My father was a recording engineer and was involved with major record labels in Brazil from the time he graduated college until early 2011 when he passed away.

He started working as an intern at RCA straight out of college, spent many years at Odeon and then joined the EMI ranks where he worked until leaving to cofound his own independent recording studio in the early ‘90s.

Discover Studios was run out of a nondescript house on a quiet street in Rio de Janeiro’s Jardim Botânico neighborhood. I remember it had a pool in the backyard and a kitchen staffed with a full-time cook.

I don’t remember the exact details, but I think the house belonged to a Russian diplomat stationed in Rio, before it was gutted and bedrooms and living rooms gave place to control rooms, recording booths and miles of multi-colored cables.

Driven by a lack of money to buy traditional (and expensive) analog equipment and an incessant curiosity, my father and his partners embarked on a journey to start recording using a new breed of digital recording rigs.

If you know anything about recording, I’m talking circa 1994 Digidesign Pro Tools II running on Apple Macintosh Quadra 950s with a whopping 256 MB of RAM. Now imagine trying to do this pre-Internet and not speaking a lick of English.

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My grandmother Neiva had a lifelong friend who had escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in what I can only guess was occupied Poland during World War II.

She told me that her friend – Olga – was a beautiful, Jewish Polish teenager when she was sent to the camps and because of that she quickly became one of the soldiers’ “favorites”.

And in the beginning, even given the inhumane circumstances, it all seemed harmless enough.

Being a teenager and not knowing any better, she would flirt with the young German soldiers and in exchange received some form of attention, be offered cigarettes and occasionally extra food.

But that quickly changed and what seemed at first as innocent, innocuous teenager flirting quickly escalated to her getting brutally abused and raped by multiple German soldiers during her imprisonment.

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