Ep32 Electro storm in a crappy tent, & the sound of modernity - Luke Marzec

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Luke T 00:00:06  Welcome to another episode of the Improv Pod podcast. My guest today is Luke Marsac. So you are a saxophone player and multi-instrumentalist, right?

Luke M 00:00:13  Yeah, that's right. I play saxophone in a couple of bands at the moment. I'm playing in, band with producer called lazy H. It's, electronic synth jazz band, and I bring the sax into that. That's like the only acoustic instruments. Everything else is analog synthesizers and drum machines and stuff. I also play with some friends locally and I'm a singer songwriter producer, so I've been writing and producing an album on which I play the piano, bass, some drums, keys, synths and singing, and I write songs. That's my main thing. And when you do.

Luke T 00:00:52  Produce them, what name are you going to release them under?

Luke M 00:00:55  That'll be looped music. Okay. So in about late March I'll be putting out some songs. I've got loads I want to share.

Luke T 00:01:02  This is the first time we've recorded in your studio, which is great, and it's good to have a real piano for once, because previously I've just been using samples and stuff, which sounds good.

Luke T 00:01:11  It's not the same as the real thing. That's music studios in Buckfastleigh.

Luke M 00:01:15  That's right. Yeah. I've just started engineering and recording with a local band. We did a little EP together with a brilliant Latin style band.

Luke T 00:01:30  So I'm going to play a piece of music. Okay. And I want you to tell me what it makes you think of. So that means don't overanalyze it too much. Just any kind of thoughts, ideas, emotions that come into your mind. Cool. Okay.

Luke M 00:02:13  Yeah, that was nice. It was a single solid idea. I like that. I think for some reason, I just had an image of a woman just staring out the window. What was she thinking about? I don't know. I could see she was a lost lover. I don't know. Yeah, just that French existential worrying looking out the window thing.

Luke T 00:02:33  French existentialism. Yeah. I don't know what you mean.

Luke M 00:02:36  But the antis. And maybe I'm. My mind's on that vibe.

Luke T 00:02:44  So are you for telling me a story of some kind?

Luke M 00:02:47  Yeah.

Luke M 00:02:47  What?

Luke T 00:02:48  And we're going to do is break it down into sections and then improvise a soundtrack to the story.

Luke M 00:02:53  It was a solstice midsummer's night celebration, and I went with my partner Layla to Kent, and we were going to go to Buxton Woods, which is this ancient woodland which is part of an old estate, and there's a mausoleum in the middle and loads of ancient ash trees and sweet chestnut trees. Sweet chestnut are my favourite trees. They've got this beautiful bark that looks like really thick textured rope that could have twists around the trunk. Anyway, so we were going on this long walk, trying to find the perfect space to sit down and watch the sunset on near Midsummer Night's Eve. And on the way we all took pill and some LSD. Then we found a beautiful space to camp, made a fire. We were just hanging out and this electrical storm was in the distance coming towards us, but we were just wide eyed watching all this lightning in the distance. And for me, each time the lightning struck, all these colors would radiate off it.

Luke M 00:03:52  It was just beautiful. Suddenly the storm was on top of us and it was fucking heavy rain. Really heavy. And then we all went into this really small tent. It was like a kind of campsite tent for family that was taller than it was wide, and we hadn't pinned it down properly. And it was a four man tent or an eight of us went inside it and we tried to close it, but it was so tight I couldn't fully close the zip. I had to hold it shut whilst the storm was battering us and we're all really cramped in. And then at some point Dan Farley goes to to close the zip, and I hadn't said that it was too tight to close and he pulled it down and then instantly the whole zip opened itself. And we were then exposed to the storm coming in and they were really high. Two hours, me and Dan had to hold the tent shut with our hands whilst we were getting pelted, but we had good spirits. It was like I realized that anytime soon the tent might just fall apart and we would be like 2 or 3 hours from the road, completely drenched.

Luke M 00:04:49  There was this one guy who kept the spirits up. He kept making jokes whilst I was thinking this was the end. In any kind of awful situation, that's all you have. Is that the comedy? Remembering what Solomon said. This too shall pass. It felt like the fellowship. It was great. And the fire I had made had withstood the storm. And then afterwards clouds parted and we saw the storm go in the opposite direction. Then we had the calm after the storm.

Luke T 00:05:16  So I'm going to break it down into sections. I see you, you're on this walk taking some drugs, and then you see this. We described a electrical storm. So you make this fire and you just camped out a bit, and everything's good at this point, and then it starts to rain really heavily and chuck it down. You get in this tent and the zip breaks. Yeah. So you've got this idea of shelter that's no longer a shelter, and then this sense of, we will make this through.

Luke T 00:05:41  We're on this survival mission. All right, here we go.

Luke M 00:08:17  I can totally see the shape of the story.

Luke T 00:08:19  Did they did the soundtrack work for you in terms of your experience? Yeah it.

Luke M 00:08:23  Did. Yeah, I think I could hear the raindrops coming in. It had three clear sections. It had the definitely the right shape and the mood in the middle when it got darker, louder and busier, faster. And then they had a little discord in the middle ring, both the drugs and the the chaos situation. And then afterwards the release. It wasn't like a fully pretty release. It was calmer, but it was still a little bit minor and melancholy.

Luke T 00:08:50  Damp.

Luke M 00:08:51  Yeah.

Luke T 00:09:06  Story number two.

Luke M 00:09:07  Then last summer I went to an event called the Bodger's Ball. with my partner. It's a pole lathe turning festival.

Luke T 00:09:16  So what's that exactly? Do you know.

Luke M 00:09:17  What a lathe is? Yeah. These days you have a mechanical lathe which grips a piece of wood and spins it very fast.

Luke M 00:09:23  And you hold a chisel to shape it. And people make bowls and things like that and chair legs out of that. But you can make a rudimentary version of a lathe by using a bendy piece of ash rope, and that can make a foot pedal, and the bendy piece of ash spins the wood. And then in the same way, you hold a chisel and you can make chair, legs and bowls in just the same way as a mechanical lathe. There's a log to leg race where you have to turn a log of wood into a Henley chair leg, and it's ten minutes and you've got to make two identical chair legs, and they use a hatchet and quickly whittle down this thing. It's crazy to see the speed of these guys and how they don't chop their hands off. At the end of the day, we all stood around the fire and the guy who won the race, who was just so old school, preindustrial looking man, he had like a leather waistcoat, some thick corduroy trousers, just looked like an old country guy who was really skilled woodworker.

Luke M 00:10:20  And we were people were singing songs around the campfire, and someone asked him to sing a song and he said, man, so revolution. And then people were saying, oh, man, romance or revolution, and then he would sing a song and we'd all stand there and listening to an acapella folk song. The revolution would be old protest songs or old romance songs. Folk songs sang acapella, transported back in time to a place where there's no machines, where there's no sound systems. They had guys with anvils and coke burners and they'd make blades. And you scrap wood to make wood in the fire. We use that. They use their voices to make song. And, it was just transported back in time. Those of people making things and not a single power tool. One of the ladies said, I don't know. A lot of people worry about the future of humanity going off a cliff edge. She said, don't worry, we've got it.

Luke T 00:11:08  You are so, so good in it. We've got this, nice.

Luke T 00:11:12  I think I'll go for the idea of being transported back in time. Back to a simpler time.

Luke M 00:11:17  Then we went back to modernity afterwards.

Luke T 00:11:20  Yeah, okay, I'll go for the transition from modern life to this all the time. The stories and these things going on without being too specific about it. And then we'll go for the transition back again and see how that works. So it's quite hard, actually. I was kind of going for the chaotic ness of modern life. So a lot of stuff going on at the same time, right? A lot of stuff that isn't you is globalisation. You can talk to people on the other side of the world easily. It's a kind of it's hard to concentrate on things. And then I was going for this. Almost. What I perceive is like a medieval sound, like with parallel fifths kind of thing. And.

Luke M 00:13:46  Yeah, exactly. I thought you hit the nail on the head with that parallel harmony. I got that done. Yeah. And it's funny that you say that because it was a simpler time and a simpler harmony when you just had the pedal, I think, like D on the bottom, and you were just going, doing the parallel stuff that hit the nail on the head on that kind of medieval vibe, and I could totally see people thinking of it.

Luke M 00:14:10  Yeah, you could away with that.

Luke T 00:14:12  Before counterpoint, before we had elaborate kind of baroque stuff.

Luke M 00:14:15  Yeah. Monks chanting in a church. Yeah. Parallel.

Luke T 00:14:19  Do you want to give that that transition a go on the saxophone from, like, modernity to simpler time?

Luke M 00:15:53  That's quite fun doing it on the fly. It's quite tricky. It's nice to think about what is the harmony or the chords or the sounds that represent modern life. I think it's easy to do pastiche of medieval folky sound, but then it's which part of modern life I was actually thinking. You were talking about the busyness of modern life, but actually this little festival was so busy, loads of people all together and sober, which was very nice. And until the evenings people would drink cider in the evenings. But then a lot of modern life these days is isolated, probably in a way that the old times weren't. Maybe you could just bring it back to modern life, and someone goes back to their bedroom in a city and works from home.

Luke M 00:16:37  I used to play the piano more, to be honest. Okay, for this exercise. It's quite nice to have the restriction of one note at a time on the sex.

Luke T 00:16:45  Do you reckon you could do that? Play what we just did on the piano.

Luke M 00:16:48  I'd probably do something similar to you. There's just more you can do on the piano.

Luke T 00:16:52  Do you want to give it a go? I mean.

Luke M 00:16:53  You could do.

Luke T 00:16:54  Just nice to hear an interpretation of it.

Luke M 00:17:47  I know what chords I like to feel. I like to play those kind of minor major or those cause I played later on. So I guess it was like going to this medieval world. Yeah. And then just going back home.

Luke T 00:17:59  Were you thinking about your experience when you were playing it? No.

Luke M 00:18:02  Not really. I just thought you've got one world. Of all I could do in that moment was a pastiche of medieval harmony or folky modal stuff, and then go just to what I play when I go home. That's I guess that's what it was.

Luke M 00:18:16  Yeah. It's just two different worlds.

Luke T 00:18:19  It's nice that that's what you play when you go home. That's your back to life kind of theme, if you like. And it's interesting how it makes you access the sometimes limited knowledge of music in a certain area. I haven't studied medieval music. What I've got from it is just films I've seen mostly. Or if you've go to an old dance so you have like an idea of it, of that what that sounds like, which is to do with a lot of media. Mostly you've just access it and then it is some type of pastiche, as you say. It's an interpretation of that sound. That is, it's evolved over the years.

Luke M 00:18:50  If I was to go and do that again, I'd probably get like the simple folk theme and probably continue the melody. But then when you go back to modernity, you have the memory of that. So the melody continues, but maybe the harmony could change underneath it and go into a modern harmony with different emotions.

Luke M 00:19:08  But keep the medieval melody and it could slowly change. Maybe the mode could change to something.

Luke T 00:19:14  I think the difficult part is keeping the consistency, Especially when you change vibe and you change worlds to not completely feel like it's jarring. And so what you were talking about there is, you know, using the same melody, but re harmonizing it and you're getting an anchor point of something that you can recognize, but now it's in a different form and making it consistent. What did you get out of this podcast?

Luke M 00:19:41  It was it was really enjoyable, actually. What I got out of it was I enjoyed telling a story verbally. And then I was thinking, actually, after I told them, I thought there were other things that I could have focused on to, to give more imagery to the story, like the bunting at the festival and hay bales. It inspired me to think about how to tell a story better, because I've been wanting to write little shorts. And yeah, it's just interesting to to put sound and music to to stories.

Luke M 00:20:08  I've not done much of that. I usually just choose the sounds I like and make do like a band, but the scoring is very interesting and I'd be very particular about what harmony you use to make you feel what's going on. Really cool. I thought, it's a really great idea what you're doing.

Luke T 00:20:24  Well, thank you very much for being on the podcast. Very insightful.

Luke M 00:20:27  Thank you very much, Luke. It was an absolute pleasure.

Luke T 00:20:30  Join us next week for another episode of the Impro Pod podcast. Thanks for listening. Would you like to be a guest on this podcast? If you're into telling stories that inspire improvised music and exploring our relationship to music, then please get in touch. Email guest at improper comment or send a message via the Impro Pod Instagram page.