EOTO was formed in 2006 by Michael Travis and Jason Hann of the String Cheese Incident. While SCI’s sound is firmly rooted in the world of traditional jambands, EOTO’s music comes from a different place entirely. The String Cheese Incident may have been “Born on the Wrong Planet,” but EOTO has somehow found themselves in the wrong universe. The duo’s brand of in-your-face, totally improvised livetronica has gained a solid following as they continue to fill up venues across the country. These guys never play the same song— let alone the same set— twice.
EOTO is nothing if not prolific. The duo recently released their 500th live recording—which means a few thousand songs worth of original material. With every show the group builds upon its fanbase, and there’s no reason to believe they’ll be stopping anytime soon. Their latest “Bass Invaders” tour might be their most ambitious to date, as the band has added their new Lotus Flower stage set up to the mix. The Lotus Flower brings a visual stimulus to the sensory overload and adds another layer to the psychedlic onslaught that is EOTO.
We recently spoke with EOTO’s Jason Hann about the latest tour, the groups hardware set up, the Lotus Flower, the state of electronic music, the String Cheese Incident’s recent forays into the world of electronica and more. You can check out the interview below.
It seems like you guys are always on the road. Where are you now, and where are you heading next?
Yes we are always on the road. We’ve done about 800 shows so that takes up a big chunk of the calendar. Right now we’re at home but coming up we have Anaheim, CA and Flagstaff, AZ. Then the following week we do five different cities in Florida, then up to Connecticut and Portland, ME. So all over the place. This is the first tour we’re doing where we’re spending about three days at home, then heading out to the region where we’re doing shows to do the shows for that weekend, and then flying back home after the weekend.
EOTO has been together for a few years now. What kind of hardware adjustments have you guys made, and is the process now simpler than it was when you first began?
So the hardware adjustments that we’ve made, we’ve had a really long evolution. Travis used to start off with just one Microkorg keyboard, a guitar and bass, run those through a computer and use a Behringer midi controller. But now he’s gotten rid of the Microkorg and he uses a Nord Lead and Korg MS 2000 keyboard, and a Roland Gaia keyboard. He also has an iPad that runs a program called Animoog, and a Kaossilator Pro which he’s done a lot of swooshes with. In my world, I have basically the same small drum set but I got it custom made, or custom remade, with LED lights so they can blink and make colors and do some cool things. Then I use my djembe, and for the past two and a half years I’ve been singing a lot and rapping, and making lots of different sound effects with my voice. I also use three touchpads, three iPads. One runs the program Lemur, for controlling mine and Travis’s computers at the same time. Another one runs a program, OSCulator, which allows me to control separate things on my computer. The third iPad runs a program called OnSong. And then we have one more separate computer that records all of our live shows, so at this point we’ve recorded over 500 live shows that people can download.
What are the conversations between you and Travis before an EOTO show like? Do you guys talk about what you’re going to do or do you just wing it?
Well we don’t talk about anything musically, just maybe something that happened during the day or just joke around. We really don’t say anything about the music until we’re actually on stage and we have our ear monitors in. And then it’s kind of like “Oh well what tempo do you want to start out with?” “I don’t know, what tempo do you want to start off with?” and then at this point I just let him do something wherever he wants to start and then we go from there. We have an audible sound of a click in both of our ears that the audience doesn’t hear, and that’s what lets us both know what tempo we’re locked into, so that all of our delays and all of our effects match up to that tempo. If we’re creating loops or recording parts on top of each other then that click keeps us aware of where the beat is. The process though, I don’t know if it’s necessarily gotten harder but its gotten more complicated — very complicated if you’re trying to jump into it for the first time. We’ve had such an evolution over so many shows. You get used to one thing and then you’re adding another thing and then you get used to that and you add another thing. Pretty soon it gets pretty overwhelming to accurately explain all of the things we’re actually doing in the moment. But for us, I have my big instrument that includes vocals, drums, and touchscreens to do live remixes and perhaps control over our entire sound. And Travis has his world of touchscreens and keyboards and midi controllers and that’s all just one big instrument for him as well.
How big of a factor is the crowd’s energy in determining how or what you guys are going to play?
The crowd is a huge factor when it comes to how we approach it. Sometimes we play a festival like Electric Zoo where people don’t know who we are and its more of dance, techno or straight up DJ type of event, and we’re on a slot that introduces us to that crowd. We gotta play it by ear depending on what it feels like. We’ll jump into it and we’ll search around and eventually we’re going to grab the crowd and take them on a journey. And then there will be the occasional people there who alert the other people that they need to get down to this right now. If we’re playing our own show, we really just do whatever we want but when we look out in the crowd we see how they’re dancing to a thing or if we’ve stayed in one genre for too long. If we’re doing dubstep and its loud and aggressive for twenty minutes then our fans are going to want a little bit of a break from that and we’ll switch to glitch hop then rev it up to drum and bass and then bring it down to some downtempo chill type of thing. When we feel like we’ve got the crowd and we’re taking them on a little journey, then we do that and when we feel like they don’t really know us yet then we gotta do a little bit of searching to draw them into what we’re doing. But its all about feeding off the energy of the crowd. It helps us push to the next place that we need to go to.
The new Lotus stage setup is pretty incredible. How would you describe what its added to the EOTO live experience?
Finally we have a visual accompaniment to what we’re doing live. Zebbler [who directs the visual elements], he’s doing all the video on the fly like we are with the music, reacting to where we’re taking things musically, and accompanying that with a visual that enhances the audience’s experience. Something that we’re working out is, we’ll find that a lot of people that know that we’re playing the instruments live and that know we’re making the stuff up on the spot, they want to see us play our instruments. And sometimes with the visuals, with the Lotus projection, sometimes when that’s going on we get sort of silhouetted and its a bit tricky to see what we’re doing. But it’s kind of like the music, every night it gets better, you need to make little adjustments here and there and its a really good team, the way we work together and react. The visuals and the projection mapping on to the lotus sculpture has really grown with us musically as well.
How long do you guys plan on touring with that setup? Do you have any ideas for future lighting rigs?
We toured with it in the spring and had a lot of fun with it but there were a lot of venues that we went to that were like “Oh we can’t really fit it as well as we thought we could.” There were some times where we really wanted to show it off in certain areas but we didn’t get to because of how much we were touring. We did a whole summer of bringing it to most of the places that we played and introducing a bunch of people to it, we’re hoping that carries over into the fall as we go back to other cities. We’ll see how it goes in the fall, as far as if people are catching on and telling their friends “Listen you gotta see this again” and depending on that we’ll see how we adjust things from there. We already have a bunch of ideas, probably projection mapping based. I really love that format, it seems so flexible and you can do so many things artistically with it. But we’ll see how this goes for the fall, we’ve got a lot of shows coming up.
EOTO’s music can be pretty genre bending stuff. What kinda of stuff are you guys listening to these days, and what do you consider to be EOTO’s biggest influences musically?
Oh wow, that’s a good question. Well you know there’s kind of a thing where I’ll listen to music with EOTO in mind, but I also do solo DJ sets in a lot of the same genres. So I’m trying to keep up with the latest releases, it can’t help but influence the things I do in EOTO. Travis also has his tastes in music that he’s checking out all the time. Before, when we would spend a lot of time together as we were forming the project, we listened to a lot of the same things. I think our tastes were on a similar path. Now it’s pretty cool because he listens to a lot of different things that I don’t and i do the same. Some of the guys that I’ve been listening to now while keeping EOTO in mind are KOAN Sound, Blunt Instrument out of Australia, TriFonic who has one release that came out a couple of years ago. I just started listening to it and wow, it’s so fresh, if it were put out today it would still be amazing. DCarls, DCarls is great. JOBOT, another one that I’ve been listening to. I really enjoy Skeptiks. Also there’s things like Tipper. I’m can’t really thinking of other stuff right now. Oh and Gaudi, and that’s a good roundabout, as far as music in the electronic world. And then when I’m not doing that I listen to a lot of world music and jazz. There’s not a particular favorite that I have, or artists that I need to check out or read a review of, that’s all over the place.
EOTO has toured all across America but electronic music is huge all around the world. Are there any plans to take EOTO international any time soon?
Yeah! We’re right on the cusp, it feels like. We have lots of connections and we have fans in different countries that keep saying “You guys gotta come here.” But you know, you gotta wait til a promoter hears about us and they work to bring us over. Right now it looks like we’ve got a solid offer from Australia and in this past year we got an offer to do Moscow and Israel but we had to turn those down because those were times when String Cheese was trying to rehearse and some shows happened. So it’s give and take, we’re not in any kind of rush but we’re definitely anxious to go worldwide because of what you said. Electronic music is a lot bigger in other places in the world and it would just be so great to go down to South America or out to Asia or Europe and partake in those amazing electronic festivals that they have there.
I saw EOTO at Electric Forest this year and it seems like there’s always another festival on the horizon for you guys. What’s the wildest festival you guys have ever played at?
The wildest! We’ve played some crazy ones. All kinds of adventures go down, and personal adventures, but as far as one festival that stands out. Of course there’s Electric Forest and Horning’s Hideout and those kinds of places. I would say that easily one of our favorite festivals is Shambala in Canada, British Columbia, just above Spokane, Washington. That’s probably been the most influential festival on us, almost 85% of the people on the lineup aren’t even big out there, and the way that they treat the property and leave room for kids to have fun and the way they go about policing it is just everything you’d ever want in a festival. It feels so free out there, as far as people keeping themselves in check and hearing the most unbelievable music that just isn’t going to hit the States for another few years. That’s what influenced us to start doing dubstep, back when we started playing dubstep in 2008 it was because of a performance that we saw at Shambala and it was really incredibly. And dubstep didn’t really catch on in the states til probably late 2009. Shambala Festival is really great in that the DJs and producers bring out their best, latest, newest stuff to Shambala. Along the lines of underground bass and breakbeat and that kind of thing. Europe owns the whole techno aspect of things, but Shambala just opens my ears so much any time I go there. Easily the most inspiring festival.
You and Michael Travis are also members of the String Cheese Incident. Do you think a bit of the EOTO sound has found its way into the new String Cheese sound?
Well that’s a funny question because when we – well there’s definitely a lot more electronic music in String Cheese world as far as we might play two or three electronic bass tracks per night. It’s funny how when a lot of String Cheese fans start to hear String Cheese do a little electronica they say “Oh that’s any EOTO moment” or something like that. But its really a misconception because, in EOTO, Travis is playing all the melodic parts and bass sounds and I’m playing the drums. So when String Cheese does an electronic moment it’s usually because I’ve programmed all the synth parts that might be running in the background and Travis is playing drums. It’s definitely a different thing, there’s a lot of electronic influence but a lot of the guys in the band, like Kang, are alway wanting to do something different with some songs. It’s very influential from Kang, to have these dubstep moments in songs that the fans really cherish, like when we did our cover of “Kashmir” at Electric Forest last year or when we did “Desert Dawn” and put a dubstep part at the end of that. I mean it was gnarly and we’re just loving the fact there’s gonna be a lot of people who really hate it but there’s going to be a lot of new fans who really love it.
That’s kind of how String Cheese has done it it’s whole career. Starting off as a bluegrass/calypso band with no drums and then all of a sudden Travis starts playing drums and Kang starts playing electric mandolin and Kyle comes into the band with his jazz and funk stuff to where the sound changes significantly and the old schoolers at that time were like “Ahhh they’re leaving their happy bluegrass and calypso place and going all electronic”. Then when they actually started incorporating electronic stuff, which the band has been doing since 1999 or 2000, at least trying to jam that way, there was another transition and people said “Oh my god, they’re bailing on their roots” but I think String Cheese as a band has always been about progressing and working in different styles according to what the band wants to do. A really good example, on the electronic side, is Billy had brought a song to the band. It was kind of a traditional real song and he’s like “so here’s this thing and I wanna do something different with it, so what can we do that’s really different with it?” I suggested that we do an Indian type dub track, and I had produced some music that was like that so I threw that out there and he was like “Well what does that sound like?” I played some examples and he was like “Yeah let’s do that” and that turned into a song called “BollyMunster,” which is one of our more electronic tracks. But you know it just came out of a desire to explore what else is out there and what can we do differently that we haven’t done already and not constantly recreate the same thing we’ve done before.
Well my next question was actually going to be about that Electric Forest “Desert Dawn.” That was my favorite moment of the whole festival. I was going to ask you who was behind the crazy new take on that String Cheese classic.
You know we did our song and then there was some point there in the conversation, I’m pretty sure it was Kang – me and Travis almost never suggest the electronic stuff because we do that thing with EOTO all the time so its expected of us. “What do you wanna do?” “Oh let’s do some electronic” So we almost always leave that open. Kang stepped forward and says “Let’s make this really gnarly” and we hadn’t done it before and people could not see that coming out of anywhere. It was like, “How can we out-Bassnectar Bassnectar for about five minutes?” So I went in and did the programming for the bass sound, the wobble sound and we just knew that the effect that we wanted was a little bit of everything else that’s out there. So we can bring our little groovy stuff but we can also bring just the nastiest of the nastiest stuff that you’re gonna see out here.
With the “Kashmir” and the “Desert Dawn,” the whole crowd went wild, nobody saw those coming.
Haha, it was just so far out of left field. We just thoroughly enjoyed it and smiled about it for the longest of times because that’s shaking things up, doing something different.
Does EOTO plan to continue touring for the foreseeable future What’s next for EOTO?
Definitely touring. This tour is going to effect a lot of things, as far as our approach to the next tour. It’s the first time trying this whole weekend regional approach, with us flying out to the region, touring the region, and then flying home. And we’ll see how that goes. It’ll effect whether or not we get back in the tour bus and go on a full blown playing every night without a break type of tour or if we keep this up. Right now, for me and Travis, its amazing to have any home time at all because we’ve been going so hard the last six years, but really the last five years we’ve been on the road 250 days a year, and with String Cheese rehearsals out in Colorado, since I live here in California. There’s a point where you just have to work on being home and just know that that’s the part that’s going to nourish you for getting back out on the road on the weekends. It’s just really important to get some family time back in there.
