Austen cut his teeth at London’s legendary Dean St. Studios, becoming Head Engineer at age 23. It was here where he was exposed to a wide variety of instrumentation and musical styles, honing his skills as a studio producer and technician.

He put in his 10,000 hours alongside some of the industry’s most revered artists, musicians, and producers, including Mark Ronson, Paul Epworth, Danger Mouse, Ed Sheeran, Lady Gaga, John Legend, and most notably, Adele.

Austen was recognised for his engineering role on Adele’s record-breaking album ‘25’ at the 59th Grammy Awards, picking up a Grammy win for ‘Album of the Year’.

His growing production portfolio includes Latin sensation Kali Uchis, producing vocals on her award-winning album ‘Sin Miedo’. The album won ‘Latin Pop Album of the Year’ at the 2021 Latin Billboard Awards.

His first commercial production came with the British indie band, Wolf Alice, who hand-picked him to produce the single ‘Bros’ and subsequently, their debut EP ‘Blush’.

Austen also worked alongside Al Shux, co-producing the seminal UK artist Plan B, for his 2018 album ‘Heaven Before All Hell Breaks Loose’. Which featured Foy Vance and reached number 5 on the UK album charts.

Austen is currently focussing on commercial production projects in LA and London.

Getting to offer insight and feedback on new innovative approaches to audio equipment has been a very exciting and intriguing process and I’m pleased that such a hard working company is gaining much deserved critical acclaim for they’re work. It was great to catch up with James at Winter Namm 2019 to get a hands-on demonstration of their latest release the “Stealth” microphone. I was blown away by how they had managed to pack in so many genuinely useful and thoughtful features into a product at such a reasonable price point.