Sigma Sound Studios — Philadelphia

Sigma Sound Studios at 212 North 12th Street in Philadelphia was founded by engineer Joseph Tarsia in 1968 and became famous as the birthplace of the Philadelphia Sound — the lush, orchestrated soul music of TSOP that produced hits for the O'Jays, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, and dozens of other acts through the 1970s. It was an unexpected setting, then, for Brian Eno to bring Talking Heads in 1978 to record More Songs About Buildings and Food — a record that used the studio's professional infrastructure and Tarsia's engineering expertise in service of something that could not have been further from Philadelphia soul in its aesthetic ambitions.

More Songs About Buildings and Food was the second Talking Heads album and the first produced by Eno, who had sought out the band after seeing them perform and recognising something — a nervous, intellectual energy, an interest in rhythm and anxiety — that he wanted to work with. The combination of Eno's production ideas and Sigma Sound's capabilities produced a record that felt simultaneously more physical and more abstract than anything the band had previously released. It pointed toward the rhythmic complexity and Afrobeat influence of Remain in Light without yet fully arriving there.

Sigma Sound has been recognised on Philadelphia's historic register for its contribution to the city's cultural life. The building on North 12th Street no longer operates as a recording studio, but the address documents a moment when the studio infrastructure of 1970s soul music became, unexpectedly, a tool for post-punk experimentation. Eno's willingness to work in a room associated with a completely different aesthetic tradition was characteristically contrary and characteristically productive.