Downtown Memphis music studio planned
Court Square Recordings will allow ‘young artists to make income as a barista while they are making a recording here’
A California entrepreneur plans to open a Memphis music recording studio for area artists.
Samuel Aroutiounian proposes to open a record label and recording studio containing a coffee shop Downtown at 123 S. Court Ave.
The proposal was revealed in documents filed with the Downtown Memphis Commission.
DMC, a public agency created to spur center city renewal, provides grants and loans for building improvements. The agency is scheduled to consider a facade grant for the Court Square project during its Aug. 21 meeting.
In the agenda prepared for the meeting, DMC officials also identified a renovation planned for Sugashack, a retailer at 392 Beale St., and a renovation planned for a former automobile body repair shop at 343 Madison Ave.
Court Square Recordings’ partners are Aroutiounian, Stewart Cole and Nathan “Che” Stratte, says a document signed by Aroutiounian and submitted to DMC as part of the grant application process. He identifies himself as a managing partner of Creative Talent Management of Venice, California.
Aroutiounian claims in the document to have staged large events and identifies by name a galaxy of celebrities and musicians he says were participants. No details about the nature of the work with the artists were disclosed.
Court Square Recordings, which would fill 123 Court’s ground floor, has applied for a $31,981 facade improvement grant. Shelby County records show Anna Petrosyan bought the ground-floor property last September for $173,000. Aroutiounian’s document says Petrosyan, a physician in Woodland Hills, California, is his sister.
The property, currently vacant, is in the six-story Court Square Building facing the tree-lined Court Square, one of the four original parks laid out by city planners when Memphis was founded in 1819.
The document filed with DMC does not disclose why Petrosyan chose to invest in Memphis, though the document does say Aroutiounian had visited the city “at a young age” as a scout for the firm Elite Model Management. “I know this region has outstanding talent from which I wish to help discover and nurture future artists,” the document says.
A call placed to the Petrosyan phone number listed in the document was not returned.
The document identifies partner Stewart Cole as a founder of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, a Los Angeles rock band, and partner Che Stratte of Spokane, Washington, as a former mathematics student in England at Oxford University and current lead guitar player in the band Mr. Mother.
“Court Square Recordings will be an infrastructure for young artists to make income as a barista while they are making a recording here in Memphis,” says the document, which identifies David Cherry of Nashville as the acoustic engineer designing the studio; Bjarne Mastenbroek of the Netherlands as architect for the layout; John Smith, who worked with Blackbird Studio in Nashville, as the studio builder; and Chicago coffee roaster Intelligentsia as the barista trainer.
Renderings show a coffee shop patio immediately to the rear of the Court Square Building accessible to passersby on Madison Avenue. The area to the rear is now a gravel parking lot behind a chain-link fence.
In the other projects before DMC on Aug. 21, Memphis developers Mike Todd and James Dickey requested a $200,000 loan for renovation of the empty building on Madison used most recently to store items for American Dream Safari. They plan to turn the property into commercial and retail space fronting Floyd Alley, a DMC document says, noting a series of large skylights suggest the building originated for grading cotton.
Todd and Dickey are partners in Monroe Associates LLC, which owns the building. Todd was a pioneer in reviving the Edge district across Danny Thomas Boulevard from the Madison property. Tenants were not disclosed.
In the project in the Beale Street Historic District, Larry Springfield, of the Memphis real estate firm Springfield Properties, applied for a $35,075 grant on behalf of Sugashack owner Stephen Moss.
The document filed with DMC says the owner would put in the same amount for the interior renovation including the addition of a dining area.