Wild Peaks: Archipelago Builds World’s Highest Atmos-Ready Studio, Inspired by Nature

Archipelago Entertainment believes that audio should be as captivating as a snow-covered mountain, exhilarating as a trail leading to a rugged summit. Based in Breckenridge, CO, the audio and music production specialists create superior music and deeply immersive experiences, composing in spatial environments from the beginning. Inspired by the outdoors, by the adventure and adversity of encountering nature at its wildest, Archipelago translates that energy into sonic work that spans music, games, sonic branding, and film. 

Archipelago has made meaningful music for Meta Music Initiative, recorded the sound of the Utah mountains for a project with Sounds of Red Bull, and fashioned music and audio for upcoming fantasy games and documentaries. The music that springs from these projects spans genres—electronic music, orchestral, ambient—and finds fans on streaming music services. 

This comes as no surprise, as Archipelago’s driving force is Ross Lara, a musician, producer, composer, audio engineer, and mountaineer, who founded the studio in a moment of revelation about the music he longed to make. Lara began his music career as a successful DJ and electronic music producer. He had also become a sought-after writer and producer, working with major K-pop artists on charting hits. Even as things took off for Lara, however, he longed for another kind of adventure. 

On a trip to the Galapagos Islands, surrounded by the islands’ unparalleled beauty, he found it. “It all spoke to me,” he recalls. “I was recording all kinds of sounds and rhythms. I had done that before, but it felt really natural to make music this way. Though we were still chasing what labels wanted and providing a service, there was another layer at the foundation, all the sounds and blips and tones that I captured. I recorded the waves and sculpted strings to go with them. You can feel the difference, how the sounds underpin the music and composition. Even if you don’t always know what they are.”

This new foundation worked a sea change in Lara, who founded Archipelago (named in honor of the islands that inspired him) with long-time friend and business mind, Brian Shenefelt. Setting up hubs in LA and Atlanta before settling in the Rockies, they built a community of creatives to ensure peak quality. They eventually settled on a base high in the Rockies, a source of endless thrills and ideas for Lara, custom-building the world’s highest-elevation studio fully equipped for Dolby Atmos and immersive sound (at a breathtaking 9,000 ft above sea level). 

Lara may have drawn directly on natural sounds during his Galapagos epiphany, but he takes cues from the mountains rising outside the studio’s windows. He incorporates nature’s sweeping grandeur and heart-pounding highs to make Archipelago's music endlessly engaging. “If I’m not in the studio, I’m outside,” Lara notes, explaining his process. “I love to go deep into the forest, summiting the highest mountains in Colorado. There’s a challenge when you’ve made decades of music; you need to keep it fresh. It’s not always about using the recordings; sometimes, it’s about being out there, remembering the feelings, and translating that experience into sound.”

Lara aims to capture these feelings at Archipelago by deploying Atmos and other spatial formats in groundbreaking ways. They have designed their set up to create in Atmos, constantly exploring new approaches. “Immersive audio is just starting to have its day,” Lara says. “Apple highlighted it, but it’s still early in the revolution.” As consumer technology moves to the new standard, Lara and Shenefelt see more and more projects that want to record immersive sound from the get-go, rather than upmixing from stereo. 

“It's a mindset, as much as a technology,” Lara reflects. “Immersive audio unlocks the chains that have had stereo locked in a stagnant position, and creates a new sonic playground. The only limit is your imagination. It can start to turn the wheels of how you write or mix. There’s this grand potential to have a game-changing way to make music in a new environment.”

Changing the game, keeping the thrill alive and present, lie at the heart of Archipelago’s work. No matter what the methodology, Archipelago wants to tell high-energy stories via music and sound. “At the end of the day, the passion and obsessive love for evolving in music has led to us embracing this revolution,” says Lara. “It’s just begun and will grow exponentially in the next five years. It’s a whole new adventure to make music in Atmos. You can really tell the story.”