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They say idle hands are the devil’s plaything, but these Idle hands are doing God’s work. Sef Idle is the man behind Simpul Studio, Simpul Records, and SimpulFest which took place last July. He’s recorded and produced several local punk bands like The Crawlouts, Dumpster Fire, Karate Riot, and his own band Broken Hipster. Sef invited me to meet at Simpul Studios in Meridian, a teeny-tiny shoebox studio in his garage, to tell this Simpul tale.

Sef: It was about ‘06 when I started recording people other than myself.

Spud: Did you started doing it just to get your own stuff recorded, or did you have a plan to start doing other bands?

When I first moved to Boise in ‘03, I’d been playing music already for 10 years. I just wanted to keep writing and recording. A guy that I recorded in his home studio, I hit him up when I moved here. I was like, ‘how do you record on a computer?’ and he said ‘Let me send you some bootleg software.” He sent me some software, and I just started tinkering just to get my own ideas down. Even back in ‘03, I had a bass player friend. I would record through his computer and send it over email to me, then start figuring out how to import stuff. Then when we bought this place, this room was already built, so I knew this was going to be the music room. When the band UniSef (that was the band I started with) became a full band playing shows, then I met other people. They heard what I recorded and went ‘hey, could you record us?’ so I started tinkering with other people coming in. So I never intended it to be anything but for myself, but I ended up falling in love with recording so it evolved.

How often do you record?

It’s up and down. Sometimes I’ll have bands hitting me up constantly, and I’ll be recording for a year straight. Then it’ll slow down for like 6 months and I can focus on my own stuff. I’d say it’s pretty consistent, it’s very rarely that I’m not doing something. What I do most is just mixing and mastering for other bands. I love recording and having local people come in but I’ve mixed albums from the UK, South Africa, Brazil, Chile. I have other people record these places, and they just like the style that I mix or master in. They’ll send me the files. This room is perfect for that, I can just sit here and work. But I enjoy the recording.

That’s pretty exciting that it’s getting global recognition.

Yeah. When my band False Idle signed to Thumper Punk Records in Santa Cruz, he knew that I had my own studio, so a lot of the bands that he was working with didn’t have a lot of money to go to big studios. So he’d have them reach out to me. That’s when I started expanding outside of the Boise area. I kept going, I made a lot of friends and just kept doing collaborations with other bands and other people. When things like that happen, more recognition happens, and it just grows from there organically.

I noticed that  the music I sampled all has a specific style to. Is that a deliberate choice on your end?

I came up in punk rock. That’s all I knew, that’s all I listened to for 20 years. Then, 10 years ago when I started playing solo acoustic stuff, I started…well, there’s more to music that just punk. That’s when I started getting into Americana, and things like that. I’m starting to grow that way a little bit more. For the most part, I’ve done punk. That’s it. That’s what I’m good at. That’s who I know around here, too. People like Hunter J. Lice, he’s kind of an American country guy. He, through a friend, came in and introduced me to that side of things and got me turned on to people like Benjamin Todd. I’ve really started to go down the folk/Americana/country road a little bit now, too.

How about the label side of things? How big is that?

Very small, at the moment. I decided to start in in late 2019 with Kid Catapult. It was his idea, he made a joke, but we decided to actually do it. The initial idea was to focus solely on solo stuff. It was supposed to be acoustic, solo, local, just start going to shows initially and then talk. Not even in punk, he’s just like a very smooth guitar player. Right after I decided to start the label, covid hit, so now what do I do? I can’t go to shows and meet people. I had this whole plan, I was going to go to so many shows and start spreading the word. So it didn’t grow very much. I ended up doing Kid Catapult, Tuc, my own stuff, obviously. When Andy came to town and kind of reached out, since I wasn’t do much else I decided to do some punk stuff too, so Karate Riot started recording in here. Then I did my own punk stuff. The Retrogradation EP which now is what started Broken Hipster. Fugue State Ravens reached out to me, they’re awesome they have so much energy. They’re kind of like the next wave of what’s starting with Simpul Records. Still really small, I don’t know what I’m doing with it at this point since the initial plan fell through. I still support everyone on it. We’re all setting up shows together and hanging out all the time.

I’ve played shows with [Kid Catapult] for like a year before he came to record. I kept saying ‘dude, you need to record, you’re so good.’ and he’s like, ‘I don’t have any money to record,’ which I understood because that’s where I came from. ‘Just come over and record with me,’ and we started doing that. That’s when he threw it out, he said ‘I can’t wait for you to start a record label.’ I was like, I could do that. I understand coming up, there’s a lot of single parents, and the job market sucks and the housing market sucks and money is not easy to have. I have something that I already have, there’s no overhead here, I don’t have to pay for any of this. Just come over, be my friend and let’s record your music. You deserve it. That’s kind of where that whole idea started.

Was Simpulfest a move in that direction?

Yeah, it was for both the studio and the whole Simpul universe, whatever you want to call it. I think the people on the label deserve some recognition. I wanted to help them play more shows. I recently worked with The Crawlouts and the Dumpster Fire album I did in here, Karate Riot, pretty much like 75% of the bands that played have come through the studio at some point. I just want it to be a thing for Boise. Like, here we are, if you need my help, if you want a studio to record in where it’s low-key and chill, let’s just talk and chill and see what we can do. Plus, it’s just fun.

How do you record drums in here?

Basically everything, including this chair, all goes out there. The drummer basically sits here [in the corner]. It fits fine. It gets LOUD in here.