WordLess
(4 min read)
For years we’ve had clients and colleagues tell us that we should start a podcast. With a seemingly infinite number of podcasts now available, and another 2,500 being published every single day (!!!), we decided to wait until we had something unique to add to the mix.
The best podcasts are often built on great conversations. And the best conversations we know are built on the universal language of music.
With that in mind, we’re thrilled to introduce you to WordLess: an experiential music podcast from The License Lab.
There’s a magic formula to great conversation. That elusive spark and the continual flow of meaningful dialogue is almost always due to those involved being better listeners than talkers.
The same is true of great improvised music. Musicians wordlessly communicate, listening first and then responding in order to connect and create something special that would only happen with those people in that place and at that time.
A trio called Argopelter has some of the best conversations we’ve ever heard, without uttering a single word. Comprised of three members from The License Lab extended family of collaborators (Barry Paul Clark, Devin Drobka, and Christopher Porterfield), each Argopelter set is a conversation, with its own arcs, dips, turns, and pauses, resulting in a compelling and wholly unique experience.
Make no mistake, this isn’t a jazz trio or a math rock project. It’s something else entirely. The result of their spontaneous musical conversations dances between ambient drones, chordal explorations, inventive loops, frantic bursts of energy, all while retaining an immediacy that simultaneously wakes the senses and comforts the soul.
This podcast series exists to document and share those conversations, live improvisations, uninterrupted and presented in their purest form without the addition of studio trickery.
Photo by Andrew Feller
Improvised sets that range from twenty to over thirty minutes of continuous music were recorded by License Lab founder and creative director Daniel Holter at Wire & Vice (Milwaukee, WI) in single, uninterrupted takes with just a few well-placed microphones in order to document the experience as unobtrusively as possible.
On the origins of the podcast, Holter explains:
“I knew that documenting these sets would be wise, but to be honest at the outset we didn’t really know what we should do with these recordings. Where would the best online home be for longform improvisational music? It was after many discussions among the participants that we started contemplating the idea of pitching these recordings as ‘conversations,’ and that maybe this was the long-elusive podcast we’d be marinating for a few years.”
Holter then mixed the sessions at Wire & Vice, Electrokitty (Seattle, WA) and The Hall Of Justice (Seattle, WA), using a practiced hand to preserve the raw nature of the improvisatory process. Mastered by Justin Perkins at Mystery Room Mastering, these recordings have been handled with care and authentically relay their wordless conversations to new ears.
First presented here in the form of a podcast, each episode of this inaugural season of WordLess features an entire Argopelter set with minimal voiceover.
Find, subscribe, and listen to WordLess wherever you listen to podcasts by clicking here.
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