EOTO in Pittsburgh

http://www.pittnews.com/article/2009/10/13/eoto-infuses-music-party-mentality-bring-groove-club-cafe

EOTO infuses music with party mentality, to bring groove to Club Cafe

photo credit: Courtesy Ankur Malhotra

EOTO incorporates trippy lights with their far-out sound.

Think about the most memorable dance party you’ve ever been to.

Now imagine being in a band whose goal is to make every performance like that party, but better.

EOTO is the electro-house-dance music project of former members of The String Cheese Incident, Jason Hann and Michael Travis. The band uses live performance, improvisation and electronic music.

“It’s 100 percent improvised music, and it’s all live,” Hann said, “and it’s all being created in front of the audience. It’s a combination of DJ with all-electronic music that flows from one song into the next, but there’s also musicianship going on.”

Performing every night can be exhausting and stressful, but Hann believes it has helped him and his band partner Travis develop their performance skills.

“The best part ... is playing night after night after night,” Hann said. “We constantly get better because it’s a stretch to do something different. The same thing gets boring. The hard part is trying to inject new energy.”

These all-night jam sessions began between the two just for fun. Since then, their roots have heavily influenced their goal as a performance group.

“We started out playing for hours on end with no real agenda, just to have fun,” Hann said. “It slowly morphed into being able to [play] . . . music for hours at a time. It was much more fun than trying to put songs together on a computer. Much more fun to go out there with a blank slate and have the audience go through the same thing with us.”

Three years later, the pair stopped performing privately and spent all their time on the road. They want to perform abroad as well, Hann said.

They also performed with other groups in various genres.

“The fun part about interacting is that it makes us play a little bit [differently],” Hann said. “If we collaborate, then there’s a meeting halfway and something new comes out of it. It’s just nice to have something different to play.”

But they still love their hometown, Boulder, Colo.

“There was definitely a following there that we wouldn’t have been able to go national [so quickly] without,” Hann said.

There’s room for vocals at their jams, as well.

“We both do vocals,” he said. “Travis might do more things with words, but it’s pretty matched by effect. When I do vocals, I’m usually making up words or raps. I’m using syllables as opposed to speaking English.”

For a band that relies so heavily on improvisation, recording albums would seem like a challenge.

“The studio is basically how we perform live, but when we perform live, we basically transition from song to song to song and don’t stop,” Hann said. “[In the studio] we press record and we just go for it and use whatever we record. If we perform 10 minutes, we might take four to five and use that as our song.”

But the difference between the recording and the live performance is clear to Hann.

“It’s definitely almost ceremonial and communal in the fact that we don’t know what we’re going to play, and it develops a relationship throughout the night,” he said. “It’s a feeling between just drums, dancers and energy in the moment. It’s satisfying to feel that in the room. That moment will only happen that way that particular night.”

Lengthy studio work may not be for EOTO, but it’s not a bad thing.

“That’s just a whole other art form to be in the studio and create a song with different parts,” Hann said. “I have much respect for producers that go in there. I also do that on my off-time.

“I have done it for a long time. But for live, it is far more satisfying to feel you can go with a blank palette and begin creating something and create it on a level that strives to be as in-depth as a producer in the studio with all the time in the world.”