Season 2: Concert Culture in the time of COVID The State Theater in Portland, Maine has opened its doors to Conclave, a live streaming concert series. It’s not bringing in the same kind of revenue as they did before with live shows, and it’s probably not covering their actual operating costs - but it is a way for musicians and technical crews in Portland to keep working on projects they love somehow, bringing live music to people in their homes. In this episode, Lamont meets via Zoom with Angelikah Fahray, and R&B singer/songwriter who delivered a spell-binding performance to the empty theatre. With her bandmate Bill Giordano and producer Joshua James Hand of Bird Theory, a company now producing these live streams expertly - to talk about how they’re keeping the music alive. Listen to go behind the scenes of a finely tuned live musical broadcast, and to take a look at how you can support your favorite venues - because they’re at risk of dying off because of the pandemic. LITTLE THINGS THAT GO A LONG WAY: Save our Stages NIVASSOC.ORG Buy merchandise at State Theatre https://statetheatreportland.bigcartel.com/
Announcer: Every music venue has a story, a culture, and each is a portal to discovery. Kyle Lamont, host and producer of Concert Cast, is your guide on a journey through today's concert culture. Season one. A road trip around Maine was released in the wake of a global pandemic. Rocked by the cataclysmic shift Lamont began to document the movement. In season two we'll connect deeper with thought leaders who are creatively adapting and recalibrating the next rendition of concert going and culture. In this episode, we're taking you back to the State Theatre in Portland, Maine. But this time it's empty. No concert goers, just a lot of cameras for a live streaming series called Conclave Lamont talks with Angelikah Fahray and her band mate Bill Giordano on what it was like to play in an empty venue. Plus, a look to the future with Joshua James Hand from Bird Theory, who, along with his stellar video team, produced dozens of high end live streams.
Kyle Lamont: My passion for music venues began in college while working at the Blue Notes in Columbia, Missouri. Cleaning puke from the urinals after Rob Zombie concert is a formidable way to enter the music industry. I toted talent around in my old Subaru station wagon, affectionately called the Cyclops, because the headlight kept burning out. I rolled fatty joints with sound soundchecks and walked around town stapling concert posters to telephone poles. But one of my most resounding memories there, outside of Raging with the band after their show was when I was asked to lock up, I would watch the tour bus roll out of town and then just before switching the lights off and turning the key, I would sometimes stand in the middle of an empty venue and let the particles of a good time envelop me. The energy was charged with emotion. It was electric. The phantom sound waves swam with my soul. The quietness was not still. It moved and it danced with me. I fell in love with live music in a whole new way on these nights. And it's why I'm so driven to experience all the unique vibes that every venue had. And working at the Blue Note welcomed me to concert culture. From talent buyers to agents, security guards, sound techs, band managers, bus drivers, bartenders, the list goes on. Everyone plays an essential role to make life music happen. Live music is just that alive. But today, as I record this podcast, live music has flat lined venues are closed around the entire country and that feeling of being in an empty venue is far from electric.
Angelikah Fahray: It's a range of emotions because it's like, you know, it could be eerie, but like I didn't feel like an eeriness, but it was just weird, just empty.
Bill Giordano: Like, I mean, it was surreal to be in there and not have any audience. But you get the professional crew. I mean, everything from the talent buying to the lighting engineer is like just top notch.
Joshua James Hand: This room, just by nature, has so much character. You know, it's almost a hundred years of people in it and you feel every piece of that.
Kyle Lamont: Hi, I'm Kyle Lamont and we've just heard from Angelica Frey, Bill Giordano, and Joshua James Hand on what it was like being at an empty state theater in Portland, Maine, as part of a live stream series called Conclave. I've zoomed everyone up from my studio here in Elsworth to talk about how the show went Good Morning.
Bill Giordano: Good morning.How goes it?
Angelikah Fahray: It's nice to meet you too.
Kyle Lamont: Out of all the things I personally miss about seeing live shows at State Theatre, there are two things that stand out. One, the pulse of sound waves throbbing under my feet. And I also miss lingering under the marquee after the concert and exchanging show notes with strangers about the set we just saw. All these qualities plus more are next to impossible to replicate when watching a live stream and in the early days of a live stream show, I think we can all agree that the production quality was subpar, which distracted us from the overall experience.
Joshua James Hand: I mean, the biggest problem in live streams is they're all dry, all the audio so, so dry.
Kyle Lamont: So that's where Joshua James Hand comes in along with his production team. He's been able to raise the live stream production value and overall experience to a whole new level for the viewer at home. His Portland, Maine, based production company, Bird Theory specializes in live music productions and music videos. In fact, he was set to go on a national tour, with Spose a rapper and producer from Wells, Maine, when covid shut it all down.
Joshua James Hand: When I got the call, you know, like my like three, almost four months of my life were just wiped in a phone call. My entire calendar is wiped.
Kyle Lamont: He took off for Denmark, Maine, unplugged, re-centered and came back.
Joshua James Hand: And it was immediately like, OK, live streaming concerts. We've got to figure it out. So I contacted Scott Moler from Éminence Arts and Jack Murray from Ocean Sound and Lighting. And then the State Theatre came into play. And that was overwhelming and exciting. And I'm so glad that it's worked out the way that it has. It's been an incredible experience.
Kyle Lamont: Conclave's started on June 5th and they came out of the gate punching with two of the state's biggest names, rustic overtones and the Ghost of Paul Revere. Every Friday night, conclave streamed live on State Theatre's Facebook page. Safety is the number one priority, but so was introducing new indie acts.
Joshua James Hand: I was so psyched when Angelikah got there and she and Just Plain Jones were on my list from the very beginning. They were hugely important to this series. I'm so grateful for Lauren Wayne and, you know, the rest of the management team of the State Theatre because they've been totally open to all the ideas and all the things. And we've had very open dialogue in regard to how we were going to do this. So I was super excited to have those guys there.
Joshua James Hand: But Angelikah, she's just got this unbelievable aura around her that I know no matter where she is, she just takes you with her.
Angelikah Fahray: Josh Joshua James Hand, reached out to me as a how would you feel about performing in the empty State theater? And I was like How would I feel? That would be super awesome?
Kyle Lamont: Meet Angelikah Fahray. She's a 24 year old indie R&B singer from Portland. She's a first generation Mainer whose parents moved to the Pine Tree State from the Congo and Kenya. She's been playing acoustic guitar songs on the open mic circuit for about two years now, but has been around live music since she was a kid.
Angelikah Fahray: My father used to be a traditional African dancer, and so he would come into contact with, you know, a bunch of musicians, a bunch of artists and stuff. The people that I've been surrounded by. One of their names is Evod. He's like a reggae artist, and he performed in Portland a lot before another concert that I've been to. And this is when I was like super young. So, like, I don't know which one came first, but Papa Wemba, he came to Portland many years ago. So those are some concerts that I've been to. And I've just kind of been around entertainment and crowds and music. And just like the whole hoopla for a little time in my life,
Kyle Lamont: Angelikah left nursing school to pursue music full time and has been genuinely following her heart.
Angelikah Fahray: I just got a lot of love in my heart, so I usually tend to write about love. So whatever has to do with that, that's what it's about.
*Getaway Plays*
Kyle Lamont: On the night of the live stream, I debated to get dressed up or to do whatever I could to mentally place myself at the venue, but before I knew it, I was on my couch and setting up my laptop, a way less involved scenario than what was technically going on at State.
Joshua James Hand: We've got a pretty insane rig going there. You know, it's great because, you know, we're still very mindful of the fact that we need to be distanced and we need to be, you know, bring in safe practices for the good of ourselves and or, you know, everybody that's coming in, all the bands. So we've got a very, very skeleton crew thing going on there. And again, you know, this is just kind of something that, you know, we really put together ourselves. So we were sort of sourcing cameras from wherever we could get them. And we're running a couple.
Kyle Lamont: He goes on about his seven camera set up, including two switchers and a shit ton of cable and lots of Internet.
Joshua James Hand: Once we've started that ten minute countdown in the beginning, I'm not leaving that station. We're staying right there.
Kyle Lamont: At this point. They have everything dialed. But their first show, the Rustic Overtones, things went sideways.
Joshua James Hand: It was the most incredible display of Murphy's Law that I've ever seen in my life. It was like everything was great in dress rehearsal. Synced beautiful. Looking good. Good to go. And then we went live and it was like two cameras lost, you know, audio delay. And I mean, it was it was astounding, actually, how much managed to go wrong out of nowhere. It was like, we really have to figure this out because in streaming. It's like, you know, if everything doesn't work, then it just doesn't work.
Kyle Lamont: Audio delays have been the hardest thing to overcome.
Joshua James Hand: We pulled everything, everything. One hundred percent. There was not a cord left plugged in. We we seriously we pulled everything and we ended up doing like a basically a re-route and redid our audio and figured it out.
Kyle Lamont: Back to the night of the performance. I'm couch-bound when the stream begins with a ten-minute pre-roll, of video promos from sponsors. There's a heartfelt intro from a DJ at ninety-eight point nine FM and also a PSA from Niva, the National Independent Venue Association, on the urgency of supporting independent venues before it's too late. The clock hits one and like a light switch we're inside State the first shot is from the balcony and you can see right off the bat that the band is adhering to social distancing. The camera then cuts to a closer angle so we can get a sense of the mood. There are cool blue video panels behind the band and geometric lights swirling around the stage. Angelikah is front and center. She's wearing jet black tights, black high heels and a white strapless dress. Her long hair is braided and her eyelashes are flapping like little butterfly wings. The band is doing a great job of building the suspense. It's like we're slowly being ushered into Angelikah's world. There are sound effects of birds chirping, paired with a relaxing, jazzy guitar riff. And right when I thought she was about to begin singing, she reaches for something on a stool, it's long black gloves, which she begins to slowly put on long, elegant sheer black gloves.
*Music Plays*
Angelikah Fahray: I have nothing to wear till like the day before, like I was freaking out about it like a month before, I'm like, okay, like what the heck am I supposed to wear? I knew that I wanted gloves, so I have the gloves. And then, like, I think the day before the show, I was like, hey, you know, I think I'm going to do this thing where, like, I put the gloves on, on stage or whatever make it all like dramatic and stuff.
Bill Giordano: We've talked a lot about the ways that we want to present the work in the theatrical component of music performance. Not every gig is like an opportunity to do that. So whenever we have that opportunity, we kind of get excited about it. And this was a great opportunity with all the lighting designers in the background at the multiple camera angles. It was theater as much as it was music.
Kyle Lamont: I love it. And especially as like a newer artist, right?
Angelikah Fahray: Yeah, I definitely want to keep doing that because like last year I was playing a lot of guitar and like sitting in a stool, which is like cool. But like I felt like I was growing from that man. Like, I really want to have, like, movement and I want to be off the stool and I want to interact with the space on stage and make it more theatrical and like really wheel people into this world that I'm experiencing.
Kyle Lamont: The more I watched, the more I became fixated with her performance.
Joshua James Hand: I've been kind of preaching the gospel to everybody that we are not making concerts here. We are making live streams for the Internet. I look forward to that idea of progressing further because there's so many things that you can do. There's so much that you could bring in. There's so many elements of video production that are applicable to live that, you know, we're not even really doing. And I think that people are starting to really get it's not fair to the viewer at this point to come in and be like, oh, this is weird. This is really awkward. Oh, is this weird for you? Like, yes, it's weird. We know we get it. This is not a surprise any longer. Like, this is what we're doing. Let's do it. Let's cater to it. Let's lean into it.Not away from it.
Kyle Lamont: Theatrics aside. She gently settles into the set. Her performance is sexy yet zen like.
Kyle Lamont: Where do you go when you perform on stage, whether it's open mic night or on a huge stage like State, where do you go when you're singing?
Angelikah Fahray: So I'm an introvert. I like my solitude. I prefer to be alone. And so I have like a whole world that I experience day to day. I just kind of go inside myself. It's like a mixture of like mental heart, spiritual. I'm going to do it every day just to equalize. And homeostasis like all the rings and of my being and thinking of like what I've been through in life and the dreams that I have and where I'm going and where I've been and the belief patterns that I've had for myself that have told me that, like, I couldn't make it where I am and then to be in that moment and then to also represent who I am and represent the family that I come from and also thinking about expressing me and people being able to see that and doing it accurately.
Kyle Lamont: Her performance is spellbinding and the band is on point. They provide just enough beat to prop her up, never playing over her. They help keep her timing. Her melody undulates. It's mesmerizing.
Bill Giordano: We use the adjective serpentine it like jumps out in front of the song chord structure and the rhythm. It's built around that.
Kyle Lamont: And when it comes to capturing all the emotion for the viewer, well, that's where Joshua James Hand comes in. Can you explain to me what it's like to capture a band or a performer singing through your lens?
Joshua James Hand: I have had some seriously transcendent experiences in front of these stages, and there's something about the idea that you're just actively part and wrapped up in this exchange that's taking place. You're just sort of in this big, big hodgepodge of like so much beautiful, beautiful action and you can't plan it. Angelikah, last week there were so many moments where I could see that she was like blown away by what was happening. We had these really great, you know, isolated close ups on her face. And she was beaming. You know, she was just so radiant. And I love that.
Kyle Lamont: And the beauty of conclave are all the different camera angles. My particular favorite is the camera that set up right behind Joshua. Watching him orchestrate the switcher while getting into the music is a lot of fun. Bill. On the other hand, while performing on synthesizer tonight, while he's in the zone,
Bill Giordano: I just like to stay dedicated to the song.You know, I can recall little mistakes and things here and there. And like I said, you know, we were a fresh band. That was our third time all playing together. So are you kind of leave some room to let it be not perfect on you knowing that that's happening. But on the whole, I think we created a vibe.
Kyle Lamont: And just like that, the 30 minutes set comes to a quiet close, Angelikah performs a little twirl, takes a bow, and then the conclave clock is back on the screen.
Joshua James Hand: I really can't say enough about how I feel about her and her music. She's amazing. And the band. My goodness, what a band.
Angelikah Fahray: My parents have worked super hard. They continue to work super hard. And all I want is to give them some kind of vacation forever through my music. So to think of that all coming together to like this moment where like I'm performing at the State Theatre or performing at Longfellow square, performing at Merrill Auditorium, it kind of just like shines a light. And so to think that, like, I'm getting somewhere after having thought that I was just going to go and be a nurse somewhere like that's huge.
Kyle Lamont: She's wrapping up her first album and look for her on YouTube where she's creating more behind the scenes content.The coolest part of live streams is the actual recording of these experiences. Would you say that maybe this new evolution of live music is to have a live stream to complement the actual live show? Do you think that that's going to be more the norm?
Joshua James Hand: I do see it being, you know, something that's implemented certainly for the next few years. I think we're going to be looking at, you know, some severely limited capacity for a lot of these venues, at least, I hope, because I hope to see them open in whatever regard they can. And so if that's supplementing with digital collateral and, you know, your reduced ticket sales, reduced capacities and venues, I think that's a great option for anybody that is able to do it.
Angelikah Fahray: Thank goodness that we're in like a super progressive, super interactive digital age. I think people's business practices have to change at this point to keep things running.
Joshua James Hand: There's a, you know, a healthy dose of fear. And I think that that fear is warranted as far as I've seen. And to my knowledge, you know, there's not really been any bailout or, you know, specified funding for any of these venues and these institutions. And Portland has a fair few independent venues, and we would have a great cultural loss if those venues were to close,
Angelikah Fahray: Live music is where it's at. That's where people go and experience unforgettable moments. And that's where a lot of artists find the glass completely full. To think that places like that that give artists opportunities to express themselves are going to close down like that really sucks. And it's like, where else is anybody supposed to go?
Kyle Lamont: And for Angelica, the entire experience is not lost on her.
Angelikah Fahray: Yeah, that was my first year performance. I was like, wow, that happened. That's that's great. It's amazing that that came about how it did.
Kyle Lamont: After the interview, I sat at my desk and rode a wave of both fear and possibility. But it's what Joshua said about pulling out all the chords at the venue in order to find the problem and then reset the livestream that stuck with me. In many ways, we're collectively resetting concert culture as we know it. Every choice we make will affect how concerts are experienced when things come back online. So please try to do one thing to support independent venues and the people who make live music happen so that the emptiness at our favorite venues will be no longer eerie, but rather recharged and ready for us to reconnect and dance together again.
Announcer: Little things that go a long way donate to NIVA, the National Independent Venue Association, to save our stages. And MaineMusicAlliance.org/Donate to support music venues and industry professionals in Portland. Purchase State Theater merchandise and gift cards and support Angelikah, Phil and their headliner Just Paul Jones via Venmo. This has been a good to go studio's production created by Kyle Lamont in Ellsworth, Maine.
Subscribe to concert cast on your podcast App of Choice and find us on Spotify for a Maine music playlist and type in concert cast dot live to learn how you can be part of the show. Our resident mastermind is Mark Tekushan. Editor and engineer is Peter McGill. Supervising producers are Heidi Stanton-Drew Alex Halky and Exenia Rocco. S
ongs in this episode are Pegasus, written and produced by Angelikah, Getaway written by Angelikah produced by Bill Giordano. Parker, written and produced by Angelikah. Going Crazy, written by Angelikah and produced by D.J. Matt Perry. Harpe, written and produced by Angelikah. Special thanks to Pepper Little, Amy Charley, Cara Romano, Eddie Contento, Jesse Couto. And thank you for listening.