We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kfir Gov a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Kfir, appreciate you joining us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?
I already knew that I wanted to pursue Music from a very young age. I had an unusual upbringing growing up between Italy, Germany, France and Israel which opened my horizons to different languages and cultures very young. Growing up that way also creating a very strong bond between my brother and I since we kept moving around and couldn’t hold on to stable friendship relations. While our family lived in France, at 13 years of age, I started learning to play the Guitar. Simultaneously, my younger brother started pounding the drums at 9 years old. We found a true passion for music and started writing songs together and then founded our first band about a couple years later.
At 15 years old, and while my brother was 10 years old, we were already performing on stages in adult music venues playing our own songs. We also started recording in professional recording studios around that age which got me very interested in the behind the scenes Recording Process of making music. That was back in the 90s when everything was still 100% analog, before computers were even part of recording studios. I already realized back then that I needed to learn more about the producing side of things in order to make the most of my art so I could accomplish my artistic vision the way I had imagined it in my head.
That same passion and same band we still share today about 30 years later, it had evolved with various band members into our life project and it has taken us across the globe to living in the United States.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I am the owner of a production music recording studio in Austin, Texas called Evil Snail Studios – www.EvilSnailStudios.com
I am an Award Winning music producer, mixing sound engineer and artist.
These days I constantly produce about 15-20 artists simultaneously and I mix about 200 tracks per year for artists from all around the globe.
I used to also perform and tour a lot with my band “Seek Irony” – www.SeekIrony.com – but unfortunately it has become less of a priority in the last few years as my career evolved further deeper into the production and mixing side of music. I work with artists in various levels of careers from accomplished Grammy winning artists to Independent bands that are still defining their sound. Being an artist myself, I understand the position artists are in and I have a lot of respect toward their “babies” – their art. I understand how important it is to them.
I love what I do and my main philosophy is about helping artists bring their artistic vision to life – Some producers are famous for their specific style of production – I’d say I myself choose to be more of a chameleon type of producer – This is not about me and my taste in music, It’s about staying loyal to the artist’s vision. My goal is to help bring the sound the artist is looking for to life – I see my job less about my personal taste in music but more about lending my experience and skills to help others accomplish their artistic vision – UNLESS of course I’m asked specifically to put my thing into it.
As a producer, I don’t believe my job is to push my own taste onto the music of others – That’s what my own band is for.
My work varies from bands that already have everything sorted out and just need help getting things to the finish line radio level quality, and to working with singer-songwriters that don’t even have a band yet and need help with writing the songs, music arrangements, hiring professional musicians and guiding everyone what needs to be played to serve the song in the most optimal way.
The work can be production work here in my recording studio when production and recordings are required and a lot of other times, all the tracks may have already been recorded somewhere else in the world and they just send me all the raw separated music tracks to mix to make them sound good as a whole. My studio is a mixture of the best of what Analog and Digital technologies have to offer – the heart of my studio is a top of the line SSL mixing console, Barefoot Monitors plus all kinds of Microphones, outboard gear and in the box plugins and VSTs.
I also work on many different styles and genres of music – I’ve done over the years everything from Modern Jazz to Death Metal, Hip hop, to Country, Indie to EDM to RNB and more. Right now for example I’m about to start working on mixing an album of electronic music infused with traditional Russian music of an artist from Moscow. Last week I mixed a classic rock single by John Stamos’ band “Destiny Forever” from LA and right after that I mixed a Doom Metal track by a band called “October Noir” feat Myke Hideous of The Misfits. Again I love music, and I enjoy the variation of it!
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
I think there are several rewarding aspects to being an artist – Artistry is a skill driven by passion and it takes years and years of hard work and determination to witness its growth – take learning a musical instrument for example – nobody wakes up one day and knows how to play guitar, it takes week after week practicing and setting goals for yourself to develop that skill and then only after a few years you really start to witness the results of that commitment.
That kind of learning develops discipline, baby steps goals planning and it takes determination to see it through and when you see the results it develops confidence in the process. It also enriches your inner world with imagination and gives your soul creative outlets for complex emotions that otherwise would have to be processed a different way, or wouldn’t be processed at all which could lead to poor mental health.
For me personally, making music has given me a lot of self confidence in my ability to make things happen in life, while giving me liberation from what other people think or say about me, It gave me my own voice and it centers my soul and direction in life, which then overtime eventually led me to my own financial independence. Thanks to music I am my own boss and I set the agenda of my daily work and the rules of how I choose to live my life.
Learning in baby steps and trusting the process also gave me a sort of confidence that I can accomplish anything I set my mind to do – a sort of confidence that I sometimes I take for granted until I meet someone else who wants me to try and explain to them where that “faith” comes from. I am not a religious person AT ALL so I am putting the word faith in quotation marks. They’ll ask me “how do you know when you’re still in the process that things will work out. How do you “know” that it’ll lead you where you want to go?” I try to explain to people that I don’t always have all the answers but as long as I’m focused on what’s ahead of me one week at a time, and I keep pushing myself to aim in the direction of my goals, I trust that hard work and a true commitment to a 5 year plan will have to lead to results eventually. At the very least, you will accomplish some of what you had envisioned.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
About 11 years ago I was offered to move to the United States to restart my career as a musician here. At the time I was living in Tel Aviv, Israel, I owned one of the leading recording studios in the country, a business that I developed with hard work over 7-8 years prior to that. After completing a couple tours in the US as an artist, my brother and I always wondered what our lives would look like if we could settle long term in the US so for many years, in the background of building my professional music career in Israel, I worked tirelessly every day on creating opportunities in the US market trying to build relationships with influential individuals in the United States music industry.
To make a really long story short, after many years of trying to make things happen in that direction, a famous US manager eventually offered to sign my brother and my immigration papers to apply for an O1 working visa titled “Aliens of extraordinary abilities visas” – these working visas are really hard to come by because they require high standards of accomplishments in a certain field, in our case the field of music of course, AND it requires that someone of high credibility in the US music industry would request for us specifically to come work in the US. To compare – in the field of science, it would require worldly recognized accomplishments in your field like scientific publishings/awards, top of the line education, news articles in multiple countries referring to you and your specific accomplishments in which you’ve played a leading role and a top US company to ask for you specifically because they need your specific expertise that no American could fulfill that position.
At that point in our career, my brother and I by then already had signed a record deal in the US, a production deal with famous music producers from California, we had several releases world wide as artists, 2 US tours and multiple news articles about our band in the US, Israel, several countries in Europe, Turkey and more. I also had my studio business in Tel Aviv, a lot of producer credits for producing many other artists and my brother had credits as a “hired gun” drummer for half the music industry in Israel including some European tours. One of the projects we did together was a production of a song to celebrate 20 years of diplomacy between Israel and China which featured 1 of Israel’s and 1 of China’s top singers which ended up later winning an award for “Best Duet of 2012 in all of China”. That led to a lot of press attached to our names in China as well.
We hired a NY based immigration lawyer, applied for the special visas and after several months they were approved.
Then that basically meant we were now going to go on an adventure of restarting our lives in the US. I was 31 at the time and my brother was 27 so not the easiest age to restart your life, not to mention as creatives with no solid promises in the US for work, but we really felt like we hit a glass ceiling in Israel and wanted to make more global impact with our music. Even though our manager is in Los Angeles, we chose to get settled in Austin, TX based on our previous experiences in the US while on tour here. We gravitated more towards the Austin vibes than the LA vibes. I sold my half of my business and used that money to start up a new recording studio business in Austin.
It’s important to state that we didn’t know anyone in Austin, we had visas for 3 years and in order for these visas to be renewed after 3 years, we HAD to maintain the level of accomplishments status that we had beforehand. Here’s the real issue with O1 visas – the claim is that if you’re such a bad a*s to actually deserve an O1 visa, it is assumed that you should be able to make a living in your field hence we were not allowed to make money in any way outside of music. So not only did we have to start from scratch, we couldn’t even make a living from ANYTHING else in the meantime to try and stabilize ourselves financially while we’re trying to make a new music career happen in a completely new place where we don’t know anybody and nobody knows who we are.
All our accomplishments back home were meaningless at that point – except for one aspect – which was that we had experience based in how we built our lives back in Israel. So you can imagine, we were pretty much cornered with our backs against the wall to make this new life and new music career work or else we fail and go back home, which we refused to accept as an option. In our minds there was only going forward, not backwards.
Of course, the first few years were tough and stressful, rebuilding a new recording business from scratch while recreating the band with new American band members and starting from the very bottom again. But we worked our asses off, did rebuild the band and started touring, developed a good audience in several cities in Texas, recruited an investor to support our independent album release which eventually led us to a lot of positive press across the US, which then peaked when we won an Award for “outstanding album of the Year” in an unsigned category at an event associated with NAMM Anaheim in 2016 – which eventually led to our signing with a label from Germany who owns Wacken Festival in conjunction with Warner Bros in the US. That allowed us to renew our visas when the 3 years were done – The label re-released our award winning album world wide in 2017 which led to more great press and radio placements . We also simultaneously developed the recording studio business and my brother’s drummer career, between the 2 of us we worked for 1000+ artists over the last 11 years and have helped many to accomplish their artistic goals. In 2017, after winning our awards, we were able to convert our O1 visas into “O” Green Cards (Extraordinary Alien Green Cards) which finally settled our stay here in the US as permanent residents. – and just recently last summer we finally became US citizens after living here for 11 years.
We continue to build and grow our creative impact in our local community in Austin and all across the globe.
I have also been devoting some of my time to mentoring advanced sound engineering college students in one of the leading colleges in Austin since 2017 as a way to give back to the Austin community who took us in and gave us a place to call home.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.EvilSnailStudios.com
- Instagram: @evilsnailstudios
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/evilsnailstudios
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kfir-gov-8a408921/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@evilsnailstudios7070/