Harbor Radio’s Live Sessions Move Into a Converted Boathouse
The station’s intimate in-studio performances finally have room for a small audience and better acoustics.
Harbor Radio will host its live session series in a converted boathouse beginning in August, giving the long-running program a room designed for both microphones and sixty folding chairs.
Music director Priya Sen said the old corner studio forced musicians to choose between a good take and a good hang. “We want both without turning it into a club,” she said.
Sessions will still air the next morning with minimal overdubs.
The corner studio, on the third floor of the station’s Alder Street building, measures four meters by five and has a window that does not open. Sen has recorded 340 sessions in it since taking over the program in 2017. The room’s reverberation time is under 0.2 seconds — dry enough that a cello sounds, in her word, “boxed.” Musicians who wanted air in the recording had to fake it in the mix, which the series’ whole premise forbids.
## What a boathouse gives you
The new room is the eastern bay of the Fennimore boathouse, built in 1911 to store four-oared shells and used since the 1970s mostly for storing tables. It is 24 meters long with a barrel ceiling of Douglas fir and a slate floor laid over the old launching ramp. Left alone, it rings for close to three seconds — cathedral territory, and unusable.
Acoustician Dov Rekker, brought in from a studio consultancy up the coast, spent six weeks getting it to 1.1 seconds at 500 hertz. The treatment is almost entirely removable: 62 fabric-wrapped panels on a track system, two hanging cloud arrays over the performance end, and a set of rolling gobos that let Sen change the room between a string trio and a drum kit in about twenty minutes. Nothing is glued to the fir.
“The building is listed and it deserves to be,” Rekker said. “Also, the moment you permanently deaden a room like this you have built a mediocre studio inside a beautiful shed. Better to keep the shed and learn to steer it.”
Total conversion cost was 1.24 million. A corporate underwriter covers lights and insurance; memberships cover programming risk. The board wants an endowment conversation before the next capital surprise. Station general manager Cordell Vane put the operating delta plainly: the boathouse costs 96,000 a year more to run than the third-floor studio did, and ticket revenue at current pricing covers about 61,000 of it.
Audience tickets are priced low and include a station membership option rather than a hard paywall. Entry is 12, or free with any membership at the 8-a-month tier or above. Sen fought for the free-with-membership structure against a proposal to charge separately for the marquee nights.
Architects left the boat slips visible behind glass as a reminder of the building’s previous life. Two of the four bays still hold water; on a spring tide it comes within forty centimeters of the glass.
## Not everyone thinks the room is the point
Not everyone at the station thinks the room was the problem. Ilya Barrow, who produced the series for six years before Sen and still hosts the Thursday overnight, argues the intimacy that made the sessions distinctive came precisely from the constraint.
“Four people in a room with no audience means the musician plays for the microphone, and the microphone is the listener at home,” Barrow said. “Put sixty people in folding chairs and you have introduced a second audience with different needs. The performer will play to the one that claps. I have heard it happen in better rooms than ours.”
Sen’s answer is that the archive already shows the cost of the old constraint: 41 artists over three years who declined a session because the studio could not fit their ensemble, and a booking radius that had effectively shrunk to soloists and duos. The August lineup leans local: a string trio, a noise-folk duo, and a composer working with ferry horn samples. September brings a nine-piece brass band from the fishing co-op that has been asking since 2021.
Barrow is not being ignored. At his insistence, every session will also be captured on a second, close-miked feed with the audience gated out, and both mixes will be archived. If the broadcast version drifts toward a live album, he said, the evidence will be sitting next to it.
Neighbors negotiated load-in hours and a hard end time — no vehicles on the slipway before eight in the morning, amplified sound off by ten. Accessibility upgrades made during the conversion are now part of the pitch, not a footnote: a ramp from Fennimore Lane, a hearing loop covering all sixty seats, and one relaxed session a month with house lights up and free movement.
Artists in the series have started side conversations about a touring version scaled for smaller halls up the coast. Logistics, not ambition, will decide whether that happens.
The first booked night is 14 August, a Friday. Sen has already recorded a test in the empty room: forty seconds of her own voice counting, played back through the monitors, then counted again. She keeps the file on her phone and has played it, by her estimate, for about thirty people, most of whom did not ask.
Reporting for this story was prepared for The Harbor Ledger’s culture desk. Tips:newsroom@theharborledger.com