Interview With Andy and Travis From The Living Earth Show With The Final On Vinyl Podcast

I had a good explanation of The Living Earth Show's recent album Music For Hard Times .

Unfortunately they dropped off the call however we got enough info to understand what their process was!

Keith "MuzikMan" Hannaleck

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Transcript

Speaker 2 0:14

Hi everybody, this is Keith MuzikMan Hannaleck with the Final on Vinyl Podcast. And today we're with Andy and Travis from The Living Earth Show and Danny Clay. And we're going to talk about the new album, Music for Hard Times. Just came out January 18th. And I actually just listened to it a few times and wrote the review. I'm ready to get that out there. And I want to welcome you two gentlemen on board. Thank you. Thanks, Keith. Thanks for coming on. And uh just wanted to hear some interesting points about how this whole project began. And obviously the driving factor was uh the hard times being what we've been in for what going on year three now. And uh how you got all involved with that. And um what was Danny the the person that got it all together, or was it one of you two? Just interesting to know how everything came about.

Speaker 1 1:08

Yeah. Well, I can do the blitz, the blitz sort of like history of what this project is. So Travis and I are um we perform as an experimental chamber music ensemble called The Living Earth Show. And I think the grounding for what we do is classical music. So we commission composers to write new music for us. Um I'm a percussionist, Travis is an electric guitarist, and so we've been performing as a chamber ensemble in like pretty traditional chamber music contexts and a lot of others, but like that's sort of the foundation since 2010. And our last show before the pandemic was March 6th, um, and it was an opera we had done with a bunch of spoken word poets and a string quartet um in early in March, I guess it was March 6th of 2020. Um, and Danny wrote the music for that piece. And um the next week, San Francisco, I guess the next day was when it was officially declared a pandemic by like World Health Organization, and San Francisco started shutting down completely. And we approached Danny just because as we were like sort of reeling from what was happening, and it was just this weird kind of days and fog of the first couple weeks of COVID shutdown things. Um and we approached Danny with the idea of like, or really a research question, like how can the tools of the classical music tradition be used to just physically make people feel better? Like, is that a possible goal with you know the tools of that tradition? The tradition and like the musical vocabulary that we learned in conservatories and that we've been trained to speak. And so that was the real genesis of this project, is coming to that composer with this research question. So it really isn't experimental music in a very literal sense. But the project, as we built it, we built the first volume in the, I think, two months after, I guess it would have been the first two volumes have been finished before summer 2020. And then we worked with the students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the San Francisco Girls Chorus to create the second volume using the same basic strategies we used to record the first volume in isolation. Um and Danny's role was he's the he's a composer, and so he created the score to the entire piece. And that score, there's some notated tradition, quote unquote traditionally notated music, but a lot of it was recording prompts and sentences and adjectives and images and asking each individual musician to interpret those in ways that were designed to be calming to the performers themselves. And so that's what the score is can be interpreted by, you know, like we're we play notated music all the time, that's our job. And so it can be interpreted by us, but also by students and by people who've never picked up an instrument before. And we recorded hours and hours and hours of dozens of hours of just raw material based on these prompts, and then sent them to Danny. And Danny arranged the collages that became volumes one and volumes two.

Speaker 2 4:40

Um that's where you got the term um that that really caught me off guard was the um the term you used, um calming strategies for the musicians, and in turn would be that for us listeners, right? Absolutely.

Speaker 1 4:59

And so like Danny created like the score, like the literal pages of the score are calming strategies for the musician that they record in real time. And some of those are like actual discernible melodies and harmonies and chords and whatever and rhythms, and others are a lot like just recording a soundscape and occasionally like recording a sound to remind like your environment that you're there, like thing things that are that simple and they range, but it really like had the effect of calming the musicians as they performed. It was extremely like a meditative exercise, and then those recordings were then collaged into something that was designed to be meditative for the listener as well.

Speaker 2 5:43

You know, looking from the outside in and reading about I'm like, oh my god, this is so complicated. How did they come up with this? You know? And and uh was it live off the floor recording, and then from that point the production went into place, or was there a lot of painstaking work to put it all together?

Speaker 1 6:05

Um I'd say a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B. I mean, the idea of the recording, actually, Travis, maybe you can speak more to like the actual recording and production value, but really like the goal was to capture things as raw as possible. Um, like the idea was to use the tools at our disposal, which meant like it was 2020, we had like we didn't have access to recording studios, we had access to our houses. We had access to like voice memos on our phone. Um, and so like that was built into the process of like hearing the artifacts from each musician's individual space. But Travis you want to talk a little bit more maybe about just the the how something like this could be produced with so many musicians?

Speaker 6:45

Yeah, like for the you know, the trio version or what I think of really as like the research portion of the album, the first half, it came together really quickly. Um because we we found out, I mean, like the the technical the the technical thing that we found out was that when you there's something really magical about layering phone recordings. When you when you have like one of them or two of them and then you you play them like uh like when they're parallel in a mix, it's fine. But when you start adding them up, there is just like some sort of airy and presence that airiness and presence that um isn't in like a close-mic studio record that Andy and I might have made in the past. Um so when we discovered that, and then we took it to working with the larger ensembles, working with um the conservatory orchestra and working with the girls' chorus, we already kind of knew that like um doing this in a really casual way using their phones was gonna work. Um and it did. So the recording, the recording went really, really quickly. Um Danny spent a significant amount of time on the edit. Um, so I think that's like really where like maybe the more traditional uh composition came in was in the edit that Danny put together. And I think that he was very thoughtful and took his time um in doing that. But I think in terms of like records that the Living Earth Show has tracked, it was probably the one that was recorded the fastest.

Speaker 2 8:19

Wow. So definitely a collaborative effort and you know being sensitive to each other's abilities, talents, and you know, all the hard work that goes into it is very important. And that was Danny's role, obviously. So he was the final piece of the puzzle, huh?

Speaker 1 8:36

Oh, yeah, for sure. He was the final and initial piece of the puzzle, and all the stuff in the middle was basically him as a composer getting out of the way.

Speaker 2 8:44

So, what was your reaction, uh, gentlemen, when you were first approached about this? Now, looking back on what you've done in the past and looking at a project like this, kind of just opening the door to something entirely new and even even off the wall compared to what you're used to doing and getting that in product. I mean, what was your reaction to that? Sure.

Speaker 1 9:06

So actually, I was I was the one that approached Danny about it. Um asked Danny if you'd be yeah, and like there's something kind of like a like kind of you know, very, very logical about it, but also like and very kind of surface level about like, you know, this is this is a you know, it sucks right now. Can we do anything to make anybody feel better? Like that's sort of like you know, flailing around helplessly that's pretty pretty surface level and obvious to you know, I think all of us at that time, we were all kind of in that place. But there's something a little bit more subversive about what we were doing with this project, especially as classical musicians, um with you know, that's coming from that world, all three of us, me, Travis, and Danny. And like one aspect of it was like making something that existed as a new age album as classical musicians, like there tends to be a little bit of a tension um within the world of, say, you know, art music or whatever, to create something that's designed to be functional, that's designed to actually make people feel better. Like the idea of having a goal in mind, um, emotionally, even, is a little bit like it's subversive in what we do as classical musicians, to have music with a functional goal. And especially if that goal is to create a kind of cathartic feel. Um also the idea that like that the ideal way that we were recording and performing was a little bit of the antithesis of what one thinks of as a classical music automaton, where we're sort of like trained to practice in a certain kind of way and execute a musical passage with a kind of like robotic precision. Danny's music is kind of the opposite, because it's a score. But to do it right, you are being yourself, you are recording your environment, you are like capturing the imperfections and really the humanity of any individual performance. And so I think for us it was really important to use the framework of what we do and what we're trained to do as classical musicians to approach something that kind of pokes holes in the way the tradition views humans, if that makes sense. Like the score of yeah, so like yeah, go ahead, sorry.

Speaker 2 11:27

Well, I was gonna say, uh I'm sorry I asked you that question because you said that right at the beginning. It was your idea. And um I I I think I twisted my question around a little bit there. I guess what I was trying to say was what's everybody's reaction been when it was all said and done, and you all sat down together and listened to it, or wherever you listened to it, what was the feeling? Was the feeling that great? We we you know, we we got to where we wanted to go with this, or yeah, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 11:56

Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's you know, I'm I'm as proud of that as I've ever been of anything we've done at the Living Earth show in like over a decade. Um, it's it's it like does a lot of I think for us it does a lot of things simultaneously. Um, in addition to sort of achieving the stated goal, it really does kind of like force someone who sees that score to think very differently about how music like how we view composed music. Um like what we traditionally think of when we think of a musical score isn't, I think for most people, is not the score that Danny delivered. Um, and then the idea that someone can read or like look at the written score for this piece and then listen to it, you know, Danny's this the score for this piece really is just like saying it's it's a lot of text. Um it's like, you know, what's a good one?

Speaker 2 12:54

Uh oh. I think we just lost them.