Ask many of today’s classically trained musicians to improvise, and you’re likely to be met with fear and anxiety. Not so for Providence, Rhode Island, cellist Laura Cetilia. She revels in living in the musical in-between.

Cetilia still loves her Mahler and Britten—she plays in the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra and the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra—but her real passion is improvised and conceptual music. “Conceptual music is not about melody or even rhythm,” she explains. “It’s about sound over time. That’s a huge shift compared to contemporary classical music, where it’s still meters and keys you have to play.”

Take this composition she wrote for a string quartet. In it, the musicians need to slide up their respective instruments in half-note increments, essentially creating one 20-minute-long glissando. The notes need to remain in the correct chordal structure—i.e. move together so that the sound is tonal—and the instrumentalists must also sing the note as they play. “It’s kind of impossible,” Cetilia admits. “But the imperfections are what make it beautiful. Things start rubbing up against each other. You get all these overtones that you won’t hear if it’s done perfectly. The result with human error makes this beautiful moment.” 

Playing this kind of music, says the 42-year-old, is both liberating and scary. “I’m attracted to that fear,” she says. “What I like about it is that it’s all about the moment. Everyone—the audience and the performers—are experiencing the same thing, in a way. I think when you’re busy sawing away on these notes [in traditional music], you’re so concentrated on what you’re doing that it separates you from the listener, whereas if you have to sit in silence for a minute before you play one note, and then sit in more silence, you’re experiencing the same thing as an audience member. It gets to the heart of what performing should be—you’re sharing this moment and this space with the listener. It’s what I love about it.”

Cetilia performs in a variety of groups dedicated to experimental music. She and her husband, Mark Cetilia, perform together as Mem1—she on an 1892 German cello, often gigged up with a computer and other electronic devices, and he using video/audio hardware and software. They improvise to create a sonic duet. Cetilia also plays in Suna No Onna, a viola and cello duo committed to performing new music, and Ordinary Affects, a collaborative effort of performers and composers devoted to experimental music.

Appropriately, Cetilia’s romance with the cello starts with a robot. Like many children, Cetilia was forced by her mother to take piano lessons, which she resisted. But in fifth grade, she saw the movie Electric Dreams. “There was a cellist in it and the computer falls in love with her after hearing her practice,” Cetilia recalls. “The owner of the computer falls in love with her, too. I fell in love with the cello through that movie.”

The dream might have died with the film’s closing credits, but Cetilia, who grew up in East Los Angeles, went to a public school with a music program. “The orchestra’s conductor was really keyed into what was going on around town,” she says, noting that he referred her to a program on the California State University campus called the Saturday Conservatory of Music. “It was for kids who are really into playing music. You get group lessons and then orchestra on Saturday mornings from nine to twelve. I would stay until three because this amazing cello teacher would give me lessons. It was for low-income students, mostly Latino families, so it was very affordable for my family. That sealed the deal for me to have that.”

The Saturday program gave Cetilia a haven in a world where, as the child of a Mexican-American mother and a white father, she always felt a little in between. “I was the only one of my friends who was mixed. I never felt like I fit in, so I became accustomed to that,” she remembers of her weekday public school life. “It’s another reason why I didn’t go the traditional route after graduating from school. I didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing musically. It’s something that’s ingrained in me.”

Laura Cetilia at home. Photo by Natasha Moustache

Cetilia’s childhood musical opportunities are a big reason why she works at Community MusicWorks, a neighborhood music school in Providence that’s its own mix of the nontraditional. “I am a product of a public school’s music program. That’s why I work where I work,” she says. “It was my savior.”

Cetilia’s interest in experimental music started at that Saturday program, too. “My teacher encouraged us to experiment,” she says. “We would just go crazy. She gave me the freedom that allowed me to experiment. To me it was a natural thing to do. I realized later you have to put in more focused practice to get even better at your instrument, but my heart was really into exploring other things.”

The sense that music goes far beyond black dots on a page is something she’s trying to introduce to the kids she works with now. “I want to get them acclimated to a different way of playing music and thinking about sound and space and the sounds around you,” she says. “It’s a much looser interpretation of what music really is.”

Cetilia put her own interest in experimentation on the back burner while attending Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. “They’re into contemporary music, but it’s more that you’re a performer and you have to master your instrument in order to play whatever music is in front of you,” she describes of her time there. “I was more interested in exploring my instrument as an extension of who I was, not just re-creating someone else’s vision.”

Of course, wanting to play conceptual music and getting experimental music gigs can be two different realities. In an effort to remain true to their mission, she and Mark started their own record label, Estuary Ltd., devoted solely to producing experimental music. “We try to release music that wouldn’t be released otherwise,” she says.

After artist residencies in Norway and the Netherlands, they landed in Providence because Mark came to Brown University to get his PhD, and the city has proven to be exactly the right spot for musical experimentation. “Providence is sort of the best place for us to be in making the music we care about,” she says. “It has a long-standing history of nonconformist musicians/artists living in and throwing shows in abandoned warehouses and such, so pretty much anything goes. That scene is changing a bit these days due to gentrification and the fact that Providence is also a transitory city for lots of kids on their way to New York, but there is always a handful of dedicated people that continue to present challenging shows, despite whatever obstacles.”

Laura Cetilia–cellist
Providence, Rhode Island
Website

The post Positive Space appeared first on Take Magazine.

This is the story of two people who build mystical worlds from plywood, metaphor, and the electricity of collaboration. Megan and Murray McMillan construct sets in gritty, forgotten places, then stage and record performances that read like dreams. Their videos unspool inside art installations.

In the beginning—the late 1990s—Megan was a writer, and Murray was a sculptor. Now, they’re both more like multimedia producers—or kids building a treehouse to play in on a ridiculously sophisticated scale. “You taught me about narrative,” Murray says to Megan, “and I taught you about space.”

Murray and Megan McMillan, a still from Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder, 2016, video. Photo by the artists

They’re sitting in their new studio, a carriage house behind the home they recently bought in Cranston, Rhode Island. The downstairs is crammed with a lawnmower, camera tracks, and brawny wooden boulders they made for Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder, an exhibition at MASS MoCA that ran from May 2016 to March 2017. By this summer, it will be their fabrication space. Upstairs, the open door of the hayloft looks across treetops to Narragansett Bay. In six weeks, they say, the loft will be renovated into a state-of-the-art design studio. Upstairs, dreams will be plotted. Downstairs, they’ll be made real.

“Megan and Murray are constantly engaged with the notion of wonder, of time stopping and being in an in-between space,” says MASS MoCA curator Denise Markonish, who organized Explode Every Day. The couple’s ambitious installation for that show, In What Distant Sky, took four years to design and build. The piece began in a massive coal bin on the museum’s campus. “It was like being in a Richard Serra piece,” marvels Megan.

They’re drawn to settings crusty with history. For What Stands Between Us and the Sun (2010), they built an artificial lake inside an abandoned mill building in Central Falls, Rhode Island. This Land is a Ship at Sea (2015) unfolded in the catacombs of Fort Warren, an old fort and Civil War prison on Georges Island in Boston Harbor.

A place’s specific textures—rust, grime, seared wood—set the stage for their work. So do unlikely materials. The video installation What We Loved and Forgot (2010), in which people ritualistically construct giant daylilies, came about after a contractor’s young widow gave the couple some leftover industrial-grade yellow plastic. “She found out we were artists,” says Megan. “She said, ‘Use it to make something really beautiful.’ We didn’t know how to do that for a long time.” Then they thought of daylilies, whose blooms remain open for just a day, then wither and fall.

In that shoot, the McMillans turned the camera on their own process. The video follows a man as he walks past the flowers being assembled and into a space near where a woman makes sushi—the food that would feed the project’s cast and crew. “We try to make it great: great food, a fun party experience,” describes Megan of filming. “And we have life happening alongside these cinematic moments.” They always invite friends to play. “We like to work with people we know, to stitch their stories together,” says Megan. “We think of it as visual poetry.”

One friend, aerialist Thea Ulrich, performed without a safety harness in In What Distant Sky standing on a boulder that rose several stories. On the way up, she encountered a Japanese couple on a balcony making tea, played by Hirokazu and Hiroko Fukawa. Hirokazu was Murray’s first sculpture teacher. The piece required sprawling vision and exacting execution—a typical McMillan cocktail of creativity and limitation.

Murray and Megan McMillan, in their carriage house studio. Photo by Natasha Moustache

There’s a meant-to-be quality to the McMillans’ love story. The couple met growing up in Dallas and dated as teens. The romance sputtered when Murray went to college, but they reconnected and married young in 1997. Both were creatives: Megan edited poetry journals and played cello until Murray’s art invited her in. He’d tell her about his pieces, and she’d give him feedback. “Really good feedback,” Murray says, looking at his wife. “Then I realized there’s as much of you in this work as there is of me.”

“We realized quickly that to do the work we wanted to do, there wasn’t enough time to keep separate projects,” adds Megan.

At first, they moved frequently. In St. Louis, they found a dusty, unused auditorium in the local veterans’ hospital, and staged Channelbone (2007), a video in which veterans with paralysis in wheelchairs pull helium balloons and dancers tango on a high balance beam. They screened the video, its themes teetering between freedom and limitation, inside a fabricated whale’s skeleton.

The McMillans never intended to land in Rhode Island, but Murray was offered a teaching job at Roger Williams University. Megan teaches, too, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Teaching fits in the same wide net of collaborative energy that kindles their work. In In What Distant Sky, Murray’s former teacher whacks rocks together to light a fire to warm the tea. “It’s also about sparking, banging rocks to create a catalyst energy,” says Megan. “That’s what teaching is. You have the fuel and someone gives you the spark.”

They love Rhode Island because the artist community here provides its own sparks. When they started constructing the boulders for In What Distant Sky, Barnaby Evans, who created WaterFire, a pageant of bonfires on barges in Providence’s rivers, offered them free fabrication space—a sizable donation.

Murray and Megan McMillan, Channelbone, 2007, installation with video, 50 x 16 x 16 ft. Photo by the artists

After collaborating as artists for 15 years, Megan and Murray started a new, familial enterprise. The arrival of sons Arlo, 5, and Jack, 1, prompted their move from Providence to Cranston. In Providence, the McMillans’ studio wasn’t nearby. Now that it’s just outside, they have more flexibility as artists and parents.

Their next project is home based. “We like the idea of embracing the studio as a limitation,” Murray explains. “What can we do right here that returns us to our roots?” Their plan—and who knows how closely they’ll follow it; they like to improvise with glitches that arise—involves a camera filming from a hoisted bucket, a fake landscape, the hayloft, and a sand pile.

Always, they’re in conversation. “It’s a really fun part of our relationship,” says Megan. “We have this rhythm together: ‘What if we do this?’ ‘What if we do that?’”

The new piece has a smaller scale and a faster turnaround than recent projects, but there’s a new twist: Arlo will play a part. Megan has a picture of Murray overseeing construction at MASS MoCA with Arlo snuggled against him in a BabyBjörn baby carrier. Wrapping the kids into the work seems like a natural evolution: it syncs with their spirit of play, and with the family feeling they foster among their collaborators.

Children can be brilliantly creative, but they aren’t always the easiest or most willing coworkers. It’s the next added degree of difficulty for a pair of artists who thrive on a blend of comfort and complexity. “It has a lot to do with letting go of control,” admits Murray, the man who oversaw a project that hoisted high a harness-free aerialist on a wooden boulder. “I feel that’s what I need right now. I’ve had too much control.”

Megan and Murray McMillan
Cranston, Rhode Island
Website

The post Up in the Treehouse appeared first on Take Magazine.

Ask locals about Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and you could hear anything. Old-timers are most likely to complain, either about that one mayor who went to jail or the PawSox. (The owners of Boston’s AAA baseball team have been threatening to skip town for years.) But you’ll also hear praise. Industrious shoppers will tell you about the latest deals they got amid the stationery aisles at Paperworks, or the two stories of material up for grabs at Lorraine Fabrics.

Foodies will recommend the Pawtucket Wintertime Farmers Market, set up each Saturday morning in Hope Artiste Village—a giant mall full of specialty stores . . . sort of. (It’s also a wedding venue, a bowling alley, and lots of other things.)

“I’m here largely because of the building,” says Kent Stetson, a designer of brightly printed handbags and leather goods. Hope Artiste Village has been his showroom and production facility for nearly four years, and it’s representative of the city’s mill studio culture. “If I’m here working at four in the morning, someone else will also be in the building working. There’s a 24-hour entrepreneurial spirit.”

Once home to a thriving textile industry, Pawtucket’s abandoned mills, like those in many other cities across New England, became prime real estate for artists in need of studios. The mills also attracted brewmasters who needed storage space. The Bucket, once a disparaging nickname for Pawtucket, now has a namesake in Bucket Brewery, a popular craft brewery—one of several in the city.

Another Pawtucket perk: low rents and large immigrant populations make it a great destination for culinary adventures on a budget. Within city limits, you can find everything from Venezuelan arepas to Szechuan dan dan noodles. The city’s Cape Verdean population is the country’s second largest, with one in eight residents claiming ancestry from Cape Verde’s ten tropical islands. Try unique culinary gems like cachupa, a slow-cooked, rustic meat stew that’s available for breakfast at Monte Cara. (It’s served with a side of linguica.) On the other side of town, 10 Rocks serves grilled octopus with plantains, plus empanada-like fried pastels (pronounced POSH-tels) with tuna or native cod.

Spend Friday nights in Pawtucket at the Ratskeller in the German American Cultural Society. Located on a side street in the middle of nowhere, the club’s basement beer hall opens to the public once a week for pretzels, schnitzel, and cucumber salad. The food is cheap, the foosball table free, and the beer freely—well, cheaply—flowing. If you’re there on the right night, you may even catch an elderly gentleman playing the accordion.

Illustration by Peter O. Zierlein

The post Take Place: Partial to Pawtucket appeared first on Take Magazine.

Jerry Ehrlich, Insert Finger, Photo by Damian Meneghini; photo courtesy of The Avenue Concept

For a city that has such a large artistic population, Providence has very little that tells their greater story,” says Yarrow Thorne, founder and artistic director of The Avenue Concept, a Providence-based nonprofit. Thorne is determined to change that narrative.

The Avenue Concept is funded largely through public donations, and has helped Thorne bring dozens of public art installations, including large-scale murals and sculptures, to the city.

Brower Hatcher, Cosmic Flower, Photo by Damian Meneghini; photo courtesy of The Avenue Concept

City planners are figuring out how to use public art to get populations to interact with urban environments. Traditionally, public art pieces occupy the same place for years, but Thorne has developed a nimble approach, periodically moving installations around the city to sustain public interest. Public art is especially important in a city like Providence, which has a linear design that traditionally discourages people from walking around, Thorne explains. Public art encourages people to explore the city and engage in conversation—and cities around the world are taking note.

Umberto Crenca, Takes All Types, Photo by Damian Meneghini; photo courtesy of The Avenue Concept

Lionel Smit, Colossal Fragment, Photo by Damian Meneghini; photo courtesy of The Avenue Concept

“When people bump into a work of art on the street and they start talking about it, there’s a sudden connection there,” says Thorne. Case in point: Lionel Smit’s sculpture Colossal Fragment, which shows a woman’s face looking out toward the city. “The reaction was gratifying,” he says. “People are really acknowledging what we are doing here.”

Yarrow Thorne–founder, The Avenue Concept
Providence, Rhode Island
Website

Top image: Bezt, She Never Came, Photo by Damian Meneghini; photo courtesy of The Avenue Concept

The post Quick Takes: Public Art in Providence appeared first on Take Magazine.

Providence musician and graphic artist Brian Chippendale first fell in love with the drums when he was a toddler. No, seriously.

The Philadelphia-raised vocalist for noise rock outfit Lightning Bolt says he vividly remembers using large spoons as a kid to pummel pots and pans in his parents’ kitchen. Later, he’d evolve to markers, which he’d tap against glass bottles of varying size, and play along with the radio.

Today, he is considered one of the world’s most innovative drummers, and was even enlisted by Björk to handle the drums on her 2007 album Volta. He’s also recognized for his cartoons and graphic novels, like Puke Force and Maggots. Doing both requires a subtle balance.

“We’re a loud band,” Chippendale says of Lightning Bolt, which first took shape in 1994. They’ve released six full-lengths, including 2015’s Fantasy Empire. “I am a fairly aggressive physical drummer and I drum for about an hour each day. Then, I have the rest of my time to work on art and chase my 1-year-old around.”

According to Chippendale, he’s been sketching for as long as he can remember, and, if he gets lost in his work, ends up drawing for hours on end. He says he’s been in New England since 1991, when he came to Providence for printmaking classes at the Rhode Island School of Design.

While at school, Chippendale met his wife, Korean-American artist Jungil Hong, who was studying ceramics. “We produced a pretty cute little kid,” Chippendale says. “So far, he’s gotten the best of us.”

The self-proclaimed workaholic admits that living in Providence has helped inspire much of his work, both audio and visual. “For years, I really was shaped by this kind of mill living scene in Providence,” he explains. “I barely left the studio. Providence, specifically, was really abandoned for years, so you get these huge spaces for really cheap. The forgotten industry of Providence provided Lightning Bolt with places where we could create and be loud, and an opportunity to form what we are today.”

Chippendale says that many of his artist friends have, in recent decades, left Providence for the likes of New York and Los Angeles. But that’s not his plan. “Those cities are so difficult to thrive in,” he explains. “Ten years ago, you saw people fleeing but now, they’re returning because they’ve got kids and they just want to mellow out.”

Chippendale says that he has become enchanted by Rhode Island’s beauty, including its glorious beaches, and loves the vibe of the capital city and its dwellers. “The slowness of Providence has really allowed me the chance to do stuff that doesn’t make money,” he jokes. “I get to decorate things and I get lost in that, and forget about not making money — until I look in my wallet.”

Want to know what Chippendale is listening to when he’s not playing? Check out our Take a Listen Spotify Channel to hear. While you’re there, check out what’s on the playlists of other musicians we’ve featured.

Brian Chippendale, graphic artist and drummer for Lightning Bolt
Providence, Rhode Island
Website
Bandcamp
Facebook

The post Lightning Bolt and Puke Force appeared first on Take Magazine.

Clowning is more than just wearing your heart on your sleeve. It is guts out, actual balls to the wall, raw vulnerability right there in your lap. Clowning is serious stuff, and it’s always messy. Providence artist Ricky Katowicz never self-identified as a clown, but this is the closest I can get to describing his practice. Puppeteers and noise musicians are a dime a dozen in Providence, RI but Katowicz’s performances push past the typical into a very real space of vulnerability. Katowicz’s projects, especially The Ricky Rainbow Beard Show, are something to be celebrated. The Show combines the formats of late night talk show and Saturday morning kids programming. “The idea for Ricky Rainbow Beard as a host came about in 2015 when I realized I needed to host a kids show because I’ve thought of this for too long and now I just need to do it,” says Katowicz “The show was conceived over the last four years but it only existed in my sketchbooks.”

While at an emotionally abusive weekend clown camp I learned that every person has an “inner clown” — you just had to turn yourself inside out to find it. Clowning is more than just wearing your heart on your sleeve. It’s guts out, actual balls to the wall, raw vulnerability right there in your lap. Clowning is serious stuff, and it’s always messy.

Providence artist Ricky Katowicz never self-identified as a clown, but this is the closest I can get to describing his practice. Puppeteers and noise musicians are a dime a dozen in Providence, but Katowicz’s performances push past the typical into a very real space of vulnerability. Katowicz’s projects, especially The Ricky Rainbow Beard Show are something to be celebrated. The show combines the formats of late night talk show and Saturday morning kids programming.

Video Still from Dance Sunday.

“The idea for Ricky Rainbow Beard as a host came about in 2015 when I realized I needed to host a kids’ show because I’ve thought of this for too long and now I just need to do it,” says Katowicz. “The show was conceived over the last four years, but it only existed in my sketchbooks.”

Making its first appearance at PVD Fest in 2016, The Ricky Rainbow Beard Show is advertised for children, but like other kids’ programs made by Gen-Xers (think Yo Gabba Gabba) Katowicz’s combination of gender bending cartoons and punny puppets often leaves grown-ass audience members wonderstruck. This is largely due to the host, Ricky Rainbow Beard, whose affect is not akin to the wide-eyed, maniacal, goon that talks slow and loud at the children of TV land. Rather, Rainbow Beard is deadpan but warm and seemingly a little shy when engaging his audience.

“I wanted to be a bearded host that could change the color of his beard on a whim because it contained all of the colors of the rainbow,” he says of his character. “The plan was always to have a magical segment on the show where I twisted my ear to cycle through all of the colors like a slot machine and land on something different each time.” 

The genius of the show is that every part, the interviews with special guests, the introductions of cartoons, the strange interruptions from live-action characters—all of it—is inquiry-based. Rainbow Beard and crew never tell audience members how to feel. When asked about his promotion of curiosity Katowicz jokes, “When curiosity is based in personal desire, it can result in real learning, and other times curiosity leads you down a gutter with a murderous clown.”

Katowicz’s projects, like The Ricky Rainbow Beard Show or Domestique, a playful noise project where Katowicz uses “domestic appliances to create layers of sound,” are more than mere performances. They are Katowicz revealing a part of himself, flashing that “inner clown,” and Ricky’s clown, well, it’s a weird dude, and that’s okay. This is Ricky’s gift, along with his wonderfully crafted puppets, costumes, and cartoons; notable collaborations; his comedic timing and the pedagogical offerings of his special guests which are all equal parts inclusive and disarming.

Ricky Katowicz, Video Still from DOMESTIQUE resized

Smart and magical, Katowicz’s work invites viewers to step into silly worlds of inquiry and vulnerability. Ricky’s world is kids’ stuff; it’s open-hearted and unafraid. Ricky Katowicz is doing the imperative work of the artist in the current, ever-darkening political climate. He gives all of us permission to be truly ourselves and in doing so, he is giving us back our power.

Ricky Katowicz–artist/clown
Providence, Rhode Island
Website
Twitter
Facebook
Instagram

Top image: Ricky Katowicz on set. Photo by J.R. Uretsky.

The post Clowning Around in Providence appeared first on Take Magazine.

The title for Abba Cudney’s group show, Things I Have No Words For, could not be more appropriate. Even before Cudney graduated from the New Hampshire Institute of Art, she had always been keen on exploring the concept of memory, something she quite didn’t have the words for.

The prints that Cudney will include in this show are ones she started in her senior year in Manchester. Most of them are scenes of the interiors of homes and fit the theme of the show really well, says the visual artist who now makes her home in Providence, Rhode Island. “These prints allowed me to think of the theme in a new way and to primarily explore the meaning of memory of a space whether it was lived in or I frequented.”

Suddenly Everything Has Changed, Part One.

In her artist statement Cudney says that she is “attracted to documenting specific moments in time within an interior space. Not only the moments themselves, but also the essence. I am able to decide what is important to me, and what can be left abstractly for the viewer to interpret.” It is important, Cudney says, for all art to have a level of relatability, and she is delighted that her paintings and prints of rooms and interiors resonate with her viewers. “It might be a specific bedroom, but I was glad that people are relating to it in their own way,” Cudney says. “My biggest goal is to focus on memory and to capture the fleeting moment of memory that spaces can bring.”

Cudney says that bathrooms and kitchens especially lend themselves well to juxtapositions, as bathrooms are the most private of places, while kitchens are for communal gatherings. “It really struck me when I moved into my first apartment while I was at school and it was an epicenter where everyone gathered, always a mess,” she says. ‘It’s also this idea of sharing a space that I wanted to explore especially as I am starting to make my own idea of home.”

Calm and Contemplation Part 2

Cudney works as an assistant at the Providence Art Club and also teaches printmaking there. Despite being a recent graduate and a young artist, the concept of nostalgia resonates deeply with her. In her work, Cudney says, “remnants of the under painting and spray paint reveal themselves as if past and present are meeting.” It jives well with the idea of moving into a new place. “I started to think what happens when people repaint a wall or put up their own objects,” she says. “It’s sort of like covering up the past and that idea was spinning in my idea for a while — this concept of past and present and memory and what that all means.”

Abba Cudney
Providence, Rhode Island
Website
Instagram

Top image: Craft Night (cropped). All photos courtesy of Abba Cudney.

The post Home Sweet Home appeared first on Take Magazine.

In 2000, photography school graduate Dan Collins never imagined that a trip to Vermont, taking snapshots for a family friend’s book on guitar-making, would provide the inspiration to one day start his own guitar workshop, teach classes, and own and manage a live music and event venue with his life partner, Ariel Rose Bodman.

Shortly after graduation, Collins traveled to Vermont to shoot some images of George Morris, who had been building guitars since the late ’70s/early ’80s and wanted to capture his process in a book. “I got there and totally fell in love with the process and with woodworking in general,” says Collins. “I’ve always been a very hands-on hobbyist sort of person, and woodworking was an awakening for me.” Morris offered Collins the opportunity to barter his photography work in exchange for learning how to build guitars, and he jumped at the chance. When he came back to Rhode Island with his new knowledge, he immediately got a job at a woodworking supply store and saved up money to start his own guitar making shop. Shady Lea Guitars was born.

Collins’ approach to guitar making at Shady Lea Guitars is as organic and fluid as the initial encounter that unexpectedly led him to the craft. “Every guitar maker approaches their craft differently; my process and techniques have changed with each guitar I’ve made,” Collins says. “This is because I’ve never made the same model twice. I’m always experimenting with new designs. That’s what keeps it fun!”

“There are just so many parts of an instrument that can be customized,” Collins continues. “Most start as a blank canvas and evolve throughout the building process.”

Collins also runs a guitar school at Shady Lea. “The students really feed off of each other’s creativity, too. Ideas are shared and encouraged here, and because of that, there is no telling what the next guitar will be. It’s always an adventure.”

Dan Collins, Shady Lea Guitars. Photo by Bob Kidd

To help create a space for students and local musicians to perform, Collins recently opened up his workshop to create a performance space. The main structure of the old converted pump house in Wakefield was erected in 1888, with a 1960s addition attached that houses the workshop and a small bar with coffee and other refreshments. Together, the two rooms make up Pump House Music Works. which for just over a year has hosted many of the area’s finest musical acts and the occasional out-of-towner.

Two to three shows take place each weekend, soon to become five, and the Pump House recently hosted a wedding for the first time. Acts such as Julie Rhodes, Ian Fitzgerald, and Arc Iris have recently played the venue. “But we really like giving opportunities to blossoming new music, too,” Bodman says. About 75 percent of the acts are local musicians performing almost entirely original music or jazz. The nonprofit’s biggest and best-attended event, however, is its open mic potluck, a concert-style community gathering with music all night and seemingly endless dishes to share on the last Saturday of every month.

Dan Collins–luthier, Shady Lea Guitars
Wakefield, Rhode Island
Website
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Top image: Ariel sings with Kevin Vidmar of The Occasional String Band. Photo by Bob Kidd.

The post Pumped in Rhode Island appeared first on Take Magazine.

Brad Rohrer would rather not rock the boat. His partner in comedy, Chuck Staton, however, admits he won’t even get on boats if they seem like they might remain still. It is only natural then, that their amalgam of a humor/art weekly production, the Chuck and Brad Podcast, is called Agreeing to Disagree.

The podcast is dedicated to covering Rhody artists and also national ones who make it through the local circuit. Who gets covered is mostly a combination of access and timing, Rohrer says. The shows focus on music, movies, books, games and has featured interviews with Rhode Island artists such as Jim Nellis from Rhode Island Food Fights, the owners of Boneheads’ Wing Bar, storyboard artist Jay Mayoh, Disney artist Nick Kole, and bands including The Copacetics, The Down and Outs, and Bad Larry.

It was around 2009 that Staton was looking to update the website for his band Senior Discount, with regular content. By this time Rohrer had already met the ex-bassist at Senior Discount through the improv circuit in Newport. “The band had done a lot of online comedy videos to promote our albums and shows, much like a sitcom, and when I saw Brad I knew he’d be hilarious to add to the world we created in our videos,” Staton says.

The weekly podcast was born and has stuck to examining the artist’s life and discussing the art that the two love. The podcast, Rohrer says, gives the duo a reason to talk about anything that interests them “in a real way” every week. “It’s easy to talk about a movie or about feelings, but being introspective about either of those things can get lost in the shuffle,” he says. “By recording what we say and why we say it, we have to examine things in greater detail than we normally would.”

The duo has had many successes including the 2016 Christmas episode, which Staton says was the most memorable because of the spontaneity and memories created. For Halloween this year, the duo did a live comedy show at Providence’s Comedy Connection, which was very well received. Staton is grateful that the Comedy Connection did not rein them in at all. “They let us do whatever we wanted even if that meant electrifying a Jack-o-Lantern on stage in an attempt to shock audience members.”

Sponsorships have helped with production costs but the podcast is also mostly a labor of love. “If there was no sponsorship money covering our server costs, we’d still be doing it every week,” Staton says. “Brad would be selling his plasma to cover them.”

Chuck Staton–musician,podcaster, Agreeing to Disagree
Providence, Rhode Island
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It was only a matter of time. Newport Storm Brewery head distiller Brent Ryan had been brewing beer since 1999 with his business partner, Derek Luke. Borrowing on Newport’s illustrious history as the Rum Capital of the World in the 18th century, the duo branched out to distilling rums with Thomas Tew Rums, named after a Rhode Island pirate. Their latest venture marries both the beer and rum-making traditions in a way.

“We were already working with malted barley everyday because of the brewery and distilling rum so we decided to work with the two and decided to lend an American twist on the whiskey,” Ryan says. Sea Fog American Whiskey is the parent Newport Distilling Company’s latest production and is made from pale and peat smoked malts.

The best Scotch whiskies come from islands off the west coast of Scotland, Ryan says, and Newport has a similar climate, which makes its way into the spirits brewed here. “There’s a salt-like air element that works into the whiskies as they age,” he says, “and we felt being on Aquidneck Island that a similar process would create the right style of whiskey for us.”

Brent Ryan filling a barrel. 

Ryan says that American whiskey is traditionally made with grains that are turned into mash — a bit of barley or corn or wheat. The material is fermented so the final product has the liquid and the trace of grain husks, Ryan says. But Sea Fog is made following the Scottish tradition of pulling all the liquid off the grain. It’s essentially distilled and then laid down to ferment. “It’s why when the Americans make whiskey, they talk about their fermented material as mash and the Scots refer to their fermented material as beer because the Scottish method more closely follows the process of beer-making,” Ryan says.

The barrel-aging process adds a special twist to the final flavor, imparting notes of vanilla and oak, Ryan adds. Having the beer brewery as a steady source of business has allowed for more creativity and experimentation — and time. Sea Fog has been eight years in the making. And while quite a few craft distillers buy spirits from wholesalers and use that as a canvas, Ryan says, every stage of the spirits are made on site, which also gives more control over the process.

Next up? Newport Distilling Company’s take on Amaro, an Italian liqueur. “We’re really excited about it. It’s going to be on the bitter side, so great for cocktailing,” Ryan says. Particularly important for him is to keep the rich tradition of the city alive in the craft creations. “The authenticity is important for us/ It’s certainly how they would have been doing things here 250 years ago so we always keep that in mind.”

Brent Ryan–head distiller, Sea Fog American Whiskey
Newport, Rhode Island
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Top image: Sea Fog American Whiskey. All photos courtesy of Newport Storm Brewery

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