Coming to SraArt Gallery (relocated from Copacabana) on Saturday night is Samsara: a short history of humanity and the unremarkable life of Lila Ember, an extended musican/theatrical experience constructed and performed by trio Absolute Zero (or AbZro or Abs_lute Zro if you prefer). LengPleng sat down with Lewis McTighe (guitar and lots of pedals) and Jesse Ricketson (drums and electronic paraphernalia) to channel their enthusiasm and excitement into words.
Lewis: We’re very excited about it, for sure.
Jesse: There are a lot of different elements to it. For me it’s an interesting creative challenge, because there’s a lot of electronic stuff – synths, drum machines, building soundscapes with samples of animals or street noises. And the drumming is still in there, but it’s pushed me to learn new skills, which has been really satisfying.
Lewis: The thing that makes it so exciting for me is the compositional aspect. I’ve been writing songs for a long, long time, but what I’ve never done before is this conceptual approach. I’m not relying on lyrics to tell the story; a lot of it is instrumental. Together we created a narrative from start to finish and divided it into sections, each one with a theme or a title, so for example: industry. And now we need to compose a piece of music that reflects industry. Go! I’ve never done that before. Working with Jesse I’ve been exposed to many obscure and challenging time signatures, and I’m learning quite a bit of harmony and timings that are new to me. These abstract components are stretching me musically.
The writing process was organic, collaborative and improvisional all at once
Lewis: We sat on the balcony and we wrote down that narrative together over about 45 minutes, then went and played some music for it. What’s first? Underwater subterranean birth. Okay, cool. We recorded jams for weeks, and then picked out the ideas that we liked, and that is how we came up with the core of the compositions. Then we learned the parts, connected them together.
Jesse: We’d jam based on a given theme, trying to play inspired by the idea, and then find the good bits and turn it into a song. Some of the songs are tightly written, and have a set structure, and others are more open and we’ll see what happens on the night. We know the sounds that we’re going to use, we know the trajectory, but how we get there is still up for grabs.
Lewis: We performed them in this cute little package at The Deck, opening for ZeitgeitS, an abridged version – about 45 minutes long, rushing from one thing to the next. And only afterwards when reflecting on it – we felt we lost something there, the feeling that it’s happening organically, improvisationally. This time we’re purposefully leaving space – we know the core idea, we know the sounds, we know the main theme, but let’s play it for a few minutes longer and see what happens. We don’t want it to be too scripted.
Jesse: It’s nice to have a mix of both – the explorative, meandering, finding sounds, and then coming with a real well-composed song. The show as it is now oscillates between those two realms, and also between the more electronic drum machine/synth/digital kind of world and then organic band mode, where we’re just like a three-piece power trio playing songs.
Lewis: Switching modes or layering both. The amount of equipment and toys and cables, it’s pretty intense. We’ll be there all day setting up.
Jesse: I love doing it, but it also makes me appreciate when I have a gig where I’m just playing drums. Wow! It’s so simple. It’s just the drums. It’s fun, but it’s also not the kind of thing you could casually do every week. It’s a big effort and a big set-up to make this show happen.
Lewis: For the past couple of months Jesse and I have been picking apart the set and expanding on the ideas, adding more elements, adding more ideas, adding more live sections. Now there’s more of it, and each piece is longer. And of course we now have AI-generated visualisations and animations that help depict the scenery and the setting and the vibe of each section. They will be triggered by Jesse as we go from one vingette to the next.
Jesse: We want the story to be a bit open to interpretation. It’s not an explicit story, it’s more capturing different themes, or archetypal stages both within the life of a person and also in the history of humanity in general. Trying to depict both of those at the same time – the evolution of life from cells in the ocean, coming on land, evolving over millions of years, becoming civilised humans, and then going through all the trials and tribulations in that macro sense, and also the journey of one character from birth to death, and the different stages of life they go through, different rituals, different ceremonies, falling in love, getting a job, being depressed, being joyous.
Space to play, space for the audience to create its own narrative from the sounds they experience
Jesse: It was really interesting to hear from people who were at The Deck. Someone said I was hearing a robot uprising taking over the world. Another person said they’re been having terrible issues with selling a house and dealing with a mortgage, and there was one song that really captured the feeling of what they’d been going through. Okay, I never would have thought anything like that, but it’s nice that it’s creating its own meaning for each listener.
Lewis: So as you would expect there are some parts of the set that are very accessible, and there are other parts of the set that are very uncomfortable. It’s interesting to feel that in the room, in a live show setting, everyone feeling this is challenging, this is a song but we’re not dancing to this.
Jesse: There’s a moment where we use an audio clip of a woman crying, quite intensely and emotionally, and the music around it is very sombre; a friend of ours observed that quite a few people left the room, it was uncomfortable. Hearing someone being sad makes you sad.
In action in other settings: Lewis, Jesse, Hansley
The creation of the piece has been continuing up until very much the last minute.
Lewis: The time for adding new changes is over.
Jesse: Two days before the gig. With the stuff Lewis and I have been adding we’ve been leaning into the odd time signatures, intricate nerdy stuff. We live together, and we can just be walking past each other in the house – hey, do you want to try and run that song again? So we’ve had time to nail some pretty intricate and complicated compositions and arrangements.
Lewis: So every single time we play we’re adding new things, and then [bass player] Hansley [Bikhari], who started a new job recently and hasn’t been as available, so one week later he comes to practice and he’s got all this new stuff to try and understand. And because it’s this nerdy math rock it’s difficult to pick up, even for him.
Jesse: He’s an understated guy. He just wants to sit there and play his supporting role, which he does very well, but will get a bit shy if it’s asked to stand out. But he’s amazing when he does. He’s always coming up with great ideas. Where does that come from? Maybe we could do a section that goes like this, and he’ll play this beautiful six chord progression, pulling it out of thin air.
Lewis:
He generally stays away from the more typical pentatonic scales and melodies.
This is not your average rock’n’roll band
Jesse: We see this more like a theatre troupe – we rehearse up a play, present that play for however many shows, and then move on to the next play. Next time we’ll do a completely new body of music with a completely new theme.
Lewis: The first version – abridged, band mode, no visuals. This time we’ve expanded on the ideas, lengthened and added the visual element. Jesse and I are really into production and sound design, so we would like to find a place and get more gear to do some kind of surround sound – where the sound is coming from all directions, and not all at the same time. It’s like a gig, but it also doesn’t feel like a gig. I don’t like using the term arthouse but it does feel like a little bit more than a gig. It feels artistically satisfying in that way. Trying to make people feel things. Music always makes people feel things, but a bit more acutely, trying to push the experience to go through a variety of different emotions.
A ticketed event, with a range of take-home treats
Jesse: These are just to expand the experience and the artistic offering. We have 20 t-shirts, each one a unique design, and they all represent different chapters within the story. For everyone who buys a pre-sale ticket we also have NFTs with little video snippets of show visuals – it’s just another way that people can take something home, a digital keepsake.
You are encouraged to arrive at around 9 pm for a 9.30 pm start.
Tickets are $5 pre-sale, $8 on the door – including a free drink and a free sticker. The first 40 pre-sale tickets get a free NFT. T-shirts $20. Get in first for pre-sale of tickets and t-shirt pre-sales – ABA: 005 758 527
In action in other settings: Lewis, Jesse, Hansley