The Five Percent

Joan Hammel is a Chicagoland-based singer, songwriter, and producer with over three decades of experience in both live and recorded audio. As the founder of Paxton Productions, Joan’s work spans performance, production, and engineering, rooted in a lifelong commitment to music and storytelling.

Jessica Thompson has dedicated her career to the art and science of sound. As a mastering, restoration, and preservation engineer and founder of Jessica Thompson Audio, she has spent over ten years helping artists, labels, and archives bring recordings to life with precision, empathy, and deep musical understanding.

Joanna Lynne Staub is a highly accomplished freelance sound designer, composer, and audio engineer with over 30 years of experience spanning Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regional theatre, as well as live events, corporate audio, concerts, television, and podcasts. As an independent contractor, she is a proud member of USA829 as a sound designer and IATSE as...

Sass (She/Her) is a Victoria, BC–based hip-hop artist, producer, and engineer whose work lives at the intersection of emotion, storytelling, and sound. With a foundation in poetry, Sass discovered audio not just as a career path, but as a lifeline, an outlet to transform internal experiences into immersive sonic realities.

Evie Clark-Yospa is a London-based recording, mixing, and production engineer with over a decade of experience in audio. Currently working as an Engineer at Baltic Studios, where she has been part of the team for the past three years, Evie balances her studio work with independent projects, bringing a versatile and intuitive approach to every...

Rebecca Huston is a Los Angeles–based mastering engineer, live FOH engineer, producer, and artist with over 20 years of experience in audio. She works independently from her studio, The Forest Mastering and Restoration, where she mixes and masters music while also creating her own work under the project name Romantic Thriller.

Betty Wright wasn’t just a powerhouse vocalist; she was a force in the music industry. She made history as the first Black woman to run her own label, Ms. B Records, proving that an independent artist could achieve mainstream success. In 1988, she became the first Black female artist to have a gold album (Mother...

Though British singer-songwriter Rosie Lowe has sustained a career as an artist for over a decade and has been recording her own music since her college days, it is with her August 2024 release Lover, Other that she took the lead on production, songwriting, and tracking. The result is a musical tapestry that crosses genres,...

Annlie Huang is a Los Angeles-based music editor for streaming content at Marvel Studios and an independent mix engineer. She began her journey by obtaining a B.F.A. in Performing Arts Technology and a B.S. in Sound Engineering from the University of Michigan, and she has since become a consummate professional with vast experience ranging across...