Fall 2025

A t first blush, there doesn’t appear to be a correlation between the arts of sound engineering and photography. As a talented and accomplished practitioner of both disciplines, Robert Feist would disagree with that assess- ment. “There are a lot of parallels between the two,” Feist says.“I think they play into each other, you know? Light is to photography what sound is to recording, and they both capture a moment in time, a sense of hearing and a sense of sight. We’re capturing them and then in a way that we can look at them again or listen to them again, we can kind of hold it in our hand and roll it around a little bit and examine it. And you know, that’s kind of magical.” As a youth in his native Colorado, Feist was interested in music and photography. “I was lucky enough to go to a school that had a fan- tastic music program, a photography class and a darkroom,” he recalls.“My love for music led me to begin doing live sound, then I got a job as an assistant in The Recording Plant (not to be con- fused with the legendary Los Angeles Record Plant), a small eight-track Denver studio.” That experience set the hook. Soon, he lit out for Los Angeles in his Ford Mustang with $300 in his pocket. “I just started knocking on doors and landed a job as an assistant at a stu- dio called the Music Grinder. I started at the bottom and worked my way up.” The Music Grinder specialized in recording demos for musicians to use for booking gigs and trying for record deals. Big names such as disco diva Donna Summer would occasionally use the facility to flesh out songs and experiment with arrangements before finalizing recordings at more prestigious studios. Feist worked as pro- ducer, engineer or mixing engineer with many other musical luminaries in his career, including 142 C A R M E L M A G A Z I N E • F A L L 2 0 2 5 This photo illustrates a story called “Pete’s Magic.” Pete was an old man in Feist’s childhood neighborhood who ran a bike shop and could fix anything on a bicycle…given enough time. It’s indicative of the beautiful photography within Feist’s book. “Fragments of Light” is a compendium of moody photographs and short essays.