A brief history of …

Let’s start in the winter of 1994.

Halfway through my first year at Dalhousie University in Halifax, (ostensibly to study towards a physics degree but really to get to “the city” to try to find some bandmates), I made the fateful decision to spend the remainder of my student loan money on a 4-track recorder. Who needs to eat when there are records to be made, right? Jon Hutt (later aka Recyclone) and I started recording at a furious pace, calling ourselves The Motes. By the spring we had two EPs ready to go, so along with Daniel MacDonald we made up the label name Ant Records, and dubbed up a batch of cassettes to sell on consignment at Sam the Record Man on Barrington. That simple, naive act was literally the catalyst for the entire 30+ years to follow.

Ant Records and the mid 90s.

Initially garnering local, then national and international attention in the pre-internet cultural underground, Ant Records released more Motes material, and then other acts from our circles, over 35 releases within a couple years time, almost all recorded on that same 4-track. I soon found myself spending nearly all my time assembling “masters” with a graphic EQ and a steady supply of TDK Type II cassettes, by necessity becoming adept at pushing the limits of the primitive technology available in the zero-budget reality of the day. Hundreds and hundreds of cassette copies were hand-dubbed and mailed to destinations around the world, to people who had found us via early webboards like the legendary sloannet, and the mail order catalogues we would hand out at shows and festivals.

Early 2000s.

By the late 90’s The Motes had disbanded, and I had joined Mark Mullane, Michael Catano, and Mark Colavecchia to form mathrock band North of America, spending the next number of years touring Canada, the US, and Europe extensively, and releasing five records along the way.

Experiencing first hand the need for mastering sympathetic to music made outside of the mainstream paradigm, I began working within my peer group of fiercely independent post-punk, hardcore, and left-field hiphop artists, and then more broadly as word spread. These early projects mastered under the Craxophenia! and Audio Projects banners led to the formal establishment of Archive Mastering, in a scrappy 2nd floor office space buildout on Portland St in downtown Dartmouth, NS, circa 2003.

2005-2016.

By 2005 Archive Mastering had relocated just outside of the city to Mineville, NS, where I was able to build a sizeable mastering room into a former sailboat builder’s workshop. Many thousands of songs were mastered there from 2005-2016, including milestones like Joel Plaskett’s JUNO winning and Gold selling “Three”, Rita MacNeil’s poignant final album, and career launching albums from Ben Caplan, The Stanfields, David Myles, and Mo Kenney, among many others.

2016 expansion.

Presented with an opportunity to expand in 2016, we leveraged everything we had accomplished to date to build a dream studio from the ground up. Securing the services of the world’s top studio designer, Thomas Jouanjean of Northward Acoustics, we pushed way out of our comfort zone (and budget) in true DIY fashion to build what can only be described as one of the world’s most technically advanced acoustic environments - a literal spaceship in the woods of rural Nova Scotia. The culmination of years of working, dreaming, and planning, we consider it a point of pride to have been able to accomplish this without the help of banks, investors, or outside partners.

Since opening the doors to our FTB mastering suite in 2017 we’ve mastered thousands more projects, seen our reach expand to dozens more countries, and helped our clients and peers navigate massive technological and cultural shifts.

Ever optimistic about the power of authentic self-expression through music, we are still thrilled when we see the deep niche projects that make up the bulk of our work reach 2 million, or 5 million, or even 10 million+ streams, and the doors that opens for our clients and their careers.

- J. LaPointe, February 2025.