This week Liquid Music welcomes Bon Iver and TU Dance to the stage for a much-anticipated performance of their collaborative project 'Come Through' at the Palace Theatre in St. Paul. In this blog feature, writer Steve Marsh talks to the artists behind the visual aspects of the project, Eric Timothy Carlson and Aaron Anderson.

*All gifs by Carlson/Anderson.*Photos by Graham Tolbert — *All gifs by Carlson/Anderson.
*Photos by Graham Tolbert

In the fall of 2016, I was working on a story on PEOPLE, a new creative network being formed at the Funkhaus Berlin, a hulking former East German radio complex on the banks of the River Spree. All the studios were assigned a number, and I kept getting drawn to Saal 6 for much of the week, where various members of the Minneapolis noise ensemble Marijuana Deathsquads were camped out. The hang was expectedly caliginous, so just imagine how high I was when the artist Eric Timothy Carlson handed me a copy of his new book, NYPLPCETC 01-04, a fat, red-covered, 400-page picture book of images he had culled from the New York Public Library Picture Collection.

Carlson and I had circulated in the same Minneapolis art scene for years, but I had only recently gotten to know him, this artist who always seemed to have a pencil in his hand, and a sketchbook in his lap, who grew up in Owatonna and attended MCAD before eventually moving to Brooklyn. I first met him at Justin Vernon’s April Base Studios in Fall Creek, Wisconsin, when Carlson was working with Vernon on creating a new Bon Iver aesthetic around the recording of 22, A Million. By the the fall of 2016, Carlson had become very involved in developing the semiotics for Vernon’s new social network, PEOPLE, overseeing the painting of a gigantic PEOPLE banner in the Funkhaus’ main hall. But when Carlson handed me his book in Saal 6, I remember sitting on a Bauhaus-appropriate German couch and leafing through image after curated image—photographs of people, people working as cops, people protesting, people lost in the ruins—and I remember the images numbing my brain, unfolding with a kind of punishing psychedelic effect, but I couldn’t stop looking, couldn’t stop turning the pages, and the images had this cumulative power, forcing me to re-see things I thought I’d seen before, cycling me through melancholy to disgust to astonishment.

TU Dance and Bon Iver invited Carlson and his artistic partner and Brooklyn studio-mate Aaron Anderson to collaborate on the visual component of Come Through. Anderson, also an MCAD alumnus, has been working closely with Carlson for years, since founding Hardland/Heartland (with fellow Minneapolis artist Crystal Quinn), a Minneapolis-based art collective, in 2006. Back then, Carlson and Anderson shared a penchant for collaborative performance with musicians, and a shared interest in esoteric text, ancient symbols, and experimental film—those interests persist in their work on Come Through. The two artists created hundreds of images for this performance and worked very closely with TU Dance and Bon Iver, sometimes remotely, sometimes on site at April Base, and finally during a week of intensive rehearsal last month at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. Ahead of this weekend’s premiere, we discussed the roots of their partnership, how this project came to be, and their mode of working together leading up to their debut performance at the Palace Theater.

Steve Marsh: How did the two of you begin working together?

Eric Timothy Carlson: This pretty Minneapolis trippy guy, Derek Maxwell, used to host these drawing parties at his apartment, where all the tables would have paper taped onto them. People would show up and hang out and party and work on these collaborative communal drawings. Everyone was pretty good at drawing, but Aaron was really sick at drawing. We started talking about working on a comic book, and coming up with these bigger narrative ideas that quickly kind of like superseded any comic book idea. So it went straight into collaborating with Crystal. She was making costumes and fabric art, as well as being a really talented drawer and painter. The first Hardland/Heartland show was actually an installation at the Soap Factory with Derek Maxwell and Lazerbeak. We made these inflatable floating mountains, and made a mural like a giant title card, and Crystal made costumes for everybody. Derek Maxwell was in a band called the Gamut, and our setting for the show had Gamut as these wandering musicians searching for the tune from this ancient warrior, Lazerbeak. So it was this noise band with this art installation inside of an elevator shaft. And the Gamut partied and played music, and when they unlocked the key to this tomb, Lazerbeak emerged and DJed for the rest of the night.

Aaron Anderson: The blog was the only reason we were called Hardland/Heartland.

Eric Timothy Carlson: The blog was like a public journal, but the real work was these kind of events and parties and installations.

*'Never Better' album cover, designed by Eric Timothy Carlson.*

You went on to design the CD packaging for P.O.S.’ Never Better, and to design Gayngs’ iconic symbol.

ETC: Never Better was the biggest [album design project]. I had a number of projects with Building Better Bombs—those were the first ones. I was working with a friend of mine, Greg Hubacek, who was deeper into the hip hop realm. Did a mixtape with Plain Ol’ Bill. Fort Wilson Riot were friends of mine and I did some stuff with them. We’re all connected.

With this project, your imagery is so esoteric that it allows the person looking at it to come up with their own reference points and their own associations. So I don’t know if it’s fair to start with discussing process. You are obviously trying to protect whoever is seeing this imagery from having the images defined for them.

ETC: Well in a way I think talking about process avoids telling you what it is supposed to be in the end, as opposed to just telling you what it’s supposed to be in the end!

AA: Our desks are pretty close, as far as process is concerned.

When Justin Vernon invited you to do this, did he play music for you? Did you bring your own ideas because you’ve worked with him in the past?

ETC: Uri (Director of TU Dance) and Justin had been in touch and Justin had been talking about the project. And in their conversation, the 22, A Million lyric videos came up, just as an, “oh, it would be great to have this component present in the collaboration.” So it was brought up to us and just hearing about it was exciting. Something that no one involved had ever done before. [Uri and Justin] were able to get together for a session before we were able to be around for it. So we kind of got some videos of the dance’s progress and we were given kind of audio sketches. That’s what we were initially given. So at that phase of it, there was very little hard direction for us. So I was familiar with some of the songs, and some of the songs were new material. There were loose notes about how this thing could be. But it wasn’t until we got together, all of us in the same place, that we were able to see some of the dance take form in the space with the music being played live, and then we received an actual set of notes from the choreography. Uri has this vision of this whole thing in a way. He’s the one that has the whole dance in mind and knows what all the dancers are doing for the whole show. He has listened to all of the music and knows it inside out, as far as the outline of it is concerned. As far as what the performance on stage is, and how it relates to the music, he kind of has the conductor hat on. So getting notes from him proved to be really important.

So a quick digression: I would say a lot of your work reminds me, I don’t mean to sound trite, but of Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi or Fricke’s Baraka or Jodorowky’s Holy Mountain, in that the images that you sample deliver more meaning cumulatively, rather than standing on their own. This one, in particular, while you’re watching it, you have shots of money, and then shots of ears, and then shots of an empty hall without an audience. It’s almost psychedelic in the fact that they’re images that we’ve all seen before, but when they’re recontextualized in the order they’re presented, and as the backdrop to a dance performance, then they have new meaning.

ETC: Totally.

So that kind of psychedelic, shamanistic vibe—the term Terence McKenna used is a “syncretic experience,” the merging of different cultural traditions in your brain. Is that the intent of your work?

ETC: I feel like all of that is totally on as far as the approach and what we’re open to and what we’re producing. I feel like once we start working on a project with a narrative where the subject is humanity, I think it works really well for that. I’m not super interested in making an explicit character-based narrative.

Why is that? Why intentionally be esoteric or obtuse? Why leave so much work to be done by the audience to actually provide meaning to the narrative?

AA: I don’t think it’s a lot of work. It’s just not the usual type of work that some people are asked to do. To me the visuals feel very specific at times. But esoteric to one person is a form of specificity to another person, and if you don’t share the same point of view with that person, that’s the opportunity to feel weird, or off-put, or mystified even. I think that personally, that’s the only thing I’m good at—doing it that way. Being confused about something is better than not caring about something. And in general, you’ll take more home with you later if you can get it that way. Whether or not you’re into it or not, whatever, that’s past my ultimate realm of concern, but really it’s more effective work that way.

ETC: It’s also speaking for a lot of different people, and to a lot of different people, a lot of different audiences. And a lot of it is about asking questions and there’s no solution.

The interesting thing that I thought about during this show, is that there are a lot more words than you usually find in your work, or maybe the words just stood out to me so much. Maybe it will feel different when I’m in the theater and am more focused on the dancers or the band. But the words stood out to me so much. And words have more of an authoritarian quality than imagery. Words actually connote more explicit meaning than say, a photograph of a blooming rose. You can be more specific with words. Was using more text intentional?

ETC: It definitely occurred. As part of the process, where again, the initial kind of conversation about our involvement was based on the [22, A Million] lyric videos. And there was no intent of making lyric videos for this performance, but we used a structure that was established in those lyric videos. Where every part of a movement in the song gets an introduction piece and that leads you through the performance as a whole. And then a way to continue organizing what will go into each section, was just kind of parsing the notes that we were receiving about the intent of the choreography for each section. And some of it is stated very explicitly: “This is what this means.” A lot of that stuff was really interesting. Where a viewer, especially a viewer unaccustomed to contemporary dance, sure some of these things would be picked up, but there are so many different things—are you looking at it formally, are you looking at it physically, are you looking at it conceptually, specifically about the dance in particular.

AA: But also coming at being really comfortable from the lyric videos. The way that that matched with the music up until that point, dance was the point of this. That’s the driver of the thing in a cool way. The dance.

You’re right, I think we grew up in similar scenes of music and visual art. I would say my ability to pick out references and to understand the language of visual art, or the references or language of popular music, is much more on point than my ability to do that with dance. I’m much more comfortable with the language of both of those mediums than I am with dance.

ETC: [One of the members of the band] BJ Burton was talking about seeing one of the guys in the front row [at MASS MoCA] looking at them during the whole performance and he was like, “why are you not watching the dancers? Watch something! We’re just standing here.”

But if you’re ignorant of the tradition and the nomenclature, like most people are when it comes to dance, you’re going to latch onto things in the room that they understand.

ETC: Totally. And see who they want to see.

AA: If you’re someone who goes to a TU Dance show, or something who would go see a Bon Iver show, you’re going to be puzzled when you leave. Either way. It will change your day, at least, in a good way.

I think being confused for an hour and 15 minutes could be a healthy thing. Maybe we shouldn’t be so sure of ourselves right now.

ETC: Yeah.

AA: Like I said, I don’t think that person will be confused the whole time, but there will be a period of acclimation. And it was interesting to see the rehearsal up close and then having to be positioned in the back of the theater. Because the system we made is more or less played along with the band. It’s not like we’re setting it up and walking away.

ETC: We’re currently pretty analog, playing through the video stuff. None of it is pre-set.

So you have control over the performance?

ETC: We have 200 videos and we have them organized and sequenced, but we can skip back in between things, and every intro of a new video piece is triggered by hand. So a lot of it isn’t necessarily falling on the beat, but it’s made to work in context of a beat.

So every performance will be slightly different?

ETC: Every performance will be very different! But it will be nuanced.

How many songs are in the performance?

AA: Like eight?

ETC: No it’s more than that now. It got to a certain point before we got to the final two weeks of building out the program. And so we had built out a program based on everything that we had known, and we got to April Base and by the time we left, it was pretty different. There were multiple working titles too—so we would call a song one thing, and the band might call it another, and the dancers might call it another. So there’s definitely a lot of fluid pieces in the way it works.

When somebody walks out of the theater after the show, and has an opportunity to ask you guys or any of the musicians, “what does NO VISUALS” mean? Or what about “BREATHE NOW AND ASCEND?” Will anybody give them a straight answer? Can anybody?

ETC: [Laughs] Well, I think the underlying premise of the whole thing is a message of hope and belief in humanity. The I WANT TO BELIEVE poster at April Base has deep resonance here. It all kind of comes to that push.

AA: I think you would get a straight answer out of most of the people involved. Some of the people might not ever give straight answer, but you’ll get honesty. And I think that’s what is cool about it. That it sort of allows for that kind of excitement. As a person who’s involved in that, it’s so rare to truly feel that.

ETC: I don’t know. Is it really confusing? It is a really mysterious vibe?

Yeah, I would say so. The kind of uplifting melancholy of Justin’s falsetto imbues the whole thing with a feeling I’m familiar with—hopeful sadness I guess. But then your imagery recalls Koyaanisqatsi, which is about an imbalance of nature and technology. Whenever you see flowers and rotting images of decay mixed with money and marching and neoclassical facades, again it can kind of look scary. I think it’s more the emotional content is on that line between being sad and also feeling the uplift that contemplating humanity gives you. It’s really big is what I’m trying to say.

ETC: Yeah. There are a lot of voices, and it’s a cacophony. And the project is a cacophony, but I feel like your read into that is also totally right. It is big. The conversation is big. And it is acknowledging this moment, that it’s a weird time, and the conversation of feeling that kind of tension in the air, and acknowledging that. The intent is to break through some of that and inspire or to ask and believe that something can be done. By us. Everybody. Us.

So would it be fair to me to ask, for instance, one of the most striking images in the entire thing is the flash zoom through all the faces. And it’s a motif that recurs. It’s really explicit, in the center of the piece, and then you flash back to it towards the end. So what idea is that coming from?

ETC: That was a direct response to a note from the choreography. “This could be a sequence of human faces.”

So how many faces are in that thing, and where did you get the faces? I know with your last book, Eric, you spent time culling images from the New York Public Library.

ETC: I don’t know, there’s 50 or 60. There might be more. 75, something like that. That was in the choreography notes for a specific moment. And that was kind of before we had gotten a bigger picture of the whole thing. So we only had a handful of things that we could really work on. So all of those were pulled from royalty free stock photography portrait galleries. So we were just trying to find a functional array of images that I could pull from that. There are certainly images throughout the whole thing that are just pulled from the Internet, and that I feel comfortable in using those from a Google image search. But when it comes to people’s faces, straight up people’s faces, it seemed important to make sure that we had whatever, royalty free free use images. But that section is also interspersed, or the faces are interspersed with the faces of the performers. So we got head shots of everybody in the performance as well, just to make it a little more personal.

AA: It flies a little too fast for anybody to recognize them.

What about the amanita muscaria mushroom—it’s one of the oldest shamanic totems of psychedelia. What was the note that you were responding to there?

ETC: That was growth. All of the growth stuff is less a specific note, but that was the tone. From the very start, knowing what this thing was addressing, this contemporary moment, this struggle that we feel is very real, and the desire to supersede that, without showing that as… I don’t know, people standing triumphantly raising some flag. The mushroom just acknowledges the growth and re-growth and cycles of nature blooming.

AA: And fungus growing is just as interesting as a flower. Even speaking to the complexity to the images in the project, that seemed to be important that that would be there. It’s not just flowers.

ETC: Flowers are too cute.

AA: Too happy. The problem is not solved. It’s just about having a better attitude to go forward.

ETC: And I love a mushroom as an end note. The deep kind of actual systems of mushrooms are a great parallel to humanity, like an unseen system that actually connects. And fungus and the connection of a lot of that material to decay, and that decay and things breaking down play a huge role in things being built again.

Maybe the most dramatic sonic moment in the show is when Justin is unaccompanied and he’s doing these sort of painful field hollers. Part of me was in awe of this white dude that’s singing such an ancient form of suffering, it’s a sound that’s strongly associated with slavery, and it’s accompanied by an image of an actual field, or brush, this kind of grey kind of ochre, muted kind of field plants. Where did you get that imagery from and what does that image mean?

ETC: So it’s in Central Park and there’s a grove of trees with a path going through it. And if you revisit the image there’s a clump of the leaves in the middle of it, and it forms this inexplicable, nearly unbelievable face. There’s like a head floating in this image. And when I walked by it, I saw it in the corner of my eye and it stopped me. It felt super surreal. But it’s a menacing headed tree, and it kind of follows you as you walk past it.

Thank you for indulging me. It does feel like cheating where you’re asking the artist to tell you what [stuff] means.

ETC: Yeah.

Everybody is going to become disoriented or confused at some point, so is there anything you would suggest to prepare for it?

AA: Bring an open mind. Sorry to have a lame answer. But a willingness to challenge your point of view.

ETC: Coming into it expecting a thing is the wrong way to do it. It’s an 90 minute thing, and it’s not a typical music show.

Maybe a warning is good: “This is not going to be normal.”

ETC: You could watch Holy Mountain and Koyaanisqatsi.

AA: Or you could watch some Bruce Conner films.

Steve Marsh is a writer interested in culture, extreme experience and performance. He’s the senior writer for Mpls.St.Paul Magazine and has been published in The Wall Street Journal, GQ, Pitchfork, New York Magazine, and Grantland.

Eric and Aaron's work will be presented as part of TU Dance and Bon Iver's "Come Through" at the Palace Theater, commissioned by Liquid Music, on April 19, 20, and 21, 2018. Tickets to all four performances are SOLD OUT.