In 1985 Paul Simon called the South African producer Koloi Lebona into the studio. He needed to borrow Lebona's ears, for Simon wanted to reproduce the quality of the accordion that he had heard on an inspiring production by Lebona before coming to South Africa. Lebona sat in the control room in a Johannesburg studio. He sat there for days, listening and advising, while South African musicians played and the tape rolled and rolled, and Simon laid down backing tracks for the Graceland album. He gave Simon the sound of his own mix. Lebona didn't care about basking in Simon's glory, though he admires him, but he sat there for days, listening intently. For him the hook was Simon's engineer, the famous Roy Halee. For producer Lebona, Halee held the secret to production success: the more he could learn from this expert sound engineer, the more control he could have in the studio as a producer, especially as a black producer in apartheid South Africa's recording studios.

In the ideal studio, the producer, as the studio's client, directs studio sessions and has final authority over the sound, so that the engineer serves his or her client. But in practice, in South African studios during the apartheid era, this was not always the case. The engineer, usually white, middle-class and male, wielded significantly more power working the controls of the console than would probably be the case elsewhere, especially in major studios in the metropoles of the global North. In the 1970s and 1980s, during years of increasing political repression and the concomitant mobilisation of resistance out in the streets, Lebona and his then assistant, Monty Bogatsu, recount being marked as radical inside the studio. They argued for what they believed were their rights to quality sound and insisted on their entitlement to use whatever technological facilities they needed.