Apostolic was many things: a label, a collective, a state of mind even. But before all of that, it was a recording studio set up by New Yorker John Townley. As a member of the Magicians, (you recognize that name from the Nuggets albums), Townley worked in some of the finest studios in the USA, but he felt he was on a conveyor belt. “You had to do the creation ahead of time, which is not my idea of a good time,” he says now. "You had all this stuff to play with, and you weren’t allowed to play with it.” When Townley came into an $85,000 inheritance he immediately invested in a loft building on 10th Street, New York, against the advice of, well, “everybody”. But there were fellow believers. Friends Matt Hoffman and Michael and Danny Weiss, heirs to the Weiss jewelry fortune, helped assemble the studio, which was built to bleeding-edge specifications and even had a 12-track recorder.