Lucky Dragons began making records by forging together moments of the natural sublime. With telluric electricity they transform the sounds of their lives – walks in parks, peace protests, rocks breaking and waves shaking – into marching rhythms and chiming portents. Frenzied and euphonious nature trance – some rare, wild magic extracted from the cacti and sand of their native California that crashes around your ears – is their business. Borne of two Angelenos named Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara, the art collective-cum-band encourages equal-power situations in which audience members cooperate amongst themselves, building up fragile networks held together by such light things as skin contact (their home-made synthesiser is played by bioelectricity). This spirit of inclusion charges their every endeavour, and it is what marks them as defining agents of contemporary humanhood.

 

 

Nabil Azadi: The sharing and interaction you encourage with your performances and the open distribution of your music – your appreciation for community – seem to be things that would have to be based on a strong trust for everybody. You mentioned once, Luke, that in your early twenties you felt a lot of distrust for people and I was curious to understand what happened.

Luke Fischbeck: I think what I said about how after I got to twenty-five or something I started trusting people was more to do with the difference between two ages.

Sarah Rara: You’ve always been a trusting person, I think – or as long as I’ve known you. I’m very gullible. I mean I’ve always trusted everyone. I mean I can’t detect a lie!

NA: I was struck by the museum you two started [in Elysian Park, Los Angeles] because it’s out in the open and anyone can access it. Is there vandalism?

SR: I guess vandalism is just a part of the museum. It’s not encouraged or discouraged – it just is what it is.

NA: And a work wouldn’t be removed because of it, right?

SR: I guess the thing about Elysian Park is that most of the work is pretty transient anyway, so acts of vandalism just mark the end of the project and then we move on to the next project. It’s not a very dramatic or violent event when it happens. Most of the vandalism in our community is not so bad, anyway; it’s interesting writing and scripts that have developed over time and that are really LA. It’s hard for me to distinguish the artwork from the vandalism.

LF: There really is no difference.

NA: Otherwise you are putting something on a pedestal! Isolated performance is interesting; you  two pursue equal power-sharing situations but to some the distance between a performer and their audience is incredibly important because it lets them dream.

LF: There’s still a place for that distance.

SR: Sometimes we alienate people. And there’s a moment of the show where we experience that alienation. When you’re singing and then you hear your own voice through a speaker that’s far away: that’s a kind of alienation that happens in every music show – it’s implicit in the technology. So I think the coming together doesn’t work unless we have a sense of our separate selves, of a distance being crossed. Coming together has to have that tension.

LF: I think that everything we’re doing is made better if there is some kind of alienation involved. It’s something to overcome.

 

NA: What do you think of the duty of sharing? That is, of never guarding any creative contribution selfishly, but committing to doing your utmost to realise it and distribute it.

SR: I’m always embarrassing myself. I don’t experience failure as something crushing; I always experience it as something really funny. When I try something I really go all out and when it fails, it really, really fails. In a harsh way. Part of sharing everything is sharing that embarrassment but also the intensity and earnestness. Being earnest is the most compelling thing. I think when you see someone fail but they’ve given it all, it’s a beautiful gesture. It becomes the perfect work of art when it fails.

LF: Error 100%.

SR: There is a way to incorporate embarrassment or failure and it compels this mode of sharing everything.

LF: You were asking about duty, though?

SR: Well, you can’t hold back!

LF: Well, you can, I guess. Is there something that compels you to share?

SR: I guess it’s an ethic. There’s something sinister about withholding something. I guess it’s an ethic to share everything or to share nothing, but the in-between of sharing some things and not others: that kind of negotiation is a murky ethical area that I don’t like to go into.

 

 

Luke Fischbeck performing at UPSET RHYTHM in March, 2008.

 

NA: What Sarah mentioned about earnestness reminded me of how recently I’ve had a kind of inability to criticise someone’s creative output if it was undertaken with sincerity and fervor. I think this has progressed from trust: trust gives way to sharing, and sharing gives way to respecting that anyone can learn from anyone. Suddenly it seems impossible to be wrong.

SR: How do you define criticism? It seems like there are two schools: there’s critical thinking as judgement, and then there’s critical thinking about how something is framed and how it works.

NA: And how it affects your perception of it.

SR: Right, so I’m lodged in the second mode but not so much in using critical thinking to judge things. I suspend judgement. I guess a negative review never teaches me very much, nor does a positive review.  I learn from something that is ambiguous about the quality, and that is about the zeitgeist that produced the thing.

LF: A lot of what we’ve been doing is about making more points of entry into things so that people can have a more engaged understanding of what it is. It’s in everything we do, I guess.

NA: When you’re introducing people to the parameters of whatever you’re playing – maybe it’s Make A Baby that you’re using – is there a visible shift in energy once people understand the process and how they are supposed to be involved?

SR: There is a eureka moment when someone understands that their touch makes the sound – because it’s not a logical conclusion at all – so there’s a moment where you can almost see a light bulb go off and things registering. And sometimes there’s a long delay. [laughing] A really awkward pause before the thing is understood but I like that because it is a discovery. We don’t explain it – we might demonstrate it – but it has to be discovered by playing; if you just watch people touching you might not believe it. You have to test it out.

LF: It’s not so much about people understanding something, it’s about them paying attention to it. And the fact that it sustains people’s attention to it and it draws other people’s attention in, I think it’s really difficult to locate something central that is capturing people’s attention, it’s more like any number of little things. t’s about a group,paying attention in a knit-together way because before they were just focusing attention on a single point or on individual relationships to that point. But this is many different relationships that are being enacted at once and that kind of attention feels really amazing.

 

 

NA: The shift of observing to involvement and participation. I zone out at concerts when I’m not involved.

LF: [laughing] I zone out of concerts when I’m asked to perform!

SR: I space out a lot during a show – I allow myself to be in a similar headspace as everyone else.

NA: How is touring going? I understand that it might be difficult or mundane in some way.

LF: [laughing] No, it’s awesome! It’s so much fun. We wouldn’t have picked this profession if we didn’t enjoy it. What’s worth pointing out is that we’re in the middle of a US tour right now but because today is Thanksgiving, I had to come home and spend all day eating.

SR: And going for a walk in the park! I mean the longest tour is three weeks with a break in between.

LF: It’s how we tour though – we just do short things and make the most out of it and then we go do something else. For a lot of bands, they signed over their entire year to promote a record and for us, we’re promoting a life.

SR: Maybe the difference is that the live show and the recording do not necessarily overlap in a tight way. We don’t go to promote a record, we go to do a performance, so it’s a bit different. I don’t even know how I would perform a record! The records really exist in another space – the space of the studio or the home or a specific walk.

NA: Do you still record sounds whenever you’re outside of the house?

SR: Yeah, I’m constantly picking up.

LF: It’s like writing and speech! To me it’s like writing and speech.

SR: Although the two weren’t always so separate – I mean Saint Augustine used to read everything aloud. For me, I like to preserve that space for the album to do something that could never be done by a human. That needs to be preserved in a record.

LF: Or things that take longer to listen to that they did to make. These things exist in an impossible today.

SR: Or like a ten hour recording that becomes a ten minute song! To dilate time, like you were saying. To change the scale of a moment.

NA: Hey, do you have strong visual reactions to your own music? Or are you concentrated on listening?

SR: No, I’m not synthesthetic at all. When I’m listening, I’m listening and when I look, I look. I guess I’m working on a movie now and the distinction between the sound and the image is becoming blurred. Gosh, I wish I could say that when I play the piano I heard each key as a different colour but I don’t at all. I translate between sound and music but there is a step of translation.

NA: There is absolutely colour in your music, though – and you’ve said that the light of LA seeps into it. What is it about the place that lands in your music?

SR: I guess just the feeling of something that warms you – maybe the sun – is the ideal. Something immaterial like sound but palpable that kind of infuses everything here – the attitudes, you know, the food, the way the day plays out. The music could kind of rule your life. I think there’s a quality, I can’t really articulate it, that is Californian. And California has so many different environments but the thing that is inescapable is the sun. And probably in Australia too! The feeling of a very violent sun and a very generous sun. I think it’s the same with music: you have a sound that over-powers you or a sound that gives you energy or depletes your energy.

LF: I think there’s a sense here that you want to have something you are in touch with all the time – some sort of ubiquitous thing – whether it’s being in touch with a friend or having a sense that you’re in your home or just the sort of mindfulness that you have of something like the sun. You’re always aware that’s in somewhere, even if you can’t see it. This kind of continuity and being aware of it is important I think.

NA: And in terms of the community? I suspect that you guys find that you’re attracting a good group of people to yourselves.

LF: I think generally we’re lucky to find situations that are already really amazing and it’s easy just to walk right in. It happens every day.

NA: You guys are some lucky dragons.

LF: You couldn’t resist!

NA: Nope. Do you think this idea of reappropriating the quotidian is something you’ve been familiar with for a while now?

LF: I always have trouble with this – talking about everydayness. Why should what is everyday for me be everyday for somebody else? It an assumption that you’re all sharing the same quotidian material. I guess I accept that there has to be something that in common between everybody, right?

 

The best Lucky Dragons video ever as say it Lucky Dragons themselves!

Introduction and interview by Nabil Azadi.

Images courtesy of Drew Bennett and Claire Evans.