Top photo - bunny bunns
Above 2 photos by Anda Chu
Orange
Sky offers 'musical culture'
Hayward's local recording studio gives hopefuls a place to play
By Matt O'Brien, Hayward Daily Review
They are amateur opera singers, thrashing punk rockers, aspiring female rappers and wandering Tin Pan Alley-style crooners looking for a place to record. The musicians who visit Orange Sky Studio all sound vastly different from one another, but they share one important trait. They all have a good sense of direction. Situated in a remote section of industrial west Hayward, between mazes of paved lots and row after row of windowless off-white buildings, Orange Sky Studio is not easy to find.
Theo Cedar, who co-owns the music studio with his friend, music engineer Sal Hernandez, said the location has made it possible to run a thriving independent center of "musical culture" without spending too much on rent. "Hayward is the only place that opened its arms to us, and it also had the lowest price per square foot," Cedar said. He and Hernandez also appreciate the atmosphere. A lone palm tree juts up in the distance. Passenger jets thunder above on evening trips back to Oakland. As musicians arrive here from their day jobs, an eerie orange haze sometimes settles over the sky. "You've got old-school industrial stuff, and then you've got futuristic technical wizardry," Cedar said of the neighborhood. "Hayward's the new Hollywood."
Eighty-year-old landlord Carmen Mateos isn't sure about that assertion, but she is happy with her tenants, who have operated the obscure studio for almost seven years."He's a real nice boy," she said of Cedar, a long-haired 42-year-old who had to convince the elderly woman and her husband that a music studio wouldn't disturb the neighborhood. "We never, never hear the music," Mateos said. "I don't know anything about the band or anything." Mateos, who lives in a nearby ranch house near Depot and Clawiter roads with her husband, Alfred, has spent a lifetime here. She was born and raised a short distance away in Russell City, a shoreline settlement that was razed in the 1960s and later replaced with warehouses. The family used to grow mushrooms behind their Depot Road home, which lies about halfway between the suburbs and Hayward's marshy shoreline, until it became a better idea to replace the mushrooms with buildings. "I got machine shops. I got cabinetmakers. I got chemicals. I got a glass company," Mateos said, listing her many tenants. "We're an industrial park."
Cedar, an Oakland resident, said the people who run Orange Sky share an interest in the spiritual side of music. Cedar's own band, Swaybone, which practices at Orange Sky several times a week, plays a heavy but melodic brand of "God-positive" rock that he describes as inspirational but not sectarian. Hernandez, 30, who joined the Orange Sky team about two years ago, became interested in religion while waiting to get out of a Mexican prison. He now has a music production degree and has worked with big acts such as Jon Bon Jovi and the Mississippi All-Stars. He performs Christian music in the South Bay at "a pretty phat church with 1,800 heads." Cedar and Hernandez find many of their clients by posting on a classifieds Web site, craigslist.com. They take everyone, from siblings who play country music together to budding Oakland rappers and people such as Arlis Tyner. Tyner's favored venue, before he recorded three albums at Orange Sky, was the Montgomery BART station in San Francisco. Wesley Kindred, a guitarist for Swaybone, recently moved to the Bay Area from Louisiana and said it's hard for people, especially apartment dwellers who can't perform at home, to find a studio as cozy as Orange Sky. "It's really good as a musician to be able to come to a place like this and play and record and advance our band," Kindred said. "It's refreshing." The studio, which two years ago was still in a "raw state," is now fitted with Italian marble and a Persian rug, Hernandez said. Hernandez said he keeps trying to update with new technology. Eventually he hopes to be able to make videos at Orange Sky. "The studio, we try to keep it pumping," he said.
Contact Orange Sky Studios 510-836-2258
