Getting drunk and bothering the lead singer of the Flaming Lips at a rock show changed Casey Friedman's life. The owner and house producer at Inner State Studio, 114 S. Western, had done all his homework at Boston's Berklee College of Music, but he needed to hear a soft bulletin from one of his idols before he could roll tape. "It had to get it beaten into my head that I needed to be recording music," Friedman said as he sat behind a Pro Tools rig in his second-floor studio. "I was making lots of weird music and enjoying it, and I was doing these solo bass or guitar shows. I went to the White Stripes show at the Green Door a couple of years ago, and I saw Wayne Coyne there. I was kind of drunk and was tapping him on the shoulder and saying, 'Hey, man, I play music,' and he tells me, 'Make a CD. Anybody can make a CD.'"


Friedman bought an Apple G4 and his Pro Tools program and peripherals, but it all seemed daunting. After graduating from the Classen School of Advanced Studies in 1998, Friedman applied only to Berklee, where he was accepted and soon had professors cramming jazz theory into his brain."I wanted to make weird, quirky music," he said. "The thing was to learn all of these jazz standards, and I just did not care about that at all. I was just kind of a kid. I don't remember having aspirations of being a musician, really. I didn't think I wanted to be a performer because I wasn't confident, and I didn't want to be a music therapist." The pressure was on, from the school and from his parents, for Friedman to decide on a discipline, and he made his way from music synthesis classes into production, learning how to record on 24-track analog boards. But a few years later, he realized that building a studio from scratch was not covered in his syllabus. The G4 sat for a year, taunting Friedman with its mere presence, until the would-be producer finally started making phone calls to friends in California, getting advice on how to build his Inner State. Within weeks of completion, Friedman recorded his first client, former Frequency Bliss leader Derek Brown, in October 2002. Having been in bands since he was 15, Friedman just operated on word-of-mouth and name recognition. "I've always known the musicians * kids who like music and are involved in it," he said. "So then I know their friends and their friends' friends." One year later, Friedman compiled "Inner State Music 2003," a not-for-sale CD he described as an electronic "business card," featuring songs by up-and-coming Oklahoma City-area acts such as Brown, Lydia Taylor, the Dizzy Heights, Emule, the Neighbors and Twenty Minutes To Vegas, along with Friedman's solo project, God TV. While some bands, like Alpha Male or TMTV, deliver a harder rock sound, much of the material veers toward avant-garde pop. "There is kind of a pop sound," he said. "I want it to be progressive, interesting and make people want to move and have fun." Other than a room filled with vintage concert posters and enough percussion instruments to outfit the University of Southern California's Trojan marching band, Inner State is a Spartan affair. Friedman keeps it simple by design: He does not want musicians to have any preconceived notions of what kind of music he produces."A lot of people, you just have to make them comfortable," Friedman said. "I used to have a bunch of stuff on the walls, but I decided that created too much influence. I've tried to dress in a certain way so that I don't portray any kind of image, and I also don't want to get myself into a certain thing, where people go, 'Oh, that guy just does a certain type of music.' I want to do all kinds of music and have all kinds of musicians coming in, working together."

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