
PR: Exo-Tech is obviously a really unique live music experience. I want to know more about it as a concept. In your own words, how would you describe it?
SB: Exo-Tech really came together around an ethos of community. It really was something that came about because of a group of musical friends that gravitated around the New York and Brooklyn music community at a particular place in time. We really wanted to create a situation where we could play and experiment and just be together in a way that felt, I don’t know, without obstacle or too much preparation.
Kimbra, who’s one of my dearest friends and a really close collaborator, and I had this opportunity to do a show, and I didn’t want to do a show where we had to ask people to learn music and create something that was premeditated. I wanted to create a situation that could harness all the energies of this beautiful community.
So how do you create a space where many different kinds of people can come together and create a kind of musical kismet that the audience can bear witness to and actually participate in?
We wanted to improvise; we wanted to experiment. We love the intoxicated space of performance as ritual and as a communion. Exo-Tech has evolved over time, but essentially it’s a community and ensemble that represents a deep sense of collaboration and listening, not necessarily defined by virtuosity.
So, in a very long-winded way, it’s creating a space where almost anyone with the right kind of energy and particular sensibility can come play. And it’s been a gift ever since we created it.
PR: I mean, in many ways, the performance is sort of like jazz, where it’s completely improvisational, but I wanted to ask what genres do you pull from? How would you define the style?
SB: We have a history of music available to us and an encyclopedia of musical styles that we grow up with. People listen to R&B. They listen to the experimental, avant-garde, contemporary, classical. I think that being influenced by all of those things and applying choices through taste and sensitivity is a really defining thing around Exo-Tech.
I think that it’s so defined by the influences of its players on any one night. There are inputs of lounge music, of free jazz, of post punk—music all deeply ingrained in the history of New York as well. It’s like this stuff exists in the water and the oxygen of the city, and I think it just plays its way through us.
It’s not a particularly sophisticated term, but we are not a lasagna. We are not 14 layers of musicians who play consistently all the way through. We’re working out how to take this large ensemble of 13 or 14 players and reduce it any time to three or four or one voice. So it’s like this intensity that’s kind of contracting and expanding throughout the evening, and we’re surprised constantly.
PR: I can’t truly understand what it’s like to actualize a completely improvised performance like that. Especially when lyrics and vocals are included. I want to understand more about your mental space as a performer. How do you manage working with that many artists without knowing exactly where the music will go?
SB: I think a lot of this comes from the deep trust that Kimbra and I have together. It’s the knowledge that we’ve got each other’s backs. She’ll go off on some sort of wild, possessed state of vocal beauty, and I’ll jump in and take it from there. We know that we can support each other, and that we’re all performing together. There’s a great sense of therapy.
So yeah, my mind space is definitely very much one of being present. That’s a key part as a performer and as the leader of the band. Maybe I go into a show feeling certain things, aware of what’s going on or in the world. Maybe I’ll have floating fragments of images and words in my head that I can try to lean into and sketch out. So much of it feels visual. We’re in a series of landscapes and dream scenes.
PR: How do you take yourself out of that to direct the group?
SB: My conducting directions are just punctuations actually. They’re punctuating things just enough. But really it’s about who you have there with you and the generosity of their listening.
PR: Do you have a favorite moment from a past performance?
SB: My gosh, honestly, I don’t know. So many.
For me, it was so exciting to have these beautiful friends who exist in all these different spaces of music. Each of us contains multitudes as performers. Sometimes artists are a kind of commercial marketing object, but within us are multitudes of influences and instincts and playful sensibilities, and I personally really dig the opportunity to see different sides of artists—who we might know for certain kinds of pop music or another—do something different.
It can be really liberating to also operate in a space that is not pre-constructed.
PR: You’re obviously PR’s first live resident. Sometimes residents have goals with us that they want to accomplish during their performances. How do you hope this residency carries out?
SB: I think we’re just keen to create a beautiful space this summer, where hopefully people can come to a few shows and experience with us a whole different range of concerts, whether it be in The Sound Room or out in THE NURSERY. And also for new people to discover us and to kind of grow our community.