Imaginary Worlds - Worldbuilding With Music

Episode Date: September 21, 2017

In the first of a two part episode on imaginary worlds in music, I talk with members of Vertigo Drift, an indie band that created a cyberpunk concept album with an expanded universe of material provided by visual artists, writers and filmmakers. While the group is influenced by concept albums of the past like The Who's Tommy or Plastic Beach by Gorillaz -- their true inspiration comes from sci-fi fantasy worlds, especially tabletop role-playing games. I visited Trevor Walker, Mark Ayesh and Mike Forsyth at their underground studio in Queens to find out how their debut album "Phase 3" came together. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. You don't know me, who I am, where I've been or where I stand. And this is Mark Ash, Mike Forsyth, and Trevor Walker of the band Vertigo Drift. Mike Forsyth, and Trevor Walker of the band Vertigo Drift. Now, typically in my podcasts, I talk with writers, artists, filmmakers, fans, scientists, professors. But I don't usually talk with musicians. And when I do talk with creative people, they usually have something out in the world that's already made an impact.

Vertigo Drift's debut album, which is a three-song EP called Phase 3, comes out later this month. But it was still a work in progress when I met them at the rehearsal space, which is one story underground below a barbecue restaurant in Queens. Now, when they contacted me a few months ago on Facebook, they were not pitching themselves to be on my podcast. I just became curious about what they were doing as we started messaging back and forth. They just wanted to know if I would ever do an episode about concept albums, because concept albums are basically imaginary worlds in music. I couldn't believe I hadn't made that connection before.

I mean, back when I was in high school, I was obsessed with concept albums. Tommy, The Wall, Russia's 2112. I'd put on my Walkman, and I would just lose myself into those worlds. Now, Trevor Walker is younger than me, so he was more inspired by Janelle Monae's Arch Android album or The Gorillas, which are basically a high-concept cartoon band. There's these moments of discovery when you listen to them. You may not know that they're

cartoon people performing. And so that's the first discovery. Oh, wow, that's really cool. And then later you might discover, well, there's a whole story going on in the background, and there's novels and graphic novels and games you can play. And I think that discovery element is really, really exciting. So Vertigo Drift's first album is a concept album. But what got me so interested in these guys is that their main influence is sci-fi fantasy. In fact, Mark Ash says the inspiration for their album came from an episode of the Nerdist podcast when Patton Oswalt was complaining about Hollywood reboots. Of course, Patton Oswalt, being the king of nerds that he is,

he just kind of calls out everyone. He's like, why are the nerd artists not creating new things? And since we were already toying with it, with concept, with our rehearsals, I kind of came in, I'm like, I feel a little called out. Like, let's just do this. Until that point, Mark Forsyth had been pushing the band towards a meta concept album, where they would do songs about Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey,

which is like an academic blueprint on how to tell fantasy stories. First of all, I'm very proud of that. I have a 16-minute song that's the first five stages of the show's journey that we don't even play anymore. But no, I think we were up to the ordeal, if I'm not mistaken. We got through the first act. We had the approach. We had tests and allies. And we were right up to the ordeal.

But they scrapped that and came up with a new idea. And it's really ambitious. It takes place in the far future. But of course it's really about here and now. We'll hear all about it after the break. All right, so first let's get to know the band a little bit. Trevor Walker is the drummer. He works at a small animation studio. You know, we had to come to the terms that we're not rock stars. We're not, like, larger than life. We weren't always, like, the coolest, untouchable people.

So how do we still create something that's, like, cool and interesting when we're just normal people? We're not going to be able to create these personas for us. I'm probably the closest thing to a rock star that's not a rock star. I'm a bartender. That is Mike Forsyth, the bassist. Their lead singer and guitarist, Mark Ash, does have a day job. He works in social media marketing. Some of the strategies that I employ

for the megacorps that we buy social media for, they might all be late to the game, but they're just now jumping on. And they're going to push technology to the point that is kind of our warning in our story. Now, the story of their album takes place over three different time periods. First, there's the near future, where everybody is addicted to virtual reality and augmented reality, where you're basically superimposing something that's not real on the real world. It's basically like that game Pokemon Go, you know, that everyone

was playing last summer, where you see Pokemon characters in the real world if you use your camera on your smartphone. But anyway, so in their far future, everyone's doing this all the time. And then there's suddenly an apocalypse. The world goes dark. There's no more power, no more juice, no more electricity, no more internet. And everyone who is addicted to virtual reality or augmented reality goes through withdrawal. So we call it the neo-dark age. And it really brings upon some of the inspiration that we have for that period is like Trigun or Fallout, these sci-fi worlds, but they definitely have that wah-da-wah-da-wah,

that straight Wild West feel. Was that in a Nino Morricone song? Yes, it was. That was the perfect interpretation of it, too. But that's all backstory. The album actually takes place in a third time period, a sort of renaissance

after this neo-dark age, where a character named Liam is trying to build society back up again. Trevor says this character starts out with good intentions. He wants to bring order and light back to the world. But his fear of chaos leads him down a path towards tyranny. As he's implanting these augmented realities into people, they're losing a bit of their freedom, losing a bit of their peace of mind. But at the same time, they're a lot healthier and safer. So in the beginning, he's a good guy.

In the beginning, he's a savior. What happens is it just starts to go too far. He gets too greedy, takes too much data. Now, the members of Vertigo Drift are also collaborating with artists and writers to create ancillary material to help build up this world. For example, if Liam is the villain of the album, the hero is a cyborg called Aaron. But Mark says it's up to the writers and artists who are collaborating with them to decide what gender they want Aaron to be. Because in the song lyrics, Aaron's gender is left intentionally vague. One of the first things that we really

decided on was like, we have a non-gender specific character, but we've had a lot of artists go with the she, so we're going to use she for right now. Where she comes from is she was this person who is incredibly software savvy, programming savvy, probably would have been likened to a computer programmer like Google. And she gets involved with an anonymous type group that brings this apocalypse to fruition. Now, Aaron has become a prisoner of the technology that he or she developed, this augmented reality technology. Aaron is a cyborg living in a cyberpunk future that believes she's a bounty hunter in the wild west. And that's because something has malfunctioned in her augmented reality and she's had some brain damage and she's she's forgets where she is. So that's Vertigo Drift

for us. This idea of being unable to control the slip between AR, VR, and reality, the first exploration of it was this song called Tuesday Talk, where we go, what happens when the bounty hunter thinks that they are capturing the right person, but in actuality, they haven't? Another day or rainy night To find my way by the bar's light My past is dark as around the block

my Tuesday walk, my Tuesday talk, a bottle of whiskey rolls down the street his heart is dead but he's so big so it's kind of a really scary thought of not knowing what your reality is and that moment of

vertigo is when you suddenly, so in the case of Aaron, the character, she or he is rounding up someone and then has this moment of vertigo drift and realizes that it's the wrong person, but then slips back. This idea of vertigo drift, which is the name of the band as well, comes from a personal place for all of these guys. Trevor says he's very concerned by how much he is addicted to technology. This has happened to me a couple of times, and I imagine it's happened to other people as well,

where I'm maybe on the couch on my computer, and all of a sudden the battery dies, and all of a sudden I'm just like, wait a minute, why am I here? What have I been doing? Like, I'm not even dressed. I'm still in my towel after the shower. How long, what time is it? Oh my God, it's 3 a.m. And it took the battery dying to get me there. And it's going to become, I think, so much scarier and so much harder, more tangible when you're in virtual reality or you're in the future.

I keep wondering when, you know, when I'm in a nursing home, am I going to be completely jacked into, excuse me, I make it to nursing home, am I going to be completely jacked into virtual reality and like be a space pilot and I get to video chat with my kids in this virtual world? And is that totally awesome or is that totally messed up? I'm not sure. Now, typically concept albums come from the vision of a single band leader. In fact, often that's what breaks up the band. I mean, famously, the members of Pink Floyd got really resentful of Roger Waters after The Wall because his ideas were overwhelming the identity of the group. Now, that's definitely not the way Mark, Mike, and Trevor work.

It's very collaborative. But at the same time, somebody has to make a decision what goes into the songs and what becomes canon in this fantasy world they're building. In fact, they often joke they feel like a group playing Dungeons and Dragons

with three dungeon masters and no players. We've had a lot of debates about opting in or not opting into things. So I've been like, well, the character has to opt into every bit of technology

because I'm opting into technology. So I've been like, well, the character has to opt into every bit of technology because I'm opting into technology and that, you know, that's my story and I want to tell that. And then someone will go, yeah, but sometimes you're using technology and you don't realize what's being, you know, you're not in control of it and other people in control of it. Or that's not an interesting story. More interesting story is a redemption story. And so we'll get into these heavy arguments about the story we want to tell when there's just one character. And that's also partially why we started to create a bigger universe, because, well, why not tell that story? But the other writers, artists, and filmmakers who brought into this expanded universe can't just go completely freeform. Mark says they're given guidelines that are very similar to what you get when you play a tabletop role-playing game

that's based on a pre-existing world, like the Star Wars RPG game. I remember learning the idea of script immunity. Your characters in your Star Wars D&D group can run into Luke Skywalker, but you can't kill him if you're in the middle of episode five. He's got to go on to do other things. So the idea of the fan fiction

helps us continue to build the world and layer and when it does make sense and it doesn't contradict and it respects the script immunity and the spine of the story that we still a work in progress but are working our butts off on that's when we go you know what that's amazing and we actually might ourselves dive into this half-melted android dog named Melty. Like, totally something that came about where we just took a left turn and were like, oh, that's canon. That's canon now. Yeah.

So then what does visuals bring to it? Because you guys certainly also want to encourage there to be a visual element. As many of these other, you know, musical worlds often have, you know have you know they end up having movies you know made around them and artwork why why is that that then also important i started thinking of so i add i do a lot of the visuals for the band and i work in animation i start to try to animate things and in some ways i want the visuals to be like a little push off to people to to say it's okay to start imagining or it's okay to to have sci-fi associations with these songs yeah i mean also makes sense for your story too because i mean i imagine that in aaron's world um they're probably taking bits and pieces of pop culture anyway as part of the sort of the

creation of this virtual world yeah he gets it or maybe i'm just now adding myself in my own version i've just added this you know welcome to the world yes ready player one aspect absolutely absolutely like please i have a question for you if that's that's okay of course when you play with your dnd group do you guys ever play to music sometimes yeah actually this one guy's got an app where he'll take out he'll play a certain background music to uh to whatever whatever's going on um yeah and like for me i know in in both i played star wars and i was just playing a board game with with my girlfriend and a buddy the other night we were playing this game called level seven and i

put on the new arrival soundtrack and it's a two-dimensional game where we're escaping aliens and stuff, but the imagination was so piqued by having that creepy music on. It just elevated the whole experience. I think that's the benefit of creating an imaginary world through music. I mean, of all the different creative mediums, music leaves so much unsaid. Something about music that I really love is that it conveys emotion, but it doesn't convey images.

You have to create the images yourself. It's also very personal. By its nature, you have to imagine. Yeah, your mind wanders when you listen to music. But if the musicians have built a certain framework, they can act as your spirit guide so that when you listen to music, you become the world builder.

Well, that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Mark Ash, Mike Forsyth, and Trevor Walker of Vertigo Drift, which, by the way, was not the band's original name. No, the original band name that we were working under was amazing. We were playing under a joke band name called the Indoor Conspiracy, which was a conspiracy that the Empire actually bred

and created the Ewoks and put them on the moon. They were part of their own downfall. I'm glad they went with Vertigo Drift. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emalinski. My site is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. And my next episode is going to continue along this theme of concept albums. I'll be talking with two hip-hop artists that are imagining what it's like to be classic video game characters. what it's like to be classic video game characters.

This is the story of a lost little girl growing into a woman in search of love and acceptance across the universe. The only thing she's ever been attached to is a cybernetic power suit with an arm cannon. Welcome to Metroid. Welcome to Metroid. Yeah, even E.T. Welcome to Metro.