business, it hinges quite a lot on Brighton's music scenes. You're recording local acts, booking local acts, I was just wondering if you were looking to expand further afield.

Well there's a lot of talent here. It's a saturated market for music, which is a good thing, it means you have such a vibrant, colourful playground to work with. In terms of branching out, we don't have any current plans to do it but it's always on our minds, you know. We'd love to have a similar setup in another city. We're always looking to expand the label as well, getting our artists into Europe, which we're doing at the moment, we're booking a lot of tours in Europe.

So there is an element of it, whether we end up doing a multi-city thing is yet to be seen. I think we're just trying to make this work first. We've only been open about two years and I  think we've achieved a hell of a lot in those two years but we're still growing, still learning as we go along, making stupid mistakes, as you do as a small company. So yeah, we'll see.

Speaking of live shows, you've got one with Slugabed coming up, do you want to tell us about that?

Indeed, yeah it's going to be fun. So we've got Slugabad doing a full live show. Obviously he's an electronic producer but he's taken on Sam, who works for Small Pond and plays in The Physics House Band as well, the Prog-Mecca... Warriors, so he'll be drumming and doing a bit of electronics for it. Slugabed will be using I think an Ableton rig with some other stuff and they've got a live saxophonist as well.

So it's trying to take his weird production style and put it into a live band setup which should be interesting.

He's local as well isn't he?

He is indeed, Greg, as are the support Vels Trio. Cam, the bassist for those guy is a friend of mine, really nice guy, super talented musician as well. They're just really tight - proper modern jazz heroes. Those guys are going to go far - as you can see by them playing in Gilles Peterson's basement. 

What's the booking process for the live shows, is there a structure to it or is it more whoever you guys are feeling at the moment?

It's a bit of both to be honest. We do encourage people to get in touch with us with their music; we can't possibly find everything so it's good if someone shows us some good tunes. We'll always listen to it, check out their page, their socials and all that jazz. The best thing to do if you do want to get on our radar is to send an email. We prefer that to Facebook stuff as it tends to just get a bit lost. Send us an email to bookings@smallpondrec.co.uk and we'll definitely check it out and give you a shout back.

With the amount of branches that Small Pond has got now, are there any other projects in the works? Anything you've toyed with? Small Pond VR maybe?

[Laughs] That would be pretty cool but I think we're a different sort of tech, unfortunately. We tried to do a summer school, which was supposed to run this past summer but it didn't quite pick up enough traction. I don't think it's something that we're going to out to rest completely, so that'll be something that we might pick up again down the line.

We wanted to offer something different, something alternative in music classes to the sort of top 20 chart production, which we think is a bit boring and we're sure a lot of other kids do as well. It didn't quite take off but it's definitelty something we're looking to continue doing in the future. 

We just started offering a few band services in terms of booking tours and stuff as well.

Sort of like music management?

Yeah, yeah. So we're sort of getting into that which is really cool, because we play in bands, all of us play in bands, and we've worked up a pretty great network across Europe of really nice people to work with. So we're up for taking not only our artists on the label, but if you're looking to get that sort of tour sorted and you just can't find the right place to do it, then we're probably the right guys to ask.

Two questions left - first one, what's the dream for Small Pond? The end goal? A studio in every city across Europe? World domination?

I think if you asked us all it would probably be early retirement to be perfectly honest. [Laughs] We're no strangers to hard work as you can probably tell, but we don't want to be working this hard our whole lives, you know?

In honesty I don't really know. There's a lot of doors open at the moment, I think we're just taking it as it comes and seeing what happens. Winging it, I think is probably the right term.

Last question, this the last question of every interview I've ever done - what are you listening to right now?

What am I listening to right now? I am listening to Cousin Kula, I think they're from Brighton. We're putting them on with Syd Arthur at Bau Wow, funnily enough. It should be really cool, Laucan and Cousin Kula are both great sort of dreamy, indie bands, they fit really well with Syd Athur who are a bit more psych, so it's a really great booking.

What else am I listening to? That Princess Nokia reissue of 1992 Deluxe, I just cannot get enough of that record at the minute. She's fucking cool.