The Flowers building, located in the Lowry Hill East neighborhood of Minneapolis, was formerly a greenhouse and floral shop before being used as a warehouse space for a guitar store. A self-described "gear freak," Ackerson had been a sound engineer at legendary Twin Cities club First Avenue and had already collected a wide variety of recording equipment on his own before deciding to start his own studio. Ackerson founded Flowers largely through money earned from his band Polara's contract with major labelInterscope Records in the 1990s as well as an otherwise unsuccessful deal with Chris Blackwell's Palm Pictures. After Polara was dropped by Interscope, Ackerson went independent both as a musician with Polara and other bands, and as a producer at Flowers. Ackerson got advice on constructing Flowers from veteran recording engineers including Glyn Johns and Fort Apache producer Paul Kolderie, and worked with acoustic designer Dave Ahl, who was the drummer for seminal punk bandSuicide Commandos. The second floor of the building was partially removed to create high ceilings for capturing an acoustically friendly environment. The control room was built from the blueprints of Kolderie's studio, Fort Apache, in Massachusetts. The greenhouse space became a lounge. The studio's large, open space is designed to accommodate either a full band playing together or isolated multitrack recording. Ackerson died of pancreatic cancer in October 2019. The studio remains open, now run by Ackerson's family; before his death, Ackerson chose Kris Johnson, guitarist in Minneapolis band Two Harbors, to be Flowers’ head engineer and studio manager.
Approach to production
Ackerson took a holistic approach to making music, viewing composition, performance, recording and post-production all as steps in a single process of creating a song. He told an interviewer in Guitar Player magazine, "It's all part of the same thing—amps, guitars, effects. You're playing it all." In an interview for Tape Op magazine, he said that the energy and vibe of a performance was more important to him than technical perfection, saying that as a producer "sometimes you have to be willing to get out of the way of the moment."
