DT Probes… Lucky Dragons - an interview with Luke Fishbeck and Sarah Rara - Part 1
Lucky Dragons are Luke Fishbeck and Sarah Rara of Los Angeles. Their music is as accessible as it is complex - it gives the listener equal spoonfuls of awe, wonder, beauty and engagement. What draws you in to Lucky Dragons is that you recognize the sounds - not as particular instruments but more as vague memories of tones you’ve heard somewhere, sometime. Using ‘found sound’ and software written by themselves, Luke and Sara arrange pop songs at the most ethereal edge of the synapses - but the crucial point is that these songs are pop - they are fun. Most recent in their catalog is Rara Speaks, a record that’s infused with honed melodies and dizzying percussion. If you want a taste of their spooked out sound check the blissful noises of Open Melody.
Lucky Dragons have a short US and European tour starting this month, and are playing some really unique events. The shows are completely interactive - if you want to be part of the show you will be; I guess in many ways you could call it performance art…
There will be a video here, but embedding doesn’t work right now.
Anyhow…
Here’s the first half of DT’s interview with Lucky Dragons - the guys are very busy at the moment, so we’re still awaiting the last half, but they’ve kindly given us plenty to go at here.
DT: Your back catalogue stretches all the way back to 2000. How have you kept yourselves motivated and inspired to keep creating new, innovative sounds?
LD: A lot of the motivation comes from our live shows… playing participatory shows in a wide variety of situations, from house shows to museums to schools to DIY spaces, and keeping things open and playful and meeting people on an equal level means we get as many new sounds and new ways of doing things as possible every time we go out into the world.. meeting an audience that is all ages and coming from super diverse backgrounds brings new interpretations to what we’ve been working on up to that point, new ways of playing, new ways of thinking and doing… it pretty much comes down to considering the audience an equal partner, whether through listening and reacting, or physically getting involved and making sounds with us… we find there are still so many ideas of what music means and what it is to be used for that we haven’t considered before.
DT: I know you guys use Max/MSP in a lot of your work, and that you build patches yourselves. What kind of things do your patches do? Do you use any written by other programmers or are the exclusively your own?
LD: We use MaxMSP and puredata and also any other programs that are around—supercollider, chuck, processing, etc—always with this attitude of testing out an idea… most of the software we build is extremely basic proof-of-concept kinds of things—one patch will listen to small changes in an electrical system and translate into control data for a software synth, one patch will work as a 512-band graphic equalizer, one patch makes any sound appear to be speeding up or slowing down continuously (an auditory illusion known as a risset rhythm), one patch serves as a very clunky homemade autotune… basically we will read about something, or notice something happening, and try to see if we can model it or reproduce it, usually very quickly, and then go out and use it in a show!
DT: Consistently your work’s featured intricate patterns of beautiful and organic sounds. What’s the writing process behind this kind of music? Do you work in a studio context in a conventional sense, or something more abstract?
LD: It’s a very casual process—we’ll be sitting around eating dinner and start to think the clacking of forks on bowls sounds very nice and drag out the recorder to sample it… or sit under a tree full of birds for 45 minutes trying to record their singing to one another… we wind up with a sprawling library of sounds, and then spend the bulk of the time editing, building up little constructions from the field recordings… treating little memories as materials to be woven together. we’ve visited studios to record things for our friends, but the process of repeatable actions—play one thing and then play it again until it’s right, building up the layers gradually—requires an attitude about time in music that we don’t usually find useful in the writing process… that it must always flow forward, and loop backwards on itself in order to form a rhythm. when constructing things, we will look at the bits and pieces of recorded material visually, how it forms patterns on its own, or mathematically, how different relationships between rhythms and tones can be made to poke through… often we find ourselves editing backwards and forwards, up and down, or coming up with a process and letting the sounds squeeze through it… there is a joke that some of our songs take less time to make than they do to listen to.
DT: Your live shows feature some intimate and intense collaboration with the audience. Have you got any plans to release collaborative records with anyone?
LD: Well, we do have plans to release a live record soon… although it’s very difficult to present something on record that when it was experienced live was truly felt to be self-organizing.. that is to say, in a live setting, all of the materials, all of the people present, all of the context we are all in together, these things are made a part of the experience… nothing external is needed or referred to—we make up the rules as we go along, and at the end the rules dissolve. a straight recording still feels like a recording, something passive and remote—a better document is something more enclosed and self-sufficient that you can come up with your own (collaborative) opinions toward in a very direct way! on the other hand, all of our records are very much collaborative things, as there’s kind of no clear boundaries on who’s in the band and who’s not… anyone who’s around and taking part at the time we record or edit is given a voice that ideally cuts through to the finished product. we’ve been meeting so many amazing musicians recently, i think the next lucky dragons record will be all the richer for their voices being included…!
DT: You’ve stated an interest in unconventional, sustainable forms of distribution and exhibition. What kind of things are you trying out at the moment? What would you like to try in the future?
LD: Well, essentially put, music should be free—it’s packaging, material things, that wind up costing us money to distribute, and to buy and take home. coming up with free packaging is a nice thing to pursue… we’re working on a label now with our friend brendan fowler that has no money involved: newotherthing.com. as for the sustainability of these things, there is the global way of thinking about it—less packaging, less money involved means it’s easier to keep going, and more scalable, more transferrable… and there’s the selfish way of looking at it, i.e., how can i pay rent and eat food through this—
