Fire at building that house KOOP and Sweatbox Studios
A fire early this morning has done significant damage to KOOP radio, Sweatbox Studios and the rehearsal spaces housed in the building at 5th and San Jacinto. This is a pretty big blow to the local music scene taking out a great community supported radio station, a recording studio with a long history of great recordings and a centrally located rehearsal space for many local bands. Here’s hoping they can all get back up and running. Stay tuned as I’m sure there’ll be benefits to get the whole thing back up and running. Unfortunately, the cause seems to have been “improperly discarded smoking materials”.
Update: K-EYE (*shudder*) has some video.
I was there last night when it happened, and it was very sad to see it up in smoke.
I am an engineer at Sweatbox Studio and a “rehearser” in a few of the spaces up there. The fire was in a room that was not used for rehearsal, and the fire was contained mostly in the one room. There is a lot of smoke damage to the studio, but most of the items that could be damaged (the better mics, tape machine, rack gear, board) were covered or in a safe place. Hopefully the owner if the building will decide to fix what is broken instead of shutting the entire building down. All of the exterior windows were broken to let smoke escape, and all of the doors to all of the spaces were kicked in.
Oh no- My band rehearsed there in the early 90s and Mike V. started the studio in that space thereafter.
I hope they fix the building…
I will see you at SWSX- perhaps there should be a fundraising event- I will help!
-Tim