Ric Royer: First off.. who are you?

Indy Shome: My name is Indrayudh Shome (or ‘Indy’). I’m Indian-born Hong Kong-bred but moved to the States for college, where I studied music and mystical philosophy. I have subsequently remained here on an artist visa.
Partner-in-crime Mat Becker is from the rural desert town of Prairie City,  Oregon. He studied geology and worked for the paleontologists at the national park service up there.
Mat and I met in an ethnomusicology seminar at Brown and have worked together ever since, as Clear Light Laboratories and Cygnus Herd and in bands like Queen Elephantine and Throne of the Void in the Hundred Petal Lotus. Apparently we share a deep love of hardship, dead tree branches, and really heavy demanding spiritual music.

RR: What exactly are you doing as part of your residency? 

IS: An immersive otherworldly sound+sculpture installation, using primarily branches. A dark, treacherous maze of decay. This is what it looks, feels, and sounds like in our heads all the time.
A haunted house kind of thing except instead of coming for thrills, you come to get totally overwhelmed by stillness so your ego plunges into the safety of seppuku and your worn, corporeal shell gets a moment to reflect and space out, or space… in….  We’re trying our damnedest to make this the best thing ever.

RR: And people walk around through it or just stand in one place being scared?

IS: Walk around, sit, lay down. It may be more calming than scary, that is just my idea of calming.

RR: Who else is involved?

IS: For the openings, there will be a variety of musicians coming in to take up spots at their drone altars, including Brett Zweiman from Philadelphia, Adam Stephanus from Maine, as well as local artists like Arvid Tomayko-Peters and the 8th grade flute-designer Riley Kinsella.

RR– You mentioned LaMonte Young’s Dream House, what is that and why is what you’re doing similar?

IS: Dream House is something like an empty apartment that has a few speakers set up in corners firing really pointilated drone tones. The result is that as you wade through it, the sound you hear changes all around you. We’re hoping to combine that experience with a much more drastic visual and spatial environment.

The other huge difference is that Young set up speakers in a room shooting tones with pure mechanical precision. We built the space with sweat and (a tiny bit of) blood and will challenge ourselves to manually sustain tones for three hours, with all the dirty imprecision and frustration of the human world.