The Living Earth Show Dreams Up an Experimental Music Hub in SF

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.)

TLES’ debut concert on Sept. 20, Music for Hard Times, will bring what originally started as an early pandemic project, composed and created via virtual modalities, to a physical space.

What follows are excerpts of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Nicole Gluckstern: So in regards to the series, you’re going to start off using Music for Hard Times, which is a really interesting piece to kick off with because a lot of it is very contemplative, right? Dreamy and soothing, which I think was part of the mandate [when creating it]. So I’m curious to know how it’s going to be presented in this space.

Andy Meyerson: So the music was created by Danny Clay. And the other wonderful San Francisco-based artist on it is Jon Fischer, who created an ambient film, and is working on creating projections [for the live show] that’ll go a variety of places to have ambiance and coziness be at the fore of the experience, as much as possible.

By designing the projections, do you mean he’s going to create a new visual, or use the existing film?

Andy Meyerson: Kind of both. It’ll be certainly rooted in the film. Because that’s the piece, right? It’s not an accompaniment to the piece. It is the piece. So it’s elaborating on and expanding on that work. That is as integral to what the piece is as the music.

Travis Andrews: We started envisioning, what if there wasn’t a bad seat in the house? What if we had a main channel of video and images and geometries, and had two supplementary feeds? So if you’re one of the 53 people that come to these shows, you can always see like two of those channels. So [gestures to bar] putting scrim over this beautifully gilded mirror, have a channel there. [Gestures to makeshift stage near the front door.] One behind the performance space, which will be much more visible when the door is shut, and then having a third channel for the people that are behind the bar and at the bar on that wall [gestures to wall opposite bar].

Andy Meyerson: It was a piece that was made visually. So what’s subversive about Danny’s work is [it’s] designed to be as beautiful when played by virtuoso trained musicians as by his elementary school students. Which is an extremely subversive act in our traditional classical music that cherishes virtuosity über alles. There’s a very specific definition of what that means, and why, and what a score is. And Danny really does kind of flip that on his head, in the most beautiful and moral and humanistic way possible, and that has a very different context for a classically trained musician and a seven year old. But both are equally valid and lead to amazing places. So he made the entire piece that way, and we made hundreds and hundreds of samples. Me, Travis and Danny, and Danny compiled them into the album.

I’d like to hear a little bit more about the Roar Shack Live! season. Maybe you can’t talk about specific performers. But I’m secretly hoping M. Lamar is on the list.

Andy Meyerson: He’s coming in February! He’s [possibly] the least “San Francisco-y” of our collaborators, but he has such a deep connection to the city. Right? SFAI alum, lived here, it’s in his work. And he’s a great example of someone we’ve worked with for years and years. We’re making our next piece, Machines and Other Intergalactic Technologies of the Spirit. And in February we’re going to play that show at the Met Museum.

It’s kind of crazy that the infrastructure to do work like that in San Francisco doesn’t really exist. Like interdisciplinary work, at that scale, in that manner. So we’re gonna do it the week before, here. It felt really, really important to us that we could build it and present it here in a way that cost is not a barrier to entry.

You’re helping to build out this space, so it supports your performance series. And then at the end of ten shows, are you no longer part of this space?

Andy Meyerson: We’d love to be, but you know, one season at a time!

Travis Andrews: We can say that there’s nothing but desire to continue to do that. This is the first time we’ll have an entire hometown season in one venue, ever. And I think what I mean by I’d love to keep this place is to just have something like this [gestures] — which felt so out of reach until a couple of months ago — but it’s such like a grounding, lovely feeling. We’ve never had an opportunity like this before to invite people to just a stable, curated environment.

Andy Meyerson: Our overall mission, really, is to show what it means to make San Francisco a place where culture is created and not just consumed. In order for San Francisco to live the values that it says it wants, about using the arts to revitalize downtown, it needs to invest in infrastructure and ecosystem at every scale.

Specifically, work that exists in a development stage; work that exists uncompromisingly; a place for artists to try things they otherwise wouldn’t; and allow the art itself and the practice to scale with its audience. What’s really important for us is to find a way to model that infrastructure and model that piece of the ecosystem.

We’ve never turned a bar into a concert hall before, but it felt like a way to tell a story of place, and be part of space together in a way that a performance here will be very different from a performance anywhere else in the world. And that’s kind of exciting and special!

After Music for Hard Times on Sept. 20, The Living Earth Show performs with Zachary James Watkins for Roar Shack Live!: Double Wall on Oct. 20. Tickets and details here.