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through this megaphone, another guy playing a straw fiddle. It was so exciting I came back and made a gourd amplifier for my harmonica! Those old recordings we love were filtered through objects. Sometimes you record something and then hear it back and I think that doesn’t sound anything like the music I love. It’s too much. It’s too much information. I don’t want it all. When we recorded our album Every Time, we recorded the whole thing using the sepiaphonicmonophone, with microphones in it…and sang into the horn as they would for the RCA Victor recordings, utilised that technology to take it back to the sound we love.”
There are now three Sheesham & Lotus CDs available, the most recent of which, 1929, again used a radical (vintage) method of mixing. “When the trio recorded this one, we recorded on one G7- style mic, stuck in corner. Lotus and I stood up to the horn and sang into that. If we needed something changed in the mix, instead of changing it afterwards, the engineer would just come in and say, “Sanderson, can you stand back seven inches!” It was a physical mix, so what you hear is what we did. It couldn’t get more live!”
There are other factors at play as well as the aesthetic of the sound the trio are producing. Teilhard continues: “Besides the sonic texture of the music, we perform a lot outdoors… places like farmers’ markets where it’s totally racketous. In Kingston, where we often perform on the streets, the buildings are 90 percent made from limestone, very echo-ous, very live acoustics, so we’d sing and people would hear us four or five blocks away. It seemed a little crazy ’cos we’re singing these high country harmonies and it was a little bit in people’s faces! We kinda also wanted the con- denser, the horn, to bring it in and focus it a bit. So they really serve a practical purpose besides the visual.”
Moreover, there’s a deeper philosophical aspect to this tech-
nology, as Brian explains: “I think also one of the appeals of the music generally these days, if there is such a thing as a steampunk movement inherently in this music, there’s a sense of community, in how it’s transmitted and what keeps it alive and in the very playing of it. There isn’t really oneupmanship. What you’re actual- ly trying to seek is one voice. The real appeal is very much in keep- ing with how we need to move forward as a society: working together, no leaders, one voice. When the sepiaphonicmonotone is being used, it makes it even more radical. It really does sound like one voice. The three of us are doing everything we can just to feed this one single sound. Ultimately they say music was born free and to seek freedom is its destiny. That’s what music is for. Every time there’s some kind of technological advancement in the band, underneath it all, the impetus, the inspiration for it, is to trying to work towards that sense of unity of sound. With this trio, it really is about serving the music.”
ist in West African outfits and Cuban bands; Sam was “just obsessed with John Lee Hooker” as a child, then carved his own path from Motown and Stevie Wonder through to ragtime and jazz. Brian was immersed in sacred music growing up, but quickly widened his horizons to a number of world traditions, including learning tabla in India.
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“It’s hard for me to separate our experience of music in the west as being separate from Christianity, Puritanism, Heaven and Hell and all the rest of it… the decisions we make about exclusion and inclusion. I remember being in India and having my teacher trying to impress upon me that in India there really wasn’t harmo- ny and disharmony, there was only harmony and distance from harmony and how he kept trying to say to me, it’s so Western to have to be one or the other.”
“We’re really interested in music that doesn’t come from a page, music that is part of living traditions. It gets more and more interesting to navigate those waters in an era in which you can access so much information via the internet. The waters can get really muddied… with people seeking authenticity… things that shouldn’t be sought after really in oral tradition. It’s interesting to be part of a tradition, but to not seek to make it a museum piece. It’s an interesting age to do that in because to try to do that her- metically-sealed, to try to do that without being influenced by the rest of the planet at this point is ludicrous.”
www.sheeshamandlotus.com F
ll three players have expansive musical backgrounds and refreshingly open minds. They are keen to see their musicmaking as progressive, rather than static. Teilhard had an early grounding in Canadian fiddle traditions but a wealth of experience as a percussion-
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