JAM: An audience member plays flute with Lucky Dragons' Sarah Anderson,… (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles…)
Near the end of "Live Sprawl," the Lucky Dragons' performance at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA last month, a sly, silly orgiastic scene broke out, like something lifted from Woody Allen's "Sleeper."
Awash in an eerie blue light, eight or nine swarming audience members groped at several colorful cords attached to a computer, drawing and modulating delirious sounds from the jury-rigged instrument with their own touch. Others danced around them or piped in on plastic recorders that were there for the taking.
Sarah Anderson and Luke Fischbeck, the duo at the center of the Los Angeles art collective-cum-band, crouched on stage or sometimes wandered into the thick with a microphone and primitive percussion. Lanky, fine-boned and skyscraper tall -- Anderson, who often calls herself Sarah Rara, is 6-foot-1, Fischbeck 6-foot-5 -- they closed in on a peaceful drone oscillating between tribal drum circle and tropical meltdown.
At the forefront of a growing number of bands that yolk together artistic and musical practices, the Lucky Dragons have performed at several museums, including the Whitney in New York and the Pompidou Center in Paris. Like kindred local spirits Los Elegantes and My Barbarian, or YACHT from Portland, Ore., they view performance, visual art and music as one seamless expression.
The homemade synthesizer, developed in 2005 by Fischbeck, is made with conductive tentacles that convert bioelectricity -- skin contact -- into musical sounds. With a ministerial calm, as Fischbeck had on many other nights, he introduced the instrument that the Dragons have salaciously dubbed Make a Baby into the palms of the willing.
For the most part, the duo makes and plays music with their laptops, but they also have a battery of makeshift synthesizers and percussive tools fashioned from found objects, including the seedpods of Gold Medallion trees in their Echo Park neighborhood. Their songs often build off of a knotty skeleton of tribal beats, with near-New Age washes of synth and hypnotic delicate textures, earning them comparisons to other soundscape-creating bands like Iceland's Sigur Ros.
A few days prior, Fischbeck, who studied electronic music at Brown and Harvard, explained trying to involve the audience. "The idea is to take away any barrier between people. The music can be created right there with everyone . . . that's a kind of equality."
That egalitarian approach is a big part of the Lucky Dragons' appeal, along with embracing technology as a means for spontaneous communion. It also extends to the band's structure: Fischbeck started the band in 2000, four years before he met fellow Brown student Anderson, who he says slowly faded in over the next couple of years. The group also often involves co-conspirators from the experimental music community, including multi-instrumentalist David Scott Stone, High Places' Rob Barber, who handled effects processing at MOCA, and Pit er Pat drummer Butchy Fuego.
Invited as residents of the Engagement Party at MOCA, an ongoing series that showcases artist collectives who operate through "non-object-based practices," the Lucky Dragons created the entire environment for the members-only party celebrating "Collection: MOCA's First Thirty Years."
Large video screens flickered with psychedelic, natural-world images, like a tumultuous sky with double rainbows. Pulsing beats leaked from the DJ booth staffed by local collective the Wildness. Throughout the space were various pods for playing with gadgets designed by the band. A giant rock, for instance, emitted sounds whenever another rock was waved over it.
At one point, Anderson, dressed in white with her blunt bob grazing her jawbone, paid homage by serenading Kiki Smith's glass sculpture of spermatozoa. She played a saxophone, an instrument she'd only recently picked up. "If you see me playing something I don't know that well," she said, "maybe you'll pick up a new instrument too."
Audience grabbers
The Lucky Dragons' presence at a major art institution is in keeping with a trend in Los Angeles and New York. As museums suffer from budget cuts and ponder their relevance at a time when film and, on a smaller scale, community-based art spaces have captured the zeitgeist, they've turned to resourceful ways to lure in young visitors with immersive, performance-heavy environments.
Whether it's Yeasayer playing among the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum, or Animal Collective collaborating with artist Danny Perez on a site-specific performance piece for the Guggenheim, more museums have seen the value of incorporating bands into their programs.
And the artists get a showcase for trying out new directions. For Anderson and Fischbeck, MOCA was an ideal space to challenge the assumed hierarchies of playing a show, where rock star is idol and the audience role begins and ends in passive hagiography.
