Lucky Dragons
By Sophie in Lucky Dragons | 0 comments
MP3: Starter Culture
“Dream Island Laughing Language” by Lucky Dragons This is music that articulates Lucky Dragons’ experience in America right now. Messages of unrest have long failed to be clearly understood, solitude and empty organization have given way to a very current volcanic desire for togetherness. Genre has never been less important; influences and ideas are consumed and digested and released in the spirit of a culture larger than music as it is bought and sold. This is world music for a world that doesn’t care about “music” as we have packaged it for the last 100 years. You could call it post-noise, or post-anything you like, but we would prefer to call it pre-something.
Lucky Dragons came together in the spring of 2000 in an attempt to create a band that would never break up. The name is borrowed from a Japanese fishing vessel caught in the fallout of a US hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific ocean that became a focal point for world-wide anti-nuclear sentiment in the 20th Century. With a constantly shifting group of participants, each recording is a record of a specific time and place, and of those present and active as a community in the creation of the recording.
For this recording, the time is 2007-2008, the place is California. The name of the record refers to the landfill-island in Tokyo Harbour where the original Lucky Dragon now lives –”dream island”, and to the creation of imaginary languages — “laughing language” — that can be used to express things our own languages can’t.
Inpress live review (Australian tour 2008):
Beat Live Review:
Sure it sounds cliché, but the newly consecrated Triple R Performance Space was the perfect setting for tonight’s lineup. In the same building as the station’s studios, it is lovingly appointed in polished floorboards, sound-proofing white canvas and subtle, moody lighting. And by virtue of being tucked away in the building that itself sits up the lonely end of Nicholson St in East Brunswick, a quieter place to hold a gig is not likely to be found. The whole thing is a cross between a museum or gallery and a stage, giving off a subdued, reverential air that created the perfect ‘space’ for tonight’s performers to walk into and weave their magic.
The theme of Lucky Dragons, a duo who set themselves up inside the mostly seated crowd, was really contained in the kinds of instruments they used - inexplicable electricity-conducting rocks that produced chords depending upon where each audience member that had one chose to take them; and something like a Theremin cord that makes noise depending on how many people are touching it, and in turn how many are touching them, and how they are touching each other. It’s all about transferring energies, feelings and, dare I say it, warmth. Forget about things like ‘songs’, ‘gig’ and ‘live’, theirs was a performance, and one that mainly hinged on simply providing the tools for happiness. The audience, half-seated, half-standing, did the rest, either directly or by some obvious signs of contentment. Attempts to ‘involve the audience’ usually come off trite, embarrassing or, worse, just fail, but Lucky Dragons intuitively knew how to orchestrate the crowd into a communal group of music makers.
It left a lingering good feeling for Phil Elverum to walk into and quietly engulf, with a gravity and sense of decay achieved far beyond what one might expect to materialise from one voice and one acoustic guitar. But come this did, and his performance, when he wasn’t spending time meekly making up sweet nothings of deferral and self-deprecating banter, was always one of darker tones, evoking an atmosphere of windswept, cold mountains at night - Mount Eerie, if you will. This quiet human apocalypse continued on for at least a dozen vignettes about desperation and loss, and whilst there was little variation for most of the time, again, trying to pick one’s ‘favourite song’ was really besides the point. Like the other two acts tonight, Elverum was concerned mostly with holding the crowd in a certain mood or atmosphere - only it was one a fair bit more sorrowful and yet, strangely, uplifting than the others.
LAWSON FLETCHER
Interview by Richard MacFarlane:
Los Angeles musicians Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara, as Lucky Dragons, gather a further ensemble of headbanded youths and armed with recorders and pea pods and massive heart they make music that you could say is based in the genre of electronica. Most recently, their record Dream Island Laughing Language fractures light through some strange New Age glass device and pushes it out the other side, psychedelic and warm. There are beats, lots of rhythms, percussion sounds of woodland origin and melodies of other colourful dimensions all shots through with fragments of harmonius delight. Based in Los Angeles, Lucky Dragon’s shows branch into both the art world and the music world, but mostly the human world, where they run free and hold hands sans hackney and plus total realist euphoria. Anyway, they make their music on this computer, but it also has email, which was nice, because it meant I could ask them a few questions and they could respond to them.
There’s a big sense of naturalism on yr electronics; an earthy sort of human touch that comes with music that often seems to be quite computerized.
Luke: My hope is that computers will act more natural soon.
Sarah: I think this comes from the looseness of our recording style, letting the tape roll and catching all the extraneous murmurs, accidents, and clutter in the room.
Colour and light both seem to come into Dream Island Laughing Language a lot; is this something you tried to infuse into the short songs?
Luke: We record a lot… around the house, out on walks, visiting with friends… then we edit the recordings down into songs, its the least we can do to let the original light and color be as they were… it’s the most we can do to somehow amplify them.
Sarah: It’s impossible to ignore the incredible sunlight in Southern California, and it definitely infuses the songs somehow. Sometimes the sun hits you in a violent clashing way like a cymbal other times the light is gentle and enveloping, like a chord or certain drones. Not sure if these are simply metaphors, or if the sounds and the light really do create a response that overlaps - probably to varying degrees for each of us.
With group participation at your shows, is that a way of expressing togetherness for you? Or more a performance art style thing?
Luke: I guess it could be both? Or at least we don’t make a distinction; we keep it pretty humble. Everyone is free to participate directly or indirectly or do their own thing. Togetherness itself is always a new thing, sometimes you are together with some very shy people, and it’s nice, even then, to be reminded of who you’re with and where you are. “Expressing” sounds like we have something we want to say, but the whole point of the group participation at our shows is to go outside of “saying” anything.
Sarah: Definitely both.
Yr music itself seems to give off a vibe of friendship and togetherness or joy or wonderment; my guess would be that you try and put this across in everyday life, too; do you?
Sarah: Often in the middle of a show, I’m holding my drum or my kalimba and having a conversation with someone in the audience at the same time. Sometimes our concerts approximate the form of a discussion group or hanging out pretty closely, and there is a lot of implicit optimism about the potential of this togetherness.
Luke: All joking aside, our music is our everyday life. Or, our everyday life is our music. it goes both ways.
What sort of tools do you use to make yr recordings?
Luke: Microphones, software, rubber bands, rocks, miniature bongos, flutes. We make a lot of this stuff ourselves very crudely. Ideally we would just walk outside and find a recording on the ground, bring it inside and dust it off and release it into the world.
Sarah: Rocks, cardboard, kalimbas, marimbas, whistles, jaw harps, jars, seed pods, and a mini-disc recorder.
I noticed a picture of you performing with a massive projection of a bunch of cactus behind you and that seems to make a lot of sense in terms of the textures somehow. A nice sort of cactus, I mean, kind of like the hand touching the lichens on yr website.
Luke: we have a lot to work with here in the American Southwest.
In terms of this togetherness or need for it, what are you thinking about Obama and America at the moment?
Luke: At the moment, and Sarah just opened my eyes to this, I am thinking that the strength of Obama rests on the attitude of his supporters. I had been so upset about the opposition, and how divided our country is, that I had forgotten how extremely positive I felt about him in the first place. So yes! Positive!
Sarah: I hope everyone who can vote will vote. And beyond that I support Obama and hope that he will become President of the United States. I don’t want to be caught in a tide of fear and anger, thinking about what will happen if McCain is elected. I just want to focus on what seems like a more positive future, a better direction.
Has playing at The Smell been a launching pad for you at all? Or are you more based in art galleries?
Luke: The Smell is a gift. I hope one day every city has one. There are so many bands (ourselves included) that wouldn’t exist as we do without the smell. It just totally turns the whole assumed system of music-making and audience and money and survival and the reasons for doing all this on its head and reminds us that music is essentially about building and sustaining a community.
Sarah: The Smell is an incredible model and deep inspiration for everything we do. It’s all-ages and pretty much all-inclusive, and beyond that it’s an amazing example of how spaces and musicians should mutually support each other. I think Jim Smith is one of my major heroes, and the existence of the Smell has made possible so many amazing collaborations I think it has had a deep impact on everyone who has ever been there.
How do you find you fit in there in Los Angeles? It seems that there’s a massive range of stuff happening, and even if a lot of it is pretty scruffy or punky, there’s always this big sense of euphoria or colour to it.
Luke: I think the thing about LA, and this goes for the art as well as the music stuff, is that style, or genre, isn’t really that important. There’s such an extreme range between rich and poor, but you can’t tell just by looking at people. People are wild here. There’s also this tremendous loneliness that is just kind of normal. I think a lot of the euphoria you mention comes from the amazing feeling of being in a crowd here - every time this simple thing happens its cause for a celebration! But yes, I totally and completely love living here.
Why do you think music is important?
Luke: It’s fun to do, and it helps us declare who we are.
Sarah: Music is a way of bringing people together and it channels everything human, every part of life and every way of life. Music is a great connector, and beyond that (especially playing the drums) music reminds me that time is passing and cannot be stopped.
I interviewed Juan from Abe Vigoda the other day and he was talking about this new interest in tropical sounds that seems to be coming out in a lot of music. I’ve noticed this too in a bunch of stuff that still retains some sort of gritty euphoria to the positive sounds. Do have a particular interest in tropical sort of music, or ‘world’ music?
Luke: Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez both kicked the American ambassadors out of their countries (Bolivia and Venezuela) yesterday. Say what you will about these bold moves, but they do represent for me something about what else is possible in the world… positive multiplicity, positive alternatives, positive answers. Without politicizing music I could say there is something tropical in all of us!
Sarah: World music pervades a lot of the sounds I make, and the instruments I choose to play–I’m still unpacking what this means and what it is that attracts me so much to the sound of “world” music and how this fits in with our California style. I think of Lucky Dragons music as being in the world, and could foresee some tropical projects in the future.
Do you ever think about a wider Californian canon of pop?
Luke: I think about a wider Californian everything. History is different here, it seems to move backwards and forwards, vibrating. There’s also a lot of secrets, things to find out. Hmm… Charles Mingus, The Mamas and the Papas, The Screamers, John Cage, The Germs, Ornette Coleman, NWA, Paul McCarthy, Black Flag, Dr Dre, Chris Burden, Bertold Brecht, Douglas Sirk, Flipside zine, Joan Didion, Kenneth Anger, Charles and Ray Eames, The Urinals, oh I don’t know, how do you ever tie a list like this together?
What can people expect from yr performance at HSP in Christchurch?
Luke: Music made by touching one another on the skin and also made in other ways.
Do you have any particular ideas for the next album you’ll do?
Luke: we’ve already recorded almost all of it, and so far it is pretty funky.
Time Off interview by Paul Donoughue:
HERE BE DRAGONS
FUSING ART, MUSIC AND PERFORMANCE, LUKE FISCHBECK AND SARAH RARA EXPLAIN THE ARTISTIC ETHIC OF LUCKY DRAGONS TO PAUL DONOUGHUE.
In 2003, a series of anti-war protests took place in Seattle, New York, Washington DC and Philadelphia. Los Angeles artist Luke Fischbeck recorded each rally. He deleted any political rhetoric, chants, or any form of human speech; he cut up the sounds of cars, drums, helicopters, and PA feedback, and arranged the sonic fragments into a musical collage.
One hundred copies were produced, each a clear disc case with a fresh spring flower inside, each distributed in record stores by a method of reverse shoplifting.
Hawks And Sparrows would become one of the better-known releases by Fischbeck’s project Lucky Dragons, which now includes longtime collaborator Sarah Rara. The pair continues to explore new fields in art, music and performance, constantly searching for a communal meaning. The rules of a regular band could never apply here.
“We have a new touring style,” announces Fischbeck with excitement. “We just go to a place and spend a week there and play every night. It’s a festival in one city.”
The new touring style has allowed them more time to work on another aspect of the Lucky Dragons road show.
“We do this thing called the Sumi Ink Club, and it’s kind of the visual art equivalent of Lucky Dragons,” says Rara. “It’s a collaborative drawing session but open to anyone who would like to join us and make a drawing. We get a whole crew of strangers, friends and passers-by who come to draw. That’s the secret goal – to meet as many strange people as possible. Because its very all-ages and all-human, we try to meet as many people from all different places as we can.”
The workshops generally take place during the day, while at night the pair will play live. Though they won’t have a week in each city when their Australian tour starts on Friday, there will still be plenty of opportunity for interaction. It’s something that is integral to the music. The live collaborations form the source of the music, and influence the very reasons behind it.
“A lot of the stuff we do is very open to interaction,” says Fischbeck, “so we have instruments that we bring and people play in a way that they need to play with each other to make things happen. So all the control is given over to the audience. It can be very chaotic, but it can also be very communal.”
“In some parts of the performance it’s possible to have a conversation with the audience while it’s happening,” says Rara. “So I guess the boundaries between the performer and audience kind of dissolve and you become more equal.”
The duo uses a range of unconventional instruments to create their vibrant, textured soundscapes. Objects are wired to act like synthesizers, producing sound depending on the number of people touching them, and the amount of interaction between those people.
“If you take a sound signal you can pass it from your hands to other people’s skin,” says Fischbeck. “It’s pretty quick to learn, so people in the audience can pick it up and show each other how to use it and we make the sounds that way. It’s like a big synthesizer.”
“You can choose to take the hand of someone next and pass the signal to another person or you can choose to just watch,” says Rara. “Or you can choose to make sounds in so many different ways.”
“We do make certain rules. Like, you can’t really play a drum like a guitar, even if you try really hard,” Fischbeck says. “It’s like when we do the drawing thing. Everybody does it using the same colour ink. So we make a drawing but you can’t really see the boundaries between different lines – one person can really continue another person’s drawing pretty seamlessly and I think it’s the same way with the music. When people do something together it really has much more of a feel of making one thing.”
InPress interview by Bob Baker Fish:
LA based Lucky Dragons make this strange freewheeling form of ecstatic slacker music, a sort of spiritual field recording to a post industrial age, the music coming across as almost ritualistic, equally incorporating electronic and acoustic elements in this highly percussive yet slightly scattered brew. They’re a duo of Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara who both met at university whilst doing visual art, the need for soundtracks to their films forcing them to figure out how to make music. Yet they’ve figured it out all wrong, they seem to be breaking every musical rule you’ve ever known, and their sounds are all the better for it. Dream Island Laughing Language is their most recent release, their eighteenth in six years and the first to secure distribution in Australia. All of their albums are markedly different, something that ultimately comes down to the duos relaxed attitude to recording and just utilisng whatever instruments they can get their hands on at the time. They also only think about an album at the end when they’ve accumulated enough material. ” It’s like a box,” Fischbeck offers, “and we put all the stuff in that box and when it’s full we release it.”
“Although on the one hand we are constantly recording sounds everyday, but for Dream Island Laughing Language we were also trying to make songs,” clarifies Rara. “But I think we were thinking of an album, a sort of arc, not a story, but something that keeps it together.”
There’s a very loose feel to their music which stems explicitly from their approach, initially not having any particular destination in mind. “All the raw sounds and raw recordings come out of improvisations,” offers Fischbeck, “then the editing process is where everything is composed and organised and put in place. It’s funny there’s this free and more chaotic part making sounds and then there’s the computer part which is quite different.”
“I think the editing process is like a prism,” he continues. “On one side you have all of the recordings you make going in, and on the other side you have a map of what the structure can be and where the points of improvisation can occur. “
Their approach is something like an hourglass, the top being the improvisation, the thin middle part being the computer editing, and the bottom being the live show which offers up more improvisation, not just for the duo. In this way the song construction never really ends.
“We’ve come up with something radically different for the live show,” offers Fischbeck excitedly, “we’ve got lots of instruments for people in the audience to play and they’re instruments we’ve designed. It’s a more controlled or harnessed way of providing that same sort of free environment for everyone to take part in making the sounds together.”
“The goal of the show is that by the end of the night the audience starts making decisions of the music and taking over,” adds Rara. “A few times the audience have gone in directions that we could never have foreseen and that’s always pretty amazing. Because to an extent with the live performance we’ve set up a series of choices for the audience and then they can chose from a set of directions and sometimes things get really carried away and people will start using things as instruments that we could never have imagined. It’s a really interesting process that goes full circle with us observing the music the audience is making and feeling really inspired by it.”
“In fact most of our shows we leave in the middle kind’ve,” jokes Fischbeck, “and at some point I can usually go to the back of the audience and watch the show,” adds Rara, “and that’s one of my favourite things to do.”
It’s an approach that really breaks down the barrier between the audience and the performer, something that Rara in particular has always been keen to do. “I don’t like to be so separate from people,” she laughs, “I like to know what they’re thinking.”
“Sometimes in the middle of the show I’ll have a conversation with someone in the audience about an instrument and how it works, about what’s going on, or about how we made them. It’s really interesting to be able to have a discussion at the same time you are performing. It’s a really really neat thing to do.”
The instruments sound incredible too, further enhancing that otherworldly ecstatic vibe of their sound. “A lot of the instruments we use in the interactive performances are magic seeming, they do things that seem impossible,” offers Fischbeck. “We have one where you play each other by touching on the skin and you pass signals on from person to person, and we have another that’s sort of like a theremin but you play it with rocks. and we do all these things that don’t makes any sense. We try to do it in such a way that it doesn’t register as possible so it can’t be real. They are real, but there’s usually one or two people who are totally skeptics. I think we try to do that with our recorded music to, so that it has to be real no matter what you think, real in some other world maybe.”
On the concept of real things start to get interesting. The duo travel with a minidisc recorder and a microphone recording constantly, barely differentiating between field recordings and the recording of instruments, because even when they’re recording instruments it’s very much about the space. “Often times there’s someone talking in the background or things rustling around so the recordings really sound like the instruments are in the world they’re being played in and things are happening around them,” reveals Rara. “I think that’s important to the feeling of the final product.”
“I’ve always really loved all those things when they wind up in the end thing,” adds Fischbeck, “it’s like they carry the pieces of dirt from different times and places they were recorded at. It’s something that adds to the charm and sincerity of the music, of the feeling of documenting their peculiar reality, Fischbeck however is not so convinced.
“I think we started we started off making music that was concerned about real and making things that were realistic, but maybe its gone beyond that to something else, like super real or something. We do a lot of really artificial things that are designed to push it beyond the level of real, but I don’t know, maybe I’m just talking out of my butt.”
Beat interview by Gav Ross:
‘Experimental’ is not a term that can adequately describe Los Angeles duo Lucky Dragons. Friends Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara certainly create music that would be categorised as experimental or avant-garde, but the methods they use to create their sound sometimes almost defies logic.
A reasonable example of this is demonstrated on a performance video streaming on Youtube that contains Fischbeck explaining his ‘Make A Baby’ project. The musician worked with a textile artist to create a rug that contained some conductive material interwoven into the fabric; the rug was then connected with wires to a series of digital-to-analogue converters, which were in turn connected to a laptop. What eventuated was a rug on the ground that could be touched by a group of people and the data (or sound coming through the speakers) could be controlled via each human making skin contact with each other; one person could change the frequency of the sine wave by holding hands with the person next to them or the group could create an entirely different sound by all joining hands at the same time.
Lucky Dragons invite similar-minded people to join in with them to create music using performance methods that are far from conventional. How often do you hear an artist say something along the lines of “the audience is as much a part of the concert as the band”? Well, Fischbeck and Rara take it to a different level.
“We have several traditional instruments that we have contacts mics on and we also have several home-made electronic instruments that the audience members play,” Sarah explains.
“We’ve been doing that for a couple of years,” Luke adds. “I think it might have started being a bit gimmicky or something at first, but it’s become integrated now and makes sense.”
This approach of making a Lucky Dragons performance a communal experience rather than just having the audience sit back and watch the artists with only their ears and eyes participating is something that may sound daunting to the unprepared, but it is a natural extension of the music Fischbeck and Rara create. The duo often perform in an environment that doesn’t include a stage; their instruments can be set up on the ground and meddled with by artist and viewer alike, depending on the mood of the night. This means that a performance can be a brief affair or it can be a marathon.
“It’s extremely open,” Luke says. “Because a lot of it is audience interaction it relies on how constructive they are versus how destructive they are. If there’s an audience that decides they really don’t want to take part in it and want to bring it down then that’s cool, and faster, but if they get into it we can keep (the set) going for a long while.”
Sarah chimes in that it depends on the setting as well. “We try to play venues of all different sizes, so we try to build a live show that can be condensed to 10 minutes if need be or it can be something that can be easily spread over several hours. A lot of the time we don’t know how long a performance will last because we just let the audience take over and feel that energy, then, at a certain point, the end becomes naturally evident.”
The most recent album from the Californian two-piece is titled dream island laughing language and, thankfully, it was made available to Australians by local Melbourne label Mistletone earlier this year. The record is an indication of what Lucky Dragons are all about, but this isn’t a case of hearing the album and then going to see facsimiles of the songs performed live.
““There’ll be a familiarity with the sound of the album because of the instruments used, but it’ll all be totally improvised,” Sarah says.
Seeing as though Lucky Dragons recordings and performances are essentially a series of experiments created to enhance the spiritual and emotional unity of participants within a certain space at a certain time, it’s interesting to note that while Fischbeck and Rara gain inspiration from nature and any number of things, they’re also heavily stirred by the outcome of certain world events.
“I was just thinking about how stressed out I am about the Presidential election,” Fischbeck remarks. “It’s sort of weird to say that something stressful is inspiring, but I think it’s really pushing me forward very quickly to get as much stuff done as I can; it’s a very strong reaction to something happening in the world so I suppose you could call that inspiration.”
And what aspect of the election is causing him stress, exactly?
“Well, for the last few months we’ve just been quietly excited about Obama being the next President, but just recently it seems very much like he’s not going to be President,” he says.
“I’m still hopeful,” Sarah goes on.” I don’t feel paranoid yet. I suppose the election has affected me too but I’ve also been very moved by the large-scale performances in the public that bring together a lot of people. I was really moved by The Boredoms’ 88 Boa Drums performance this past Summer (in New York City on the same day the Olympics launched). I got to drum in that and I found it to be a beautiful and mind-blowing direction for their music to take. To include so many people and bring a city together inside a really positive space – that, to me, opens up the possibility for peace.”
The sprawling, cross-cultural sound plays of Los Angeles duo Lucky Dragons coalesce artist and audience, creation and community.
Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara seem to possess an innate, almost telepathic understanding of each other’s thoughts. The pair – better known as the curatorial heart of amorphous LA sonic phenomenon Lucky Dragons – eagerly expand on each other’s musings; they break off on rambling tangents; they finish each other’s sentences.
It’s a telling intimation of their strangely beautiful art. If there is one space neither of them could be accused of inhabiting, it’s that of creative isolationism.
“I think that’s the biggest rule we impose on ourselves,” muses Fischbeck. “The whole idea is to make things open to interaction and interpretation.”
He’s not kidding. The rare level of exchange between the pair represents only the starting point for their music’s intensively discursive course. Indeed, Fischbeck and Rara tread an artistic path entwined not in their own individualised creative processes, but in notions of ritual, interaction and personal and community interface.
Over the course of eight years and an incredible 19 releases under the Lucky Dragons nom-de-plume – the latest of which is the wondrously quixotic and surreal Dream Island Laughing Language, through Melbourne imprint Mistletone – 30-year-old Fischbeck has worked to reconfigure, if not totally reinvent, the correlation between artist and audience.
For he and Rara, who joined as a collaborative partner in 2005, Lucky Dragons’ oddly ornate electro-acoustic syntax is grounded in fashioning a context for artistic and communal expansion, rather than delivering a completed product. According to Fischbeck, who has a background in independent film, their music finds its bearing in “openness”; in its ability to foster exchange.
“It’s what drew me to making music and putting music out in the first place,” he says. “I mean, I used to do a lot of filmmaking and I soon realised that once you had a film, there wasn’t really anything you could do with it. It wasn’t something you could easily transfer or share; there wasn’t any real way of distributing it.”
“Music was something that was very easy to share,” he continues. “Like, it’s always been very easy to share – you can just play music with your friends or something. There’s been so many different ways of entering it and addressing it, especially coming from a punk background. There’s a resistance and there’s an alternative and these sort of multiple entrances to it that don’t really exist in other kind of creative expressions.”
Rara, who along with Fischbeck is chatting on speakerphone from their home in the central LA neighbourhood of Echo Park, articulates the sentiment in more practical terms.
“Shows have been five dollars since I can remember,” says the 25-year-old, who entered music via visual art. “And there’s something very democratic about that and very universally available.”
“When we play live shows, we try and play in really diverse places,” she continues, running with the theme. “We play everywhere from the local punk club to house shows to museums, and we try and bring people from each of those worlds to each new place, like bring them along with us.”
“I really hope, not for a specific community to hear the music, but for communities to overlap when they hear the music and for the end result to be all ages and all kinds of people and totally open,” she continues. “I guess the dream for it is to be something that can link communities which otherwise seem really different and really separate. It’s almost impossible to achieve that in the art world.”
This sensibility translates to Lucky Dragons’ recording process as equally as it does their routes of dissemination. The duo track their records on-location, utilising whomever and whatever is at hand – crowds, passers-by, friends, whistles, flutes, sticks, rocks, voices, toys, percussion and more conventional instrumentation.
“I like getting into musical situations where you don’t know what it sounds like until you try it,” says Rara. “I much prefer that game or that playing aspect, and just not knowing from the beginning where it’s going to go. But part of the game is that when you improvise music, every sound you make should always generate another sound and have something that follows it; something that forces a continuation or development.”
Fischbeck elaborates: “Usually our intentions are setting up a situation and then we can sort of play around in it and see what happens, and then we have something that comes out of it and we can look at that and it shows us a lot more than we ever could have imagined to begin with.”
“And other people’s reaction to that teaches us even more about what we were doing, and I think it just all expands outwards.”
The duo’s sonic palette is vast, both ethnographically and stylistically. Dream Island Laughing Language echoes with dynamics and intonations as disparate as Kabuki-esque Japanese folk, fragmented west coast psychedelia, minimalism, ambience and lithe, micro-rhythmic and melodic electronica. The effect is remarkable. The album’s 22 fleeting sketches oscillate between vastness and intimacy, synthesis and organics.
Whilst the pair acknowledge the influence of Japanese Kabuki and Noh theatre, they frame Dream Island Laughing Language in more figurative terms. “I see the record as a metaphor for a kind of turning point, where some sort of latent public sentiment becomes externalised,” says Fischbeck.
“The title is kind of two different titles squished together. In terms of the band name, Lucky Dragons, there’s sort of a legend that we’re using. It was a fishing boat that sailed into the hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll in the ’50s, and was called the Lucky Dragon. It got immersed in radiation and everyone on board got radiation sickness. It eventually went back to Japan, where it came from, and the ship got cleaned up and renamed the Dark Falcon, which served out its life for about another 10 or 15 years. It was eventually destroyed and put onto a garbage island in Tokyo Harbour called Dream Island, and so this is sort of the continuation of that legend.”
“Up until the Lucky Dragon incident there was no real anti-nuclear movement; for 10 years after the end of WWII there was no real outcry about the use of atomic weapons. But then the Lucky Dragon, and these poor victims of radiation sickness, became like a rallying point for the world and anti-nuclear sentiment. It became a metaphor for a much wider idea.”
The second part of the title – Laughing Language – on the other hand, refers to an investigation into the possibilities of language. “It’s sort of a longstanding discussion that Sarah and I have had about language and about what language is, where it comes from, where it’s going, what is inside it and whether it is everything.”
“Or whether perfect communication is possible,” adds Rara. “Like directly transferring an idea from one person’s mind to another, or whether it always gets translated somehow. We constantly have agreements and disagreements about that. Also, it kind of refers to the idea of a language without words; a language of spontaneous sounds.”
“It all has a lot to do with the idea of spontaneous transmission and group awareness and stuff,” says Fischbeck. “Some things can be known and expressed by a group instantaneously.”
At the same time, the hazy, abstracted nature of Dream Island Laughing Language’s instrumentation and syntax make for anything but a prescriptive listen. Despite the fact that it stands as their fist ‘non-communal’ recording thus far – aside from a couple of fleeting guests, Fischbeck and Rara are the lone performers – they see it as their most unguarded work to date.
“We were trying to make something that was a little bit simpler,” explains Fischbeck. “I’d been kind of thinking about the record as a kind of minimalist thing, but it’s not always so much like that. It’s more about making something that people can put their own interpretations into, more than being a kind of didactic thing. It’s about, as much as possible, leaving some of the sounds up to interpretation and keeping these sort of ambiguous sources of sound.”
“With some of the past records we’ve made, we’ve tried to create a world that people can kind of enter into when they listen to it, and try to account for every element of that world. And this one was much more, like, we wanted it to enter into people’s worlds and be part of the outside world, rather than the other way around.”
Nonetheless, there is still an intoxicating sense of escapism – of dream-like immersion – to the record. But for Lucky Dragons, their sound worlds transcend mere imagination. “I think we would call it utopian,” offers Fischbeck, before Rara chimes in, as if on cue: “I guess when we make things, we think about the future and the past, and I guess we want to occupy a time that has the conditions for living that we desire,” she says.“ So maybe it’s less about escaping the world and more about trying our best to occupy a world that agrees with us, and hopefully that extends to other people.”
“It’s like an idea of overlapping utopias, where everyone we’re striving to live with wanted to live and lived how they wanted to live. I think people’s ideas of that wouldn’t ever be identical, but I think just that spirit, that approach; instead of looking to the future or looking back, just occupying the present as if it’s the way you want it to be already, like the future has arrived.”
“That’s maybe where I start playing music,” she pauses. “I start having that mindset.”
Dan Rule
The Wire feature:
The Australian review:
Cyclic Defrost review :
Lucky Dragons is really quite and intriguing offering. It’s experimental music with a real world music leaning, focussing on these percussive textures, though often adding these shy rhythmic vocals. It begins with the sounds of distorted gongs, so what do they call it? Clipped Gongs - way to cover up a mistake. Except I hope it’s not a mistake because it sounds great. There’s a certain carefree genius at work here. Every rule you’ve ever known gets carelessly broken in a unselfconscious savant kind’ve way. It’s incredibly minimal, repetitive, with very few elements, and an almost cyclical drive, which taps right into the spiritual world music angle. Yet it’s also at times quite electronic with these looped electrical flecks existing alongside spasmodic bursts of acoustic guitar and the odd dose of moaning. Lucky Dragons are not trying to do too much, they get a groove going and stick to it with a vague slightly hysterical bent- these short fragments of song that never wear out their welcome thanks to their brevity. It’s LA based Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara who are part of a collective that has spawned 18 previous offerings, though, if anywhere deserved a little dose of unexpected lo fi post electronica spirituality it’s that terrible joint. It’s innocent, possibly stupid and very infectious as these incredible loops continue to build until you find these fully formed ultra funky fragments of sound and you wonder to yourself, why am I not dancing?
The Big Issue review (4.5 stars):
Dream Island Laughing Language is shudders of sound and melody and rhythm; it is splinters of light through trees. It is a chest full of fresh air and a head full of computer parts; it is clouds and planes and birds in the same sky. It is the 19th release from hyper-prolific young Los Angelite Luke Fischbeck (aka Lucky Dragons) and it is as wonderfully surreal and joyous as its title portends.
Woven via fragments of melody, percussion, texture and wordless voice, the record’s 22 fleeting vignettes reference but never embrace a stockpile of musical and ethnographic intonations. Psychedelic melodic hues, static-riddle noise and placid Japanese folk inflections entwine themselves deep within skittering electronic rhythms. The effect is startling – as equally cerebral as it is immersive and emotive. See the brilliant ‘Morning Ritual’ and ‘Mirror Friends’ for evidence.
Dream Island is a rare and astoundingly individual record. Brimming with both familiarity and near alien abstraction, it resonates with the intriguing contradictions of contemporary culture. Indeed, while these sonic scapes shine with sprawling cross-cultural scope, they also whisper with intimacy, contingence and connection. Lucky Dragons has crafted a work of wondrous, iconoclastic musical syntax.
The nanotechnological dream of photosynthesizing computers appears within reach when listening to Lucky Dragons. While the Macs employed by the LA duo are probably the regular kind - plastic, circuits, software - the weird and near-total naturalism of their sound on umpteenth release, Dream Island Laughing Language, begs the question - are they not living things, inlaid with grass, coconut husk or animal skin? While everything here is excessively treated, chopped and processed, somehow it comes across as Natural History - ethnomusicological and live, suntanned and relaxed - like a bunch of geckos and undiscovered aboriginal life jamming together on some Tron-island beach.
Twenty-two tracks fly-by on the wind, light and sunny, but as complicated in detail as any rainforest walk. Players Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara push seemingly unlimited sound sources through the digital glass - tabla, shakers, wind-chimes, recorders - yet never unnecessarily pile up the layers. Tracks are short patterns that typically drop away once formed, with nothing overly laboured or ‘meaningful’ in a pop sense. But this is pop as regularly issued by Mistletone; unrecognisable, alien and joyful. Our closest touchpoint might be Black Dice circa Creature Comforts, or locals Snawklor, but even then we’re still a way off.
Like a friendly cousin to Black Dice, or the difficult offspring resulting from a one-night-stand between Boards of Canada and Panda Bear, Lucky Dragons main man Luke Fischbeck, here with Sarah Rara, have produced an intoxicating blend of digital samples, non-descript vocal chants, handclaps and muted recorder lines. Dream Island’s 21 tracks have no real structure, building up and buzzing around the ears like mosquitoes on a hot night, before changing direction or disappearing completely. Despite its digital leanings, Dream Island is a very organic sounding album, almost trance-inducing at times - Wander Birds is a dark electronic track built from light synths, reminiscent of Clark’s Body Riddle, and Wooden Cave Loop is a great acoustic tropical island cave jam. Were you to bury a microphone deep in an anthill, amplify the resulting recording a thousand times and play it through a stack of giant conch shells, and this is probably what you’d hear. Yes, it’s a good thing.
ABOUT LUCKY DRAGONS
“Lucky Dragons” means any recorded or performed or installed or packaged or shared pieces made by Luke Fischbeck, Sarah Rara, and any sometimes collaborators. They try to do as many different kinds of things as they can, high and low, fast and slow. They would say they are “artists who use music” and if they make performance art it is to alter and append it, but they give respect to history and the people who live there.
Today’s influences include: Nikki de St Phalle, Joan Didion, COBRA, Hieronymous Bosch, Thomas Jefferson, Tina Turner, Allan Kaprow, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman, Mayan codices, Ivor Cutler.
Lucky Dragons shows are about the birthing of new and temporary creatures– creating equal-power situations in which audience members cooperate amongst themselves, to build a fragile network of digital signals connected by touching on the skin. There have been hundreds of these simple yet shifting and unpredictable instances– with audiences ranging from the intense intimacy of one person to the public spectacle of over one thousand people. At the heart of it all is playing together– building up social collectivities, re-engaging the wonder and impossibility of technology and live performance. It sounds– and looks– like simple and ancient patterns coming together and falling apart in a sincere attempt to let wires and screens and words become clear and crystal.
They keep a busy schedule of performances and visits and festivals and workshops and things, in the present, and in the past: NY’s PS1, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Philadelphia Institute for Contemporary Art, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle, Los Angeles’ The Smell, NY’s The Kitchen, and the 2008 Whitney Biennial. In the future: The Smithsonian Institute’s Hirshorn Museum, etc.
Lucky Dragons live in Los Angeles California and have recorded 7 albums which are all available for downloading.
Lucky Dragons’ sister projects include sumi ink club — a weekly collaborative drawing society, and “glaciers of nice“–a small press and internet community.
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