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Kria Brekken opens for Lucky Dragons.

BY MAIA GERLINGER

In print | Published October 29, 2009

The line between audience and musician was blurred this Saturday at the Olde Club performance of experimental band Lucky Dragons. More group activity than stage performance, Lucky Dragons is a two-person band whose output is expressed through a variety of media — predominantly performance, recorded music and video.

Lucky Dragons member Sarah Rara describes their sound as “ecstatic music.”
Olde Club director Anna Zalokostas ’10 said that the band had been chosen because “they’re really interesting artistically … and really innovative.”

In particular, Zalokostas referenced the band’s Make a Baby project, which features homemade hardware and software that allows audience members to directly participate in the sound being created. “This creates communicative possibilities during the performance, both between the performers and the audience, and between audience members themselves,” Zalokostas said.
“What I really like is that they try to make an intimate warm atmosphere out of anything,” Louis Jargow ’10, the Olde Club Facilities director, said. “They get people not interested in participating to participate. We don’t always get this kind of experimental music going on.”

I had seen Lucky Dragons before and in some of their concerts they did just that while in others the experience was completely different. Once, in front of large screens playing abstract videos, Luke Fishbeck — the other half of the band and the main force behind Lucky Dragons — writhed on the floor, surrounding himself with digital loops of sound. Yes, it was as strange as it sounded. It was bizarre, it was kind of cool, it was vaguely alienating and, as Fishbeck became more and more frenzied, maybe even borderline uncomfortable.

But next time I saw them, I was in a room full of normally-standoffish New Yorkers who, having gotten past their initial timidity, were walking and climbing all over the performance space, moving rocks across sound fields, grasping cords and holding hands. This was the Make a Baby project.
“By touching other participants on the skin, the signal is transferred at varying impedance levels — a direct result of minute variations in the quality of touch from gently brushing to fully grasping,” according to the Make a Baby page on the Lucky Dragons website. This signal is aurally expressed by ecstatic and rippling electronic notes, tripping up or down odd-sounding but happy scales. In that room, human contact created music, and the music created community.

According to Fishbeck, however, the band does not actually end up doing Make a Baby at every performance. “We always try to prepare for the possibility of Make a Baby,” he said. “And people sometimes request it. It’s sort of like our hit song.”

Whether or not Lucky Dragons ends up doing Make a Baby depends on the audience’s level of engagement. Fishbeck said, “Sometimes people want to be more aggressive in appreciating sound. It’s this sort of grabbing, infantile thing. People want to hold something, and you can feel that.”

The opening act at Olde Club Saturday was Kría Brekken, an Icelandic artist who is perhaps most recognizable as a former member of múm and for being currently married to Animal Collective’s Avey Tare. Her voice is ethereal and high, and her music was reminiscent of the pattering of rain, of soothing clinking and clankings, of echoes and pipes.

“I feel like there’s an alien force invading my mind,” concertgoer Danny Cramer ’12 characterized the experience.

Next was Eric Copeland, whose music was loud and abrasive, punctuated with strong hints of static. There were high pitches and electronic slides; sometimes I even thought I heard space lasers. Some of it I found oddly catchy while some of it I found not particularly exciting at all. The crowd’s reaction ranged from impassioned, formless hipster dancing to grimaces of pain, as people quickly left the building.

Then, finally, Lucky Dragons took the stage. They set up on the middle of the floor while the audience sat around in a circle. Rara and Fishbeck both knelt amidst the equipment. A third, temporary member — a friend of the band — sat and played gentle percussion next to a microphone. Rara sang pure notes that followed no melody; processed, her voice vibrated and shimmered. Some audience members seemed bored; others seemed relaxed and content.
Eventually, Fishbeck shuffled on his knees around the circle and handed out rocks. Gradually, the familiar scales of Make a Baby, exuberant and hovering, began to grow. Audience members with rocks moved closer, waving them over the machines as Rara played the thumb piano in peaceful thirds.

Like all experimental music, it was either ridiculous or interesting, depending on your point of view. After all, there was no melody, no song structure; the purpose was to make noise together, pure and simple. Concertgoer Will Schulz ’13 described it as “musical feedback.”

Soon, Lucky Dragons took out the cords, and people began grasping hands, delighting in the experience of having the sounds completely change through touching each other. “It’s corporeal music,” concertgoer Will Duncan ’13 said.

As the other sounds faded out one by one, finally, only Rara’s processed voice was left to fill the room.

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