When
I put the album from the electronic duo EOTO in a CD player at work,
my office mate Mike Schulz asked - after about five seconds of
music - "You're not watching porn, are you?"
I'm guessing that question would please Jason Hann, a percussionist with jam-band/bluegrass favorites String Cheese Incident and half of EOTO. While he's more than happy to talk about the impressive technical elements of the live-looping project - which will be performing at the Redstone Room on Monday, May 28 - he'd rather you just dance.
He described the pair's live show as "a straight dance experience as opposed to it being like a science project up there. We try to avoid that all times."
Think a club DJ, but with all the music being created live by two people, improvising. And yes, that first track does recall the stereotypical porn soundtrack of yesteryear, with its cheesy synthesized funk.
But EOTO - which also includes String Cheese drummer Michael Travis - creates a wide range of electronic soundscapes, and porn is just one of them. Drum-and-bass, house, break-beat, trip-hop, and down-tempo are all part of the mix. And based on the group's debut CD, Elephants Only Talk Occasionally, EOTO manages to be relatively organic within those genres.
"The whole point of doing all of this technical stuff is so that it doesn't sound like we're doing any technical stuff," Hann said in a phone interview last week. "We just basically want the impression to be that you can close your eyes, and it feels like a needle dropping on a record."
Getting to that point, though, is where the science project comes in. The duo has software that allows them to record, manipulate, and play back 17 separate tracks as they perform, with Travis in charge of "tonal" elements - guitar, bass, keyboards, basic percussion - and Hann overseeing electronic sounds.
"It's definitely very different from what String Cheese does," Hann said in a gross understatement.
The software, he said, "sort of records audio in an elastic way." Travis typically has 10 tracks and "becomes a live re-mixer," while Hann has seven tracks. "We'll fill up the 17 tracks every now and then," Hann said.
The building blocks might only take up a few tracks, but in the remainder the two musicians might find the element that turns something transcendent. "Those little bits of ear-candy ... here and there are sometimes what really give body to whatever piece of music we're on at the time," he said.
EOTO began roughly two years ago as a lark. When String Cheese would practice, Hann would bunk at Travis' home, and they'd jam until 4 or 5 in the morning.
"Little by little, just to entertain ourselves, we kept adding some little piece of equipment to it that would make it that much more musical for us," Hann said.
About a year ago, EOTO began playing live, and at first, the two musicians would find a groove and stay in it for 10 minutes or more. It was only listening to a show later that they'd recognize they that they held the pattern too long.
"We'd listen back to that, and we'd go, 'Oh ... that's kind of long,'" he said.
These days, the pair has a more refined musical intuition. If they both agree that something's not working, they have an "abort" signal. And if they both think they've found a worthwhile idea, that gut feeling is usually verified when they listen to a recording of the show.
"When we were first playing together, that would not happen," Hann said. "We'd be amazingly happy in the moment and be like, 'Wow. Yep. Yep. This is amazing.' And we'd listen back and be like, 'No. No.'"
Hann
said EOTO has gotten not only better but leaner, trimming core ideas
down to three minutes or so. The music is continuous, but Hann and
Travis switch gears more frequently.
The two talk about an outline for a performance before they go on stage, but they don't have set tunes. "The idea is to start from scratch every night," Hann said. "We depend a bunch on the feedback the crowd gives us in the moment."
While EOTO has done sessions with members of Umphrey's McGee and the drummers of Stomp, Hann said there are logistical reasons to keep the outfit a two-person affair. For one thing, he said, it makes it easier to travel. And if String Cheese is stuck at a venue before a show, EOTO can practice. "All of sudden it becomes really practical," he said. And EOTO can quickly set up for a String Cheese after-show.
But there are also philosophical reasons. A band such as String Cheese has an emphasis on musicianship, but electronic music has a different mindset, more trained on maintaining and varying basic ideas. "The challenge of this type of music is not what kind of virtuoso player you are on your instrument," Hann said. "It's really just the discipline and patience to play something over and over again with little variations."
That makes EOTO a tough entity to market. The easiest hook is String Cheese Incident, but that band's fans don't seem like a natural fit for club music.
"It's a little bit scary at first, because definitely our initial reason for people coming out was seeing two of the guys from String Cheese doing some other, different thing," Hann said.
But there's still the improvisational side of things, and if things go really wrong, an audience might get some String Cheese after all.
"All our gear breaks down, ... and everything went to hell, and nothing's working, or the power goes out in the building, and we [might] just get down to doing a String Cheese song a cappella with percussion and us singing really badly. ... We hope it doesn't come to that. That won't be fun for anybody, but we know, as a last resort, we could try to pull that off."
EOTO will perform at 8 p.m. on May 28 at the Redstone Room in downtown Davenport. Tickets are $10 and available at (http://www.redstoneroom.com). For more information on EOTO, visit (http://myspace.com/eotomusic).
To listen to the River Cities' Reader interview with Jason Hann, visit (http://www.qcspan.com).
