Excerpted from interview by Nicole Gluckstern
For KQED
The Living Earth Show launch a creative laboratory in the heart of San Francisco’s Mid-Market
When I arrive at the Odd Fellows Building at 7th and Market Street in San Francisco, the ground floor space — formerly known as cocktail bar Mr. Smith’s — is getting ready for its next act as a nascent creative hub. Ladders, buckets, toolboxes, extension cords, cleaning supplies and half-drunk bottles of water are strewn about the room. A small collection of instruments in their cases are clustered in a corner near the front entrance, waiting to christen the space on opening night.
At the heart of the chaos, Andy Meyerson and Travis Andrews — the experimental chamber music duo known as The Living Earth Show (TLES) — greet me affably, as if they weren’t in the middle of building what may prove to be one of their biggest experiments to date.
Graduates of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, TLES has been creating and touring large-scale, interdisciplinary experimental works with a roster of boundary-pushing collaborators such as singer-technologist Pamela Z, Pulitzer-winning Diné composer Raven Chacon and poetry organization Youth Speaks. They’re so busy and artistically free-ranging that even in the middle of their remodel of 34 7th Street, they performed at Great American Music Hall as members of the raucous queer music collective COMMANDO, followed by a brief trip to Norway to present Tremble Staves with Chacon at the Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival.
As part of its goal to revitalize the struggling downtown area, the city-funded Market Street Arts program tapped TLES to inhabit the space and curate a season of shows they’re calling Roar Shack Live! The musicians are preparing to bring some of their touring works home to San Francisco, and perform them, salon-style, in an intimate venue reconfigured according to their imaginations. They will roughly present one show per month with a different collaborator and use a sliding scale, pay-what-you-can model for tickets. (Exact dates are under construction, but trans rights advocate and musician Honey Mahogany, experimental music luminary Terry Riley and rising composer Zachary James Watkins are among the seven featured artists.)
Read KQED interview in full here
Check out Roar Shack Live! shows here.
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