In 2009, David Wrench was close to giving it all up. He was working as an engineer in a recording studio in north Wales but wasn’t getting enough work and was struggling to pay the rent each month. An offer to do some lecturing came in and he thought: why not? When he ran this past his friend and collaborator, Julian Cope, he got a sharp response. “He said to me: ‘Go and look in the mirror,’” says Wrench. “‘You’re unemployable in the real world. Find a way to make this work because you won’t last five minutes, you’ll go completely crazy.’ Annoyingly, I knew he was right.”
Wrench didn’t have to wait long for his fortunes to change. In 2010, Odessa, a track he had mixed for Caribou, was released and became a global anthem. “That opened up a whole different world,” he says. He soon found himself working in New York. The very first cafe he went into was playing Odessa. “Having spent well over a decade sitting in the studio working 18-hour days, that was a big moment,” he says. The momentum continued. In 2014, when albums he worked on by Jungle, FKA twigs, Glass Animals and Caribou all arrived within about a month of one another, his phone started ringing: “Things haven’t stopped since,” he says.
Wrench, 52, is now one of the most in-demand mixers in the game: the person who takes all the different parts of a recorded piece of music and balances them in the version that reaches your ears. “It’s like the final sculpting,” he says. “Sometimes it can be a subtle process, or for some artists it’s very much an exploratory part of the creative process.” When FKA twigs asks for her vocals to sound like a sunset on her debut album, Wrench is the man to make that magic happen.
He’s also been sought out by Frank Ocean, David Byrne, Blur and Erasure; his sonic fingerprints are all over 2024, having mixed tracks on new or forthcoming releases by Jamie xx, Sampha, Blossoms, Ezra Collective, Kelly Lee Owens, Primal Scream and the 1975’s George Daniel. “When I met David it was apparent straight away he was a mixing engineer and musical mind working at the highest level,” says Caribou’s Dan Snaith. “It was only a matter of time before the world caught on to his talents.”
Wrench is also an acclaimed producer, having worked on albums for the likes of the Pretenders and Let’s Eat Grandma. (The latter’s Rosa Walton says he possesses “possibly the finest ears ever”.) However, his role as mixer is different – he comes in once the music has already been recorded. While he doesn’t possess a signature style as such, he says he loves a lot of bass, 3D-sounding records and attempting to balance clarity and cohesion. And it’s easy to get a sense of why people want to work with Wrench: he’s kind, patient and a good listener with an equal love for pop and avant sounds.
He has also released several solo albums, spanning experimental folk and synth-pop, and is a member of leftfield electronic pop duo Audiobooks. Despite his recent flush of success, Wrench’s trajectory hasn’t been conventional. At school in the 1980s he was actively discouraged from pursuing music. “My music teacher said I had no hope of doing anything with production,” he says. He moved schools and his new physics teacher was more encouraging. He wasn’t just any physics teacher, but Gorwel Owen, who would go on to produce records for Super Furry Animals and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci. He introduced Wrench to the school’s four-track studio.
Buoyed by the emerging rave scene, Wrench was soon making what might be the first ever Welsh-language acid house record as Nid Madagascar in 1990, which was released on Welsh label Ofn. He slightly recoils at the mention. “I was excited by it [acid house] and trying to copy it,” he says. “It was a school band that wasn’t very good.” Wrench would attend open air raves in the Welsh mountains but as the sound evolved into trance territory he moved on.
In 1997 he released a Nick Cave-esque solo album, Blow Winds Blow, and would later support Gorky’s on tour – but that decade was largely spent figuring things out. “I was on benefits and trying to find something I wanted to do,” he says. “There wasn’t much work in north Wales. At the time, I was worried my life was wasting away or that I wasn’t achieving anything but I look back now and those years when I was listening intently to records over and over were an invaluable part of my learning process. I’ve got all those records within me.”
He blagged himself into engineering work at Bryn Derwen studios in Bangor, hoping it would get him free studio time; when he was successful, he realised he didn’t know how the equipment worked, and had to cram-read the manuals the night before his first day. Yet he soon realised had a real skill for it. “The first band I recorded was a local metal band with the biggest drum kit I’ve ever seen,” he says. “They seemed happy so I took confidence from that.” Then the late Scottish songwriter Jackie Leven came into the studio. Wrench says he had “a fearsome reputation” – but it was the start of a relationship that produced 14 albums.
In the 00s, Wrench become deeply immersed in the Welsh language music scene, producing the indie-pop of Race Horses and Topper; psychedelic folk records by Georgia Ruth and Lleuwen; hip-hop and pop by MC Mabon and Swci Boscawen alongside more mainstream acts such as Bryn Fon and Tebot Piws. Welsh music was crucial to Wrench’s journey to fine-tuning some of pop’s big hitters. “I could turn on Welsh radio on any night and hear my work,” he says. “This was invaluable. I could then switch to BBC Radio 1 or 6 and compare, to figure how to make my productions or mixes stand up against not just other Welsh language music, but everything. If you have pride in your language and culture you want it to have the same production values as the very best there is.”
It’s clear those formative, often difficult, years left their mark on Wrench. “I value anyone who trusts me with working on their music,” he says, with real sincerity. “I never take it for granted and it’s always an honour.” And despite once being told he had no hope whatsoever in his field, he’s even managed to spin that moment into a positive working ethos. “I never say no to an artist in terms of an idea,” he says. “The studio is not a place where ideas get shot down. The daftest idea can turn out to be a stroke of genius.”
