Earlier this week I had the chance to catch EarthCry here in Denver during Re:Search Wednesday. Sharing his pensive electronic productions through his unique live set-up, he truly gave an cathartic performance that mesmerized from beginning to end. Facing his electronic controls to the crowd, EarthCry uses analog synthesizers to weave downtempo yet uplifting soundscapes, and it’s all done on the spot, improv-style.
Keep your eyes on EarthCry as he continues a short run down the West coast alongside Cualli and Living Light!
With both Papadosio and your solo music project, you use analog synthesizers very heavily. Are there any new ones you’ve been playing with lately?
Anthony Thogmartin: I got a Roland SE02 because I got psyched out and didn’t wanna fly out with my usual modular – it’s huge and a lot of people have recently been having trouble with TSA trying to take their shit apart, and that doesn’t sound like fun. So I decided to get this little Roland. I like to have things to play instrumentally; I already have drum pads and all this other stuff but I like to have an organic, analog synthesizer. Every single time you mess with it, it’s going to sound different and that’s really fun.
The live set up for EarthCry is really unique in that all of your equipment faces the audience, so everyone gets to see you literally performing and making it all happen. How did that come about?
It all started because I play guitar in my band and in order to not run into the stuff on stage, I had to put it on a ramp. But people started telling me that they really enjoyed watching me do it. So I figured I’d keep it the same, so that people can see the process. I don’t really do it as much with Papadosio because there’s so much going on with other instruments.
You donate portions of your earnings to different ecological initiatives around the world. Are there any organizations you are working with in 2018 or would otherwise like to spotlight?
Last year we were doing a lot of work related to the Dakota Access Pipeline, and this year we’re working with the National Resources Defense Council. They’re really cool because they basically set up lawsuits against larger companies doing larger things. They’re a collection of lawyers and I’ve looked at a bunch of different breakdowns at how these NGO’s work, and a lot of them seem to spend a lot more money on their infrastructure than on what they do. The NRDC are rated very high when it comes to the impact they make. And we also have a couple different initiatives like Share Your Cloud, which is this student created system where they have art that other people make and they sell that art for money towards things.
They’ve raised thousands and thousands of dollars over the last couple years for different things and they always have a local initiative that they do, so they’re gonna follow us around on this run with Cualli and Living Light. They haven’t really missed a Papadosio show in a long time, and they just follow the band, and it’s amazing. When you’ve got crew and all of these things you have to pay for it’s hard to find money to even give but you want to. They’ve really helped make that process happen, because our fans really care and they want to make something happen too. It’s a total win-win.
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