Photo credit: Sonja Kramer-Haag
Liam O'Brien
Though these days his music falls squarely under the banner of folk, Liam O’Brien is a composer at heart. He was only 14 when the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra performed one of his compositions as part of a youth program, a piece called “Medieval Fanfare” that was more than a little inspired by the movies (“it’s definitely reminiscent of what a pre-teen would come with,” he recalls.)
“Heading into college I thought I was going to go the academic composer route,” O’Brien says “I went to school for theory and composition at Lawrence University, and during that time I was in bands, too. I also play saxophone so I was doing jazz, too. I just loved music, so I was pursing all these different ways of playing music at the same time.”
Like many college students, though, the path O’Brien set out on his freshman year was not the one he ultimately landed on. “Somehow through the swirl of college I shifted focus and started getting really into recording, because I began to see that as the modern composer’s palate, just being able to explore the sounds as you complete them in the studio, rather than writing them down on a pad,” O’Brien says.
These days O’Brien records for a living. He now runs his own studio in Milwaukee, but he still approaches his own music with a composer’s sense of experimentation. For his new EP credited to Liam O’Brien’s Faithless Followers, Nowhere to Go, he and a small cast musicians tracked all six of its songs live in continuous takes. “I think of it as one thing, like a symphony,” he says.
Written during an unsettled time in his life, while he was living on a farm in Western Wisconsin, its opening tracks are sparse and naked, folk music in the most traditional sense. But from there the EP swells, growing gradually more restless until it culminates in the large, restless swells of its penultimate track “Understatement” (ironically the least understated track on a record that otherwise prizes that trait). Like Phil Elverum’s records as The Microphones, the EP plays like a journey, a study in impermanence.
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“If I had to put one word down as a philosophical theme, that would be it, impermanence,” O’Brien says. “I think there’s joy in impermanence. People get hung up on the angst of being mortals, but I find so much joy in being able to experience the now, because now is the only time now is going to happen. So that’s my whole message. That’s what I’m trying to convey with the music. Things come and go.”
O’Brien is releasing the EP as a cassette, which will be packaged as part of a hardcover book containing art from the musicians that contributed to it. And in keeping with the ephemeral, in-the-moment spirit of the EP, for its release show O’Brien has lined up a one-time ensemble of 12 musicians to play perform it in its entirety, among them Mike Noyce (who’s played with Bon Iver and The Tallest Man on Earth), Ousia Whitaker-DeVault (of RuthB8r Ginsburg and Sweet Shieks), Dria Rushing (aka DJ Dripsweat) and Charlie Celenza (of Soul Low), as well as openers Apollo Vermouth and Caley Conway.
O’Brien cites the spontaneous, one-off nature of performance as one of the things that excites him the most about live shows. “Every time I play a show, there’s new people or there’s old people coming back,” he says. “Sometimes I play with two people, sometimes 12. I’ve toured solo before, too. So I really wanted to be flexible. I enjoy keeping things fresh all the time.”
Liam O’Brien’s Faithless Followers plays an EP release show at Anodyne Coffee, 224 W. Bruce St., on Friday, Aug. 17 at 8 p.m. with Apollo Vermouth and Caley Conway.
