When José Gonzalez and Anunt Singh think of music, they visualize waveforms and compressors along with whammy bars and cables. They’re the team behind Spicehouse, a recording studio based in Sanford. You may also know them from other projects — Gonzalez plays guitar for the band Weymouth, and Singh is the drummer for Condado.

Before starting Spicehouse in late 2023, the two racked up years of experience running a DAW (digital audio workstation). Gonzalez began recording almost as soon as he learned to play guitar. “I wanted to capture the sound I was creating.” From there he went on to record anyone he could. He started out with a setup in his family living room, his mom navigating mic stands and cables as she moved about the house. He began to grow a client base and started reaching out to musicians all over the state. By the time he was 19, he had a thriving solo-recording business. When he met his now wife, he thought he needed a “real job,” and left what he had built to work with Epic Games, working his way up over six years to the role of a sound designer. Gonzalez, like so many, shifted focus in the wake of stay-at-home mandates during 2020. He formed JGonzAudio, a formalization of the same work he was doing in his late teens. He was able to build back up quickly. “80 percent of my business was the people I worked with when I was a teenager – they kept doing music, I returned to music and there they were.”

Singh took a slightly different approach. He grew his skill around what some might call a traditional work schedule as a machinist. Audio engineering is “a huge passion of his,” says Gonzalez. When most of us are scrolling or watching the latest movie, “it’s what he does in his spare time.” Singh had worked with Gonzalez before, and the two would work together on some of JGonzAudio’s projects. After Singh recorded, mixed and mastered Condado’s most recent release, Gonzalez heard a marked difference. “He engineered entirely himself with his own resources, and it was just such a jump in quality from the stuff I had heard him do previously,” Gonzalez says of the release. He told Singh, “I think your talent is wasted being an assistant or a helper to me. Let’s just be business partners.”

The name Spicehouse is a nod to their desire for precision, and their love of the culinary arts. “We’re fans of really organic approaches to things and, obviously, doing things well.” says Gonzalez. “There’s a lot of crossover between the culinary world and recording, because you want to start with the best ingredients possible. And then typically, if you make sure all those things are good, what you end up with is greater than all of the individual pieces. So it really speaks to our ethos about what we want to do. We want to make as many good decisions upfront to make sure that your production is just awesome on the back end and we’re not skimping out on stuff.”