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BIO
With
most bands these days, it seems to be what’s
outside that counts. What makes the imaginative
duo of Sarah Scott and Jonathan Kochmer -- known
as Two Loons for Tea -- stand out from the crowd
starts inside. Literally in the case of Sarah.
She’s
got an extra rib – 13 of them on one side rather
than the conventional dozen.
Maybe
there’s a connection between that and the
hauntingly beautiful voice, hypnotic melodies and
colorfully offbeat lyrics she brings to the music
of Two Loons for Tea.
Jonathan, as far as he knows, has the standard
number on both sides. But he mirrors his partner’s
asymmetry with his visionary musical
constructions.
Two
Loons for Tea returns five years after its second
album -- the critically acclaimed, challenging yet
seductive Looking for Landmarks -- and having
forged intense bonds with an ever-growing legion
of loyal fans in North America and Europe, have
delivered Nine Lucid Dreams. Independent in spirit
and in business (with their growing Sarathan
Records label), the album at once delivers on the
promise of its predecessors and opens up new
artistic vistas and possibilities for the
Seattle-based duo.
Their
first two albums and expressive concerts have
earned comparisons to Massive Attack, Zero 7,
Cocteau Twins, Portishead, Psapp, and Rickie Lee
Jones, among many others. And Sarah and Jonathan
cite a vast range of influences from Aphex Twin to
Xenakis, most of the way through the alphabet. All
that now, though, seems at best mere starting
points.
Recorded in part at Willie Nelson’s Pedernales
Studio in Texas with such friends as drummer Matt
Chamberlain (Pearl Jam, Tori Amos), keyboard
master Patrick Warren (Michael Penn, Fiona Apple)
and strings wizard Eyvind Kang (John Zorn, Blonde
Redhead) helping out, Nine Lucid Dreams brings the
alchemy of Sarah’s hauntingly beautiful vocals and
colorfully imaginative lyrics combined with
Jonathan’s vivid musical vision to full fruition.
The
title is a perfect fit for the songs that are both
crystal clear portrayals and vivid visions worthy
of Jung. The atmospheres can shift from being as
lush as the Seattle landscapes to as arid and
spare as the west-Texas desert, the images range
from intimate confessions to colorful character
sketches. Very much not about trends and hairdos.
But what is it about? The tingle.
“Our
involvement with music is about making a
connection with something larger than ourselves,”
Jonathan says. “It’s that whole-body tingling
feeling we get when we’re recording or performing
and alerts us that we’re on the right path.” But
it’s not just for them. It’s for the audience. “To
hear back reports from others that they’ve
experienced the same tingling at home or at shows
is wonderful. It’s about creating a community of
feeling.”
They’ve
certainly created an intriguing community in the
character-filled (in both senses of character)
array of songs on Nine Lucid Dreams – from the
circus-denizens of “The Strongest Man in the
World” to the defiant prostitute in “Marietta,”
from the delicate yearning of “Tragically Hip” to
the Beat surrealist narration of “Consuela”
(voiced by Jonathan in his frontman debut) and
from the fogged impressionistic account of a
hairstylist friend’s murder in “Eyebrows Are
Nature’s Makeup” to the space-age jazzbohoedown
“Dixie It Up!”
Jonathan and Sarah are an unlikely community
themselves. His background is academia and
technology, with experience in biostatistics,
human genetics, climate change studies,
evolutionary biology, Internet development and
such, combined with an incurable entrepreneurial
bug, is manifested most recently in the expanding
operations of Sarathan Records, with a roster that
includes releases by Airpushers (two members of
the Black Eyed Peas’ band), Abra Moore, The Purrs
and the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players.
Jonathan’s past shows a knack for initiating and
developing successful enterprises since grad
school, with the growing Sarathan following suit.
Sarah,
in contrast, was raised by a free-spirited single
mom, living in such locales as San Francisco’s
Haight-Asbury, next to a nudist colony in the
Santa Cruz Mountains, and Spokane Washington, with
Sarah carrying the bohemian lifestyle into
adulthood.
When
they met in the ‘90s, he was playing the Seattle
open-mic circuit and outdoor festivals, and she
was singing in an R&B revue. They clicked
immediately, hooked up with some ex-members of The
New Bohemians, first as Loon, but as the line-up
contracted to the duo, the name expanded to Two
Loons for Tea.
Nine
Lucid Dreams was not necessarily a quicker record
than Looking For Landmarks, but the process and
results were more fluid than in the past. After an
enforced three-year hiatus (“I almost amputated my
left index finger in a bizarre accident involving
a butter knife and a buffalo burger,” Jonathan
reports), the two sought a new environment for
recording, setting up shop at Willie Nelson’s digs
in the hills of Texas rather than in rainy
Seattle.
“Because of our improvisational recording process,
the environment made our music a little sunnier
this time, with a touch of the Southwest desert,”
Jonathan says. And to keep the process fresh,
Sarah tried some new techniques.
“I
tried on this album to get out of my own head,
which I really enjoyed,” she says. “In the past,
the subject matter has been personal either from
me or close friends. In Nine Lucid Dreams, I also
borrowed from movies. ‘Strongest Man in the
World,’ was inspired by Bye Bye Brazil, which is
about an unlikely crew of characters that who all
end up in a traveling Brazilian circus.”
Revisiting methods used on previous records, she
cut up words and phrases and allowed chance into
the creative process by drawing them out of a bag
or scrambling them on the floor.
“Pretty
much all of the songs on Nine Lucid Dreams were
done that way, except for ‘Strongest Man in the
World’ and ‘Stand on Your Head,’ which is also
from a film, about the writer Janet Frame from New
Zealand, who passed away just after I wrote the
song. She had a difficult life growing up and
didn’t fit in to her surroundings. It was
inspiring to me because I think I always felt a
little odd growing up, slightly left of center,
like she did, but she found a way to channel her
loneliness and discontent into her art.”
Through
it all, Jonathan has worked to blend a wide
spectrum of musical aesthetics into a singular
whole – a process he relates to his PhD research
at Yale in the field of speciation. “To a large
degree, what makes Two Loons for Tea's music
unique is that it is a hybrid of many distinct
musical species . . . rock, pop, jazz, classical,
funk, folk, and various ethnic musics,” he says.
“And yet, despite the many parental sources, it
has a distinct identity of its own.”
It’s
Jonathan and Sarah who sound like proud parents as
they discuss their hopes for the album. “We want
to do this one right,” Jonathan says. “This time,
I’m staying away from butter knives and buffalo
burgers. I don’t want to miss that thrill when
people tell us a song has a thematic tie to their
lives”
“Or
even,” Sarah notes, “when they say, ‘We made a
baby to one of your songs! Or ‘your music made me
get lucky.’ We hear this one a lot! And they share
far too many details with us. TMI! Strange to
think we’re in the bedroom with them.”
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