Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision (CLOSE UP with studio designer John Storyk and recording engineer Eddie Kramer)

54 years before designer John Storyk designed The Mark screening room at Upstate Films’ Orpheum Theater, he was a recent architectural school grad and was enlisted by Jimi Hendrix to work on Electric Lady Studios. It was the first such commercial enterprise owned by a recording artist. This new doc  explores the stop-start year spent designing and building it, making for a rich oral history containing tantalizing asides. Electric Lady Studios proposed that a studio have the ambience and aesthetics of a club, a place where you could entertain as well as work — an idea that Hendrix welcomed and ran with. Electric Lady was the corrective to the institutional blankness of commercial studios. “Jimi’s spirit is still there,” says Eddie Kramer, the recording engineer who was a key partner in Hendrix’s sonic innovation and his studio venture, and a central figure in the film. (dir. John McDermott, 2024, USA, 90 min.)