I recently had the chance to catch up with Twang Darkly – a Shreveport native alt-instrumental trio. One of my favorites. Great for fans of movement and brooding rhythms; enchanting melody and a spirit of song. It’s like listening to the soundtrack of a western film while riding on the red planes of Mars. It’s like remembering the desert. It gives me goosebumps. So I got a couple of questions together and sent them over to Michael Futreal; writer, craftsman, and visionary leader of the band.
Before we dive in, cue up this track from Twang Darkly’s “Recurring Colors” to set the tone. The album is available for purchase in digital or physical form.
LANDON MILLER, HELIOPOLIS: You folks have been playing out of state recently. In the desert of Nevada right? Looked awesome and majestic. How did that come to be?
TWANG DARKLY’S MICHAEL FUTREAL: Back in the spring, I was honored to be selected as an official Artist-in-Residence at Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area near Las Vegas, Nevada. Red Rock Canyon is a real treasure — an otherworldly landscape with wildly varied geology: a ridge of dramatic red and white sandstone cliffs faced off against the swooping dunes of a dinosaur-era desert preserved in wildly eroded stone, with both of these presided over by the majestic La Madre Mountain Wilderness, an even older seabed now lifted into the sky. Throughout the area you find ancient petroglyphs hidden in various places. Being there affects your sense of past and present, puts you into the realm of mythic imagination. I’m the first musician to serve as Artist-in-Residence there, so I was thrilled for the opportunity to be supported in creating art so connected to a particular place and yet so unhinged from time.
During the residency, I spent several weeks hiking, climbing, and contemplating the Canyon, mostly miles from anyone, carrying bamboo flutes in my pack, including a few I made specifically for this trip. I had portable recording equipment and cameras with me as well, and sketched out various musical ideas out in the landscape. I shot a lot of video footage that captured different locations in a way I could use later in both creating and sharing the evolving musical ideas. Near the end of the Residency, Joel Boultinghouse flew out to join me and we gave a couple of performances, one in a small cave with a tiny audience that we hiked out to the location, the other at the visitor center.
The whole thing was a natural follow-up to our 2014 project, Martian Archaeology, which featured lots of artwork and animation created from photographs I took in the same area. So the title of the new album, Recurring Colors, has meaning for me on a few different levels. You can find both albums, along with more material, at band camp. The videos from Red Rock can be found at Futreal’s website.
LANDON: So “ecurring Colors” is your newest album. Record it yourself? Who were some of the players?
MICHAEL: One of the tracks, “Written in Sandstone,” features flute actually recorded in the Canyon wilderness, but parts of many more tracks, particularly the electric dulcimer backbones, were recorded at night in my hotel room as I reflected on the day’s adventures. When I got back to Shreveport, I organized all the material, recorded some additional parts on instruments that didn’t make the trip (like my electric gourd, ukulele, and oil-can guitar), and then I brought in the rest of Twang Darkly, Lane Bayliss and Joel Boultinghouse, to add drums and bass respectively. Using my footage from the residency, I produced a set of music videos to go along with it all; these were used as part of an exhibit at the Canyon visitor center in August and September, and, of course, I’m using them online to share this material.
LANDON: Any other interesting facts about Twang currently? Didn’t you recently invent ANOTHER new instrument?
MICHAEL: Yes, I did just build a new electric dulcimer from this beautiful piece of heirloom cypress wood that was originally an ironing board used in my family all the way back into the 19th century, so that’s more of an adaptation than an invention. I’ve built a slew of experimental bamboo flutes, as well. I’m working on a couple of new instrument builds in the meantime, including a bamboo cello sort of thing and something else I’m calling a dronebow.
Another interesting thing that happened recently is that I composed and recorded the score for an independent feature film produced out of Hollywood called “Counting for Thunder.” The film premiered this August at the Rhode Island International Film Festival where it won a best feature award in the show’s “Alternative Spirit” LGBTQ category. We’re hoping the film will get picked up for distribution in coming months. During the same time period, I also contributed some music to a Louisiana-produced feature film; a mystery called Coldwell Spring.
LANDON: That’s amazing. So many good things going on. What’s next on the horizon?
MICHAEL: I’ve got in mind to go back to the desert this winter, probably focusing on a place called the Valley of Fire, a state park a ways north of Las Vegas. Aside from featuring its own improbable landscape, there are several areas in the Valley thick with very well preserved Anasazi rock art; I’ve a notion to explore ways to treat the friezes as a kind of symbolic musical score. Between now and then, I’m working on recording a stripped down solo album called Rural Routes of the Solar System.
In the meantime, there are several shows coming up where you can catch Michael and the rest of Twang Darkly with lots of their new music:
Sunday, October 11, 2015, 2-4pm at Rhino Coffee.
Saturday, October 17, 2015, 2-3pm at the CoCreative Fall Fest down at Agora Borealis.
Thursday, October 22, 2015, 6:30-8:30pm at Artspace.
Thursday, November 12, 2015, 7:30-8:30pm at Hamilton-South Caddo Branch Public Library; desert imagery will be projected while they perform.