The threat of COVID-19 has canceled or postponed concerts and festivals worldwide. It’s keeping many of us indoors, and in-person concerts are all but a thing of the past. As disheartening as this can be for fans everywhere, live music isn’t gone completely. Bands and DJs across the globe are taking advantage of streaming platforms like Twitch and Facebook Live to broadcast concerts right from their homes. Some of these setups are basic webcam operations in a living room with their mixing software broadcasting the audio to the stream, some are full AV setups complete with lighting rigs and a closed set stage. Promotion companies like Insomniac and Electric Impulse have even been going so far as to schedule acts in hour time slots throughout the night, effectively creating an at home music festival you can join or leave at your leisure.
Below is an interview with Mt. Analogue, an Ohio-based experimental music producer/rapper and one-third of the group The Trifinity (a self-described spiritual awakening and “path to the light through the power of The Triangle”) with fellow artists Yheti and Toadface. Real name Stephen Strohmenger, Mt. Analogue has been incredibly active producing streams for fans of his music since the quarantine began. His streams feature anything from full concert sets, jam sessions, Photoshop tutorials, and even gaming streams. In his impromptu songs, he creates from scratch by looping samples and beatboxing on the fly; his lyrics have focused on staying positive and compassionate through these trying times. To keep things as relevant as possible, we did the interview on a Zoom call:
Can you tell who you are and just a little about the livestreams you’ve been doing?
Yeah, I’m Stephen, my artist name is Mt. Analogue. I’ve been doing the live streams more this past week and they’ve been really fun. It's been really cool to engage with people online and share music, share tutorials, just do games. A lot of people are craving that right now, that sort of communion with other people. But yeah, it's been really fun. It’s been super therapeutic for me and I’m just happy people have been engaging and having fun with it too.
How would you describe your music style?
Experimental, I always just try to keep an experimental backbone to everything. Oftentimes there's lyrics and poetry involved. It has sort of a rap music backbone, but really influenced by experimental music fusion in general.
Can you describe to me briefly your streaming setup at home? I love the way it looks on the stream.
Eyyy! The streaming setup’s pretty basic. For instance, if I’m doing a music stream I open up FL Studio, I have FL Studio running to my sound card, and then I have my sound card running into a looper, the Boss RC-505. Then I route the Boss RC-505 into my computer and I use a program called OBS, which is Open Broadcast System, and it captures the audio from the looper. Then I have everything also connected to a MIDI keyboard which can trigger drum samples or synth samples. Through OBS I send a signal to a multi-streaming platform and they’ll stream it to whichever platforms, like Twitch or Facebook, that I tick. I just do it off my webcam on my laptop off my computer like this, and I have a big light pointed at me. Like right now, there’s just a big studio light on me.
It sounds like a lot of that’s digital.
Yeah most of it’s digital. Most of everything I’m doing is in like… a digital thing.
But you’re Mt. Analogue…
Ha! Get out of here!
I love the show must go on mentality you have. I saw the other night on a live stream that FL Studio wasn’t working and you just looped beatboxing on the looper for like an hour while you freestyled. What do you get personally from doing all this for all the people at home?
I feel like I’m a pretty introverted person anyways, but I do get stir crazy and I feel like everyone else does too. We all get that craving to communicate in a space and sort of have that craving to talk and engage with other humans. That’s very natural, that’s how we evolved, in a very pack like situation. It really is therapeutic for me to be able to share what I’ve been doing in my own cabin fever with other people and to get a response from them like “hey this is helping me” or “hey this is really fun” or just people saying it made their day and enhanced their reality. And every stream I put up a little donation thing, I’m working on donating funds for direct relief charity and I’m just trying to raise as much as I can for that because right now that’s all I have. I have music and I can create paintings and do videos and things but other than that I don’t really have a strong skill set outside of a creative space so I’m trying to use the skills that I do have and help in whatever way I can.
That’s really awesome. How do you think this pandemic will affect the future of live music? Do you think streaming will become more common of a thing?
I think it will, at least for the duration of 2020 and it’ll have a strong impact beyond that where I feel like you'll see a lot more digital concerts and a lot more people engaging in a VR space. I feel like this is only kind of the beginning of a new exploration into digital space where people can come together. But of course, it’s never going to match up with the in person experience, which we all miss, but I think it'll be cool. I’m really excited to see where all of it goes.
What's your message to everybody through all of this? What's the best thing they can do to get through this and entertain themselves?
I think the best thing to do is to continue to have empathy and continue to check on your mental health and the mental health of the people around you and in your direct sphere of humans. I think this is going to be a real lesson in human compassion. The best thing you can do is just try and help however you can. It can even be just lending an ear, a lot of people are struggling with this in many ways and just need somebody to listen to them and help them through it. It gives them a sense of stability. We’ve never seen anything like this in our lifetime and it can be really scary for a lot of people so keeping the morale high is really important too. We have to keep the morale high and not focus on the negatives, ‘cause there are so many negative aspects to all of this, but simultaneously there’s a silver lining of positive aspects. This is going to mutate humanity in a way where we’re going to come out the other side with a deeper understanding of love and compassion. Just keeping that in mind during all of this is important too. It sucks right now but it will mutate into this beautiful new sense of reality.
You’re in a group with Yheti and Toadface called The Trifinity. When Yheti and Toadface do B2B sets without you there, are they The Bifinity or just a line segment?
I think that they are…I’m going to go with The Bifinity. Haha, no they’re their own artists and when they go B2B it's a Yheti and Toadface B2B, it’s a whole different thing.
Now I know Todd (Toadface) and Tyler (Yheti) are brothers—are you related as well?
No, we just grew up together. I’m not a biological brother, we’re all just from Pickaway, Ohio, and we all just grew up together. We learned music together and we were in bands and stuff together.
How do you find the sine of a right triangle?
How do you find the sine of a right triangle? OK. Well, you have to look into your third ear, deeply. You have to go really deep into your third ear and then Hanz will whisper the galactic equation into your mind’s eye, and he’ll say “The triangle has been there this whole time if you look deep within yourself.”
I also would have accepted the opposite over hypotenuse but that’s a great answer. The rest of these are trigonometry questions.
That’s just math they want you to believe, we’re gonna blow the lid off this thing.
Do you know what Plamping is? I see it posted a lot in the live streams and I’ve heard a bunch of DJs reference it recently.
I don’t! During these livestreams people have mentioned it and I was like I need to know what that is. Do you know what it is?
I looked it up and the closest that I found was “Plants + Lava Lamps - Pants”
Wait, so, like chilling with lava lamps with no pants on and with plants? See that seems fine to me, why would you have to look out for that?
When did you get into music? What brings you to now? Who are your influences?
I started when I was a kid and my grandpa would play guitar for me. He would let me play his guitar sometimes. I feel like that's how a lot of people’s path started—you had a relative who exposed you to a live music aspect. I got more into guitar and then I turned into a teengaer and wound up getting into a couple punk, death-metal bands. After high school I started getting into rap music and then learned about electronic music. I learned about Ventian Snares and Square Pusher, those were the first electronic music people I had ever heard about and it just blew my mind. Like I said, I was always intrigued growing up with music that had elements of fusion, where it encompasses so many genres that you can’t identify what it is, and that's what really drew me into electronic music when I was hearing it for the first time. It was like, “this is special and I’ve never heard anything like this.”
So, from there I started making rap music with my friends, started making electronic music and making beats, and it just kind of crescendoed over the years. After the post high school years I used to play smaller local shows, house parties and stuff. I don’t think I actually started doing music as a career until like 2015 or 2016? I remember in 2015 quitting my job and planning to go on tour in 2016 and being really scared and hoping I could support myself. And from each year it got progressively easier just staying dedicated to creating music and being authentic about interactions with people and helping to build a culture, just gravitating towards things that felt natural.
So what does your name mean, Mt. Analogue?
My name I got from a book called Mount Analogue by french author René Daumal and it's a spiritual allegory where these travellers try and find an invisible island, but each traveller kind of represents a different spiritual mode of thinking. The beauty about the book, I mean it’s not beautiful that the author died, but the author died before he finished it and his son was able to ghostwrite the second half of the book. I thought that was really interesting too cause it took it to like a generational perspective on the whole allegorical and spiritual tale. I’m really inspired by that sort of idea and that sort of story and just thought it would make a cool name.
That’s really cool. Do you think Carole Baskin killed her husband? We’re in Tampa so this is pretty relevant for us.
Oh, absolutely! I’ve seen a little bit, but everyone has watched it all except me. From what I can tell, it’s highly probable, and slightly possible, and…
I don’t want to ruin it but she probably...
Probably did. She probably did y’know? I’m sure she probably did.
If Quintin Tarentino is stuck in quarantine, is he Quarant Tarentino or Quintin Quarentino?
Quintin Quarentino for sure. That's the one, it rolls off the tongue so nicely. That’s like a track already in itself.
Well I was going to ask, are you working on any new projects while you’re stuck at home?
I just put out an album a couple weeks ago that I had been working on for a really long time called Breathe. It had been probably about a year that I was working on it. Right now I am working on more music and I’m working on an EP, hopefully around 5 tracks, that's going to be more in the same vein as Breathe where it’s going to be more soul singing and a more melodic situation. I’m also working on mastering my RC-505 looper because it has a lot of options and I’m really trying to work on integrating that heavily into my live sets.
What is your most commonly used internet password?
Hm...most commonly used...123...333..33...3.
Which Spice Girl are you?
Hmm..Dang...Scary Spice for sure.
What kind of charities are you raising money for?
I’ve tried to do some research on charities and stuff and the one I’ve been focusing on has been Direct Relief. From what I can find that is a good charity if you do have extra cash to donate. If you’re crafty, my girlfriend has been killing it literally every day just working on masks for people. She’s been making the masks, she just started looking up patterns for gowns and stuff. If you’re going to donate to a charity, do a little research and make sure they’re on the up and up. Maybe not focusing on ones that are so much religious-based, not that I wanna say anything but they’re usually the ones you have to look out for more. Pick a non denominational global charity because it’s not just the United States, it’s everywhere.
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