EAR WHACKS
by Jonathan D. King

Tapping a barely noticeable beat with the heel of her black knee-high leather boots, the chanteuse seemed to float through the crowd along with her voice. She sang, eyes closed, breathlessly swaying in a slinky turquoise dress. Her voice caressed the transfixed audience in a delicate manner like fog—occasionally thickening, predominantly ethereal, completely mesmerizing. The bass player looped grooving bass lines over a simple beat kept on a four-piece drum kit as the guitarist layered melody fed through an effects box onto the shimmering soundscape. On a Friday night in early November, under the blacklit hammered tin ceilings at the Rhinecliff Hotel, Outloud Dreamer was weaving sonic tapestries crafted around the sylphid vocals of Sarah Medenbach.

Outloud Dreamer’s critically acclaimed independent release Drink the Sky was conceived as a studio collaboration between bass player Carl Adami and vocalist Sarah Medenbach. A thin brunette in her last semester of studying voice at SUNY New Paltz, Sarah’s languid style recalls Beth Gibbons of Portishead, Margot Timmons of the Cowboy Junkies, and Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star. For live performances Outloud Dreamer has added guitarist Chris Lané and drummer John Watson. The lush songs from Drink the Sky have been stripped down and rearranged without the piano that Sarah played on the album, the looping samples, or layers of nuanced vocals. Rather than detracting from the show, the simple arrangements serve as an excellent showcase for Sarah Medenbach’s exceptional vocal talents and poignant lyricism.

After the show Carl, Sarah and I agreed to meet for breakfast the next day at the Clove Valley Cafe in High Falls—at noon—breakfast hour for musicians. We talked over the clinking of silver and china and jazz, and the wailing of a battery-powered doll with a realistic cry that would fill the room throughout our meal/interview (think Eraserhead). The child who brought the toy must have been out with his deaf grandparents because the mechanical crying did not stop. Carl is in his mid thirties with a slim build, sandy hair and a sly, silly sense of humor. He seemed amused by the wailing toy. “You’re going to have fun listening to this. You have to let me know if you have fun,” as he chuckled at the intermittent screeching.

“What’s going to be fun is seeing the expression on the kid’s face when I rip the batteries out of his doll,” I said a little too loudly, to no avail.

When I asked how Carl and Sarah met, Carl said, “I was doing this techno ambient thing with this guy from England and we got some interest from a couple of labels. We did this showcase in the city that all these label people were supposed to come to and they didn’t. On the way home I was like, ‘We need to step this up a notch, we need vocals.’ …I heard about Sarah [a voice student at SUNY] from my wife Melissa and our neighbor…We found that we thought together similarly and wrote a bunch of stuff pretty quickly and we were just like, wow.”

I inquired about their respective roles in the songwriting process. Carl answered, “It’s intertwined. We believe in accidents, like when you keep recording too long or start a loop at the wrong place, and then you listen to it and you are like, that’s kind of cool…[We have] No preconceived notions of what a track is going to be. What’s almost as important is getting out of the way of the music and letting the music happen. You pick it out of the air…Discipline and quality control are very important. A song is more than just a good groove. You have to have a good melody, good lyrics, all the parts, or you end up thinking you have something that you don’t.”
Sarah added, “I think that it’s a great thing to have a musical partner as opposed to being a solo artist. You come up with a lot of ideas on your own and the other person comes up with ideas, and when you put them together, it seems stronger somehow.”
Carl offered, “And if there is any shite involved, it is suddenly very clear.”

“It develops your editing skills, working with another person,” Sarah said.

The comfort of their creative collaboration was obvious throughout the interview as Sarah and Carl freely finished each other’s sentences and injected their views.

Musicians have always needed a patron to help them survive and focus on their craft. The recording industry has assumed that role in the modern era and Darwin’s law of survival is in full effect as countless artists compete for favor among labels at night while working day jobs fulltime. Drink the Sky was recorded at Carl’s home in the Rice N’ Beans Southeast Studio in High Falls. “We recorded and mixed everything at my studio, and I did my best to kind of master it, but my insecurity is why it’s not credited on the CD.”
As with any band that has yet to find a patron, they have found that surviving in the Hudson Valley while producing music can be overwhelming at times. As well as attending college, Sarah works at a health food store leaving limited time to pursue Outloud Dreamer. Carl is employed as a courier which he says gives him a lot of quality time in the car to listen to fresh recordings from his studio. “I actually get a lot of work done when I’m driving. Being in the car forces you to listen to the whole recording as opposed to breaking it down into all it’s parts… I think I want to do an entire car concept album. Conceived, recorded and only for listening in the car.”

In addition to introducing him to Sarah, Carl credits his wife Melissa with much of the work that has kept the Outloud Dreamer dream alive, including handling bookings, Web design, and graphics.

They are working on new material for the next album but would like to score a record deal to aid the production. Carl continued, “We would like to get ourselves in a position of doing this fulltime and nothing else. Unfortunately we are in the proving-ground stage. We need to have our butts kicked… It’s the way the industry works. A large part of our day and our week is taken up paying bills and putting food on the table. When you finally get to concentrate on music, [you] put the toothpicks in the eyelids and have an extra cup of coffee and go. We have to prove to ourselves and people in the industry that we’re serious about this…Then hopefully we will eventually be put in a position that will enable us to do our job properly in the right conditions and so we can supply [a label] with the product that they need to do their job properly... I get impatient, but it’s a slow process…But hey, we’re HUNGRY. Make sure you put that in big letters.”

“We’re a food obsessed band,” they said in unison.

“Wherever we go, food takes priority,” said Carl.

“Good food,” Sarah added. “We’re going to get our own chef when we go on the road.”
Brunch drew to a close with the toy baby still screeching and as we finished our coffees and settled the tab I asked if they had anything to add. Carl promptly answered, “3,000,564 plus 57…I’ve always wanted to add that.” Then he winced. “Baaaad joke, don’t print that…”

After a summer of touring the Northeast with a focus on NYC, Outloud Dreamer is in a holding pattern waiting to hear back from a number of interested labels and does not have any December shows planned at this point.
Drink the Sky is available over the band’s Web site and at the Green Cottage in High Falls. Future Outloud Dreamer performances will be listed in Nightlife Highlights and posted on the Web at www.outlouddreamer.com.