OPEN OFFICE

Sarah Rara and Luke Fishbeck have been traveling the world for years now making drawings, music, performances, and other less immediately classifiable products under the name Lucky Dragons.  They have collectively released over a dozen records, many of which are available for free download on their website, and 2008 saw them play over 100 shows on four continents.  For their live performances Lucky Dragons utilize a dizzying combination of instruments: hand drums, thumb pianos, synthesizers, shakers, computers, and gongs, to produce a sound that at once embraces and transcends the distinction between electronic and acoustic music.  Most instruments are played by audience members and participation is further facilitated by a homemade synthesizer, played by many people at once, which generates sound when one person touches the skin of another.  In a Lucky Dragons performance participation becomes not only a cerebral experience of togetherness but a real physical act of reaching and touching.  Their performances are a series of beautiful confrontations with the sometimes awkward and uncomfortable role that technology, as that which facilitates but also inhibits togetherness, plays in the formation of a community - an awkwardness that is often downplayed in the celebratory rhetoric of techno-futurism.  I spoke with Sarah and Luke about the place and space of their performances on the occasion of their participation in the 2009 Transmediale Festival in Berlin.

DK: Would you consider yourselves first and foremost a band?

SR: No, because I always want to hold on to the possibility of having multiple identities.  So I wouldn’t privilege one over the other.  So I wouldn’t say my presence is going to be in a band primarily or as an individual primarily or that the drawing group will take precedence over the music or vice versa.  I kind of always wanted to have the choice of these identities and play them like cards, or use which ever one is beneficial at the time.  What do you think?

LF: It really depends on who you are talking to.

SR: Or what context we’re appearing in.  For instance in this festival were presented as members of a cohesive group within this theme and that’s someone else’s work too and that’s a collaboration with them…naming what it is that we do.  And that changes all the time.

[...]

DK: I’m asking because I was thinking the other day about how it’s acceptable and totally common now to be an artist and in a band.  Beginning in the ‘60’s even many different media and strategies began to be incorporated into what was properly understood as art, as visual arts.  So like performance art would still be considered visual art.  But I feel like you rarely see people who consider themselves musicians expanding their work in the same way.

LF: I feel like its unfortunate when people are so steadfast about the name for what they do.

DK: I feel as if people tend to fall back on artist because that’s –

SR: - is more open.

DK: - more open but also more respectable than if you were to say, ‘I’m a musician but I do drawing also.’

SR: I thought about this term Entertainer.

LF: I’ve always been so afraid of that one.

SR: It’s a slippery one because it includes theater, it includes television, clowns, magicians, there are so many kinds of entertainer.  And that term is even more open than artist.

LF: Well I think it’s open but it’s attached to something so vague as entertainment.  I don’t know what entertainment means.

SR: And it has this connotation…

LF: But everybody thinks entertainment is good.  It’s a very unpretentious thing to call it as well.  I think sometimes calling yourself an artist is not very open and limits you in a lot of ways.  I have friends who are video artists and we’ve never seen their videos.  And unless we can get to the gallery show in London or New York or wherever than we wont see the video ever because its an edition of like five copies.

DK: And it’s not on YouTube.

LF: Right, definitely not on YouTube.  There are people I know who have made hundreds of videos and there’s not a single thing about them on YouTube.  Do they even exist?

SR: The means of distribution and sale of art are much more closed.  Even though maybe mentally it’s more of an open space. There are fewer means of getting it to people than music, which can arrive in so many different forms.

DK: Then it really becomes a question of your identity as being defined by the economy that you are working in or the way that your project is circulated.

LF: That’s why we’re going with entertainer.

SR: For the moment…

DK: I think that even in your work with Sumi Ink club or these other projects you’re still using the framework of the band.

SR: It’s very band-like.

DK: I heard your music before I knew about any of the other projects you do and I think that for me it’s very easy to consider you as primarily a band, but a band that is not strictly musical but is also visual or is also working in other channels.  But you use the framework of a band to produce things.

[…]

LF: But the first question everybody always asks when you tell them you are in a band is what instrument do you play?  And we’re like…uh…

SR: I’m working backwards.  Because I don’t play an instrument, I’m just using the pretext of being a musician to get all these people together.  And then I play anything.

LF: We don’t play instruments.  We play shows.

SR: But now I’m working backwards, so after being in a band for four years I finally picked up an instrument, which is the drums.  So I’ve been learning the drums for the past year and becoming a drummer just so when people ask me I can introduce myself as the drummer.  But then when I’m on stage it will still be totally confusing.

DK: So I guess if you consider yourself playing primarily shows rather than instruments.  Than there’s this question of the place that you play.  How does the particular place that you play factor into how the piece works?

SR: The number of people can determine the structure the show will have and the size and shape of the room -

LF: I think a lot of issues about the place and the way the show is put together and the access people have to it –

SR: If it’s all ages or not, if it’s for children or for old people.  Although we pretty much present the same show to everyone.

LF: And we’ll also pretty much play any show people ask us to.

DK: And any place too?

SR: Yeah.  It’s difficult to say that in a certain situation we act one way and that in another we change but it’s more of a surprise.  We’ll present a similar show but it will go in a totally different direction depending on the age and the room and the vibe and the energy around it.  Which is cool to see, because a different community comes forward and maybe one that didn’t exist before the show can happen, which is the best situation.

LF:  I was talking to my friend about Indie 103, I don’t know if there’s an equivalent station in Portland, but it’s like the indie Clear Channel station in Los Angeles.  We were talking about how it went out of business in L.A. and about how Clear Channel in general is not doing very well.  And my brother used to do pirate radio stuff and low powered FM stuff.  And there’s been this thing about Clear Channel being the biggest enemy and they own billboards, radio stations, television stations, newspapers, and concert venues.  And my friend Randy from No Age was like “have you ever played in a Clear Channel venue?”

SR: Have we?

LF: There was a point when I would have made absolutely sure that we weren’t playing in a Clear Channel venue just because it was part of this media hegemony or whatever that was completely ruining any attempt for people to do things on a sustainable level where people were fairly treated and things were transparent or anything.  But the fact of the matter is-

SR:  My strategy is that if you play a club that is within a monopoly and then the next night you play a DIY venue –

LF: Or the same night even –

SR: Than you are busting apart the monopoly because you are saying, “you can continue to exist alongside other things,” whereas saying, “you have to shut down,” is just another way of shutting down culture.  And people need culture.

LF:  There’s one way that’s trying to fight things head on and there’s another way that’s trying to do things in parallel.

SR:  When you bring something totally punk and totally small to a mainstream venue, you open things for the audience.

LF:  But I think as long as you’re doing that and then you’re also playing another show afterward in a house –

SR: - that’s important.

DK: I think there’s a certain type of band or entertainer who is able to do those kinds of things.

LF: There’s definitely a tradition for it.  Like the idea of jazz bands having the early and the late set.  Who are the people who come to the early set and who are the people that come to the late set?  And people that had to work until the late set, it’s good that there’s a show for them too.  But we try to play as many shows as we can in one night.

DK: I’m an old architecture student and also an old media studies student and I love bands.  But this question I’ve been working on is about the relationship between a band and the space that they play.  And not just how the places groups play defines their image but also the way in which a band playing in a particular place can actually change the architectural feel of that space or can alter the context in some way.  You’re a band – or you’re entertainers, that play in big museums like the Whitney Museum but you also play in houses or in little rooms –

LF: - and on top of mountains –

SR: - on a mountain, on an island, we had a kayak too.  We play everywhere.

DK: So you play shows all over the place.

SR: The context changes the interpretation of the show.

LF: Are you thinking about buildings in a physical sense, or buildings in a cultural sense?

SR: Like the function?

DK: Like the culture and function of a space… I’m talking about the way people use buildings, like the experience of seeing you play in a museum as being different from the experience of seeing you play in a house.

LF: For the one part this is really testing our intentions of stepping outside the performance and seeing it from a different perspective.  We can’t really answer this question because we’re so inside of the performance.

SR: The audience would really be able to answer this question of whether seeing us in a museum is different.

LF: I mean it’s difficult because we try to flip flop and go on the outside of things and look in.  I mean when we played in the Whitney Museum I went outside and waited in line with people while the show was going on just to see what it was like to see the show going on while you were waiting in line to get in.  But it’s still me being very much a tourist in this other perspective.

SR: I’ve had the idea recently that you should treat your heroes like your friends and your friends like your heroes.  Like you should lower one and raise the other to have this kind of sense of equality among people of all different walks of life.  And I’ve been thinking this about venues too.  So when a person I meet on the street says congratulations I say, oh it’s no big deal.  And then when we play a house show I want to tell everyone about it and brag about it.  It’s like the opposite impulse: playing down the prestige and playing up the more humble things that we do or the weirder things. So I’m always working against the context.  I don’t know…it’s a very difficult question.

DK: I don’t know that there’s an answer to it.

SR: It’s very deep.  It runs through everything.  But I’m always trying to give everyone the same experience.  When I’ve had the best shows ever I’ve felt a total connection with other human beings and seen them walking out of the club having a discussions with each other or with a stranger.  I want to give that to everyone.  So when we’re in a museum I want to give that to them and when I’m in a house show I want to give the audience the same thing.  And I also want to test the limits of playing the same show in different places and whether people can handle it in different places in different buildings with different functions.  And maybe that’s why our shows are almost like a discussion group.  Because we’re bringing them to buildings where discussion doesn’t happen very often.  So maybe the buildings with functions I really admire are like libraries or schools and there’s something about what we do in a rock club that is like that kind of building.  Or even a cafeteria or something.

LF: There’s also the question of the difference between doing something temporarily to change a place and doing something that will change it after we’ve left.  I don’t know.  I like to think that we’re working towards some change that stays on…

DK: That has duration.  Like it will always be the place where there was a Lucky Dragons show?

LF: No but it will be a place where the next time a band plays there people will have a different attitude about it or maybe people think of other ways to use the space.  I really like being part of a space where you have an ongoing contribution to the culture of that space and the way that it’s used.  A place like the smell in Los Angeles is a place that we’ve played over and over again and seen the same people and helped contribute to the development of the culture of the space and when we go play a show there it has a definite feeling to it that’s very unique.  It feels sort of like a book club.  People are seated very calmly.  It’s very strange because other bands, when they play there, it’s not like that but that’s something you can see continue to change.

Lucky Dragon’s adventures are documented extensively on their websites: www.hawksandsparrows.org and www.glaciersofnice.com.

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