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All a scene needs to make it vital is a few people willing to put their time and energy into it. For Baton Rouge’s local music scene, Fred Weaver (pictured) is one of those people.

Apocalypse the Apocalypse, his home studio in the Plantation Trace neighborhood, was responsible for four out of the five albums on 225’s “Most Intriguing” list of 2006.

Primarily catering to the city’s underground rock scene may not have been a financial success, but an artistic one. “Money has never really mattered that much to me,” Weaver explains, “much to the dismay of my creditors.”

Weaver got in the recording game after having a bad experience in the studio himself. His band thought its practice tapes sounded better than the finished product, so he decided to try his hand at recording.

“I figured, ‘I can do this,’ and bought an 8-track open reel setup,” he says. Weaver’s equipment soon moved with him from Pennsylvania to Brooklyn, and finally back to Baton Rouge in 1999. He has since recorded the likes of The Myrtles, Slobot, Justinbailey, Terror of the Sea, We Landed on the Moon!, Brass Bed and a few dozen others.

Studios like Apocalypse The Apocalypse are an essential part of any indie music scene, giving bands without a lot of money but plenty of ideas a canvas in which to realize a vision. “There are a lot of people doing diverse, interesting music, each with their unique vision, which, I believe is the most important thing,” Weaver says of the current local music scene. “The unfortunate thing is that there seems to be less of an audience for this stuff in Baton Rouge than there was in the Bayou’s heyday of the late-90s.”

Still, Weaver’s do-it-yourself spirit allows him to see the positives in that as well. “Operating in a relative vacuum might have been good for those bands in that there was not much audience or peer pressure to make their band feel compelled to more readily fit into a specific subgenre.”

Fred Weaver is recording his new album, produced by Codeine’s Chris Brokaw, to be released this summer. fredweaver.com.