1 Photo by Michael Schmelling
Lucky Dragons ‘Make a Baby’ with electricity and audience participation
By Beverly Bryan
Published: May 6th, 2008 | 2:35pm
It’s not easy to get people to interact with each other at shows. But Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara of L.A. experimental duo Lucky Dragons have it down pat. It’s all about a box that turns electrical resistance into sound.
Fischbeck created a box that contains four braided wires, or “touchers,” extend from it, and the whole contraption feeds into a laptop. Fischbeck and Rara often perform in small gallery spaces, where they present the box to an audience by setting it on the floor. The touchers produce channels of feedback when touched, but here’s the catch: the audience has to touch each other as well. At least two people have to touch each other and touch a wire to trigger the first note. Lucky Dragons calls the concept “Make a Baby.”
“Everyone playing Make a Baby has to form a bridge between each other for it to work,” Rara says. The device produces a series of tonal progressions based on different levels of electrical resistance. The progressions are created by the number of people who touch each other and the way they touch each other.
Adding more layers of meaning, Fischbeck and Rara describe Make a Baby as a game and a ritual. “There’s a lot of magic in these performances. [It’s] asking people to do things they wouldn’t ordinarily think made any sense,” Fischbeck says.
In one part of the performance, audience members move rocks inside a magnetic field generated by turning the sound box up all the way. The laptop produces feedback, translating very small changes in energy into notes. In turn, these ritual games transform strangers into band mates. The technical aspects may require some explanation, but the aim of these performances is simple. “It’s a totally unnatural situation that people have to leap into,” Rara says. “It results in a lot of genuineness and people taking their guards down.”
THE SOUND
There are parallels to be found in Lucky Dragons’ new album, Dream Island Laughing Language (Marriage). Fischbeck and Rara started simply: recording themselves playing acoustic instruments in their house. You’ll hear the sound of flutes and mini-dulcimer, as well as rocks and hands. But Fischbeck finished the album by editing tape loops of the basic sounds into experimental pop songs crafted like a finely woven textile. Though the rhythmic tracks can feel a bit like electronica, the album also has a light, handmade texture recalling experimental bands Animal Collective and the Raincoats.
Lucky Dragons has a discography consisting of too many experiments and collaborations to name, but both band members agree that Dream Island is an unusual instance where the two sat down and worked on making an album with typical songs. “Some of them have words to them, so just on a basic level it’s pretty different,” Rara says.
Still, it’s only a traditional album when compared with Lucky Dragons’ free-form past. “A lot of the songs are just a few notes played with rubber bands stretched across a board,” Fischbeck says. “It’s very simple music, we’ve just expanded.”
THE STARTUP STORY
The pair’s collaborative efforts began simply enough. Rara met Fischbeck at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, in 2004. The artists found their community-oriented goals complimentary and started Sumi Ink Club, a drawing group open to all ages and skill levels. But they were soon expanding these efforts into other projects: Going to noise shows and living together, for instance, led to playing music. In 2005, they formed Lucky Dragons and they started doing Make a Baby.
That piece in particular satisfies the aims of two artists who seek radical equality in everything that they do. In concert, they avoid a divide between audience and performer, hoping to give agency to everyone there. They especially want audience members to be aware of each other. Rara says seeing the connections and relationships formed in the audience during Lucky Dragons’ performances are extremely satisfying for that reason. “Just seeing everyone walk out the door after a show is kind of proof that this is possible. Those shows start with a lot of tension, and they end with everyone talking,” she says.
Another part of the Lucky Dragons’ mission is to play for and with as many different people as possible. As much performance artists as musicians, Lucky Dragons play punk clubs like The Smell in Los Angeles and the Whitney Biennial in New York. Rara notes both venues are all-ages, though the crowds are presumably different from one another.
With a history of prolific touring across four continents — and participating in workshops for kids as part of a recent Japanese tour with French performance band Shobo Shobo — the group is working hard to accomplish its mission. The result is a lot of strangers touching and talking to each other — a piece of wizardry for any band.
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Lucky Dragons' "Make a Baby" documentary on YouTube
Lucky Dragons' official website
Lucky Dragons' MySpace
Issue #34
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