EOTO

Jenn Cohen | April 1, 2012 | 0 Comments

by Joel Center

Although I was instantly attracted to both the concept and the music of electronic duo EOTO, I was skeptical, at first, that the band would be able to continue touring for long, due to the fact that each note in every show is one hundred percent improvised. Surely they must run out of ideas before long, and fall into that pit of unoriginality that swallows so many bands – bands that (unlike EOTO) don’t commit themselves to create over an album‘s worth of new material every show, right?

Wrong. What I didn’t realize was that Michael Travis and Jason Hann’s improvisational tendencies do not cause the music to go stale at all, but rather to evolve at an exponentially quicker rate than some more “conventional” groups. Hann (drummer and vocalist) warned me in a pre-show interview that “[EOTO] has a very different balance than last time we came to Boulder. We are exploring more genres that we enjoy playing live, and we are always experimenting with new sounds.”

He was completely correct. When EOTO last made an appearance at the Boulder Theater, they brought the constant heavy beats and throbbing bass that has made them so popular in the electronica scene, and they did it well, but there wasn’t nearly as much variety as there was at their show on Friday, March 16^th. While the last Boulder show made the audience feel as if they were falling down a bottomless pit of intimidating (and empowering) beats and melodies, the most recent show gave the impression of traveling down a river that is dangerous and frightening at times, and merely a pleasant trickle a little further downstream.

The feeling of travel was aided by EOTO’s new stage installation; an impressive array of Plexiglas pedals arranged to form a Lotus flower that encircles both members of the band. A Lotus flower was chosen in reference to the ancient teaching of the Far East, that place the Lotus as one of their most important symbols. The Lotus flower has it’s roots embedded in mud, and grows through the water until it emerges from the depths, then continues to grow even further above the surface; representing the progress of the soul from the primal mud of the materialistic world, through the waters of experience, and out into the bright sunshine of enlightenment.

As if the structure itself wasn’t enough, its exact specifications are programmed into 3D mapping software that allows EOTO’s video engineer to project different scenes onto the pedals and the backdrop, causing an optical illusion that is baffling to witness. Not only is the music improvisational, but the images are as well; the video jockey (Zebbler – Shpongletron) has to be aware of what feel the band is creating, and he must replicate that using his various images and scenes.

As many know, Hann and Travis also play in the popular jam/bluegrass band String Cheese Incident, which tends to arise all sorts of reactions from long-term fans of the group. There is a sort of unspoken rivalry among some fans between jam music played with “real” instruments, and electronic music played with a wide array of strange mechanical devices. Hann says that, “There have been some pretty brutal reactions [to EOTO’s electronica by long-term SCI fans], but some people just say mean things to be mean. We can’t pay too much attention to the media due to some of that senseless negativity.”

In spite of some (few and far between) bad reviews of the group, fans still flock from hundreds of miles to put themselves into EOTO’s unique atmosphere. If you missed their latest show at the Boulder Theater, don’t worry! EOTO will be playing many festivals this summer, including Wakarusa, Electric Forrest, and Colorado’s own Sonic Bloom. See you there!