Roar Shack, baby: Enter Mid-Market’s new experimental music hub

I’ve recently attended a wonderfully wild geospatial mapping-meets-saxophonic improvisation happening at Luggage Store Gallery, and found myself raving to psychedelic trance from an all-trans DJ lineup in an old tech office basement, but so far the grand, city-sanctioned “musical revival” of the city’s ghosty core has largely bypassed the city’s thriving experimental music scene, in favor of gonzo EDM mega-pageantry and fabulously vibrant global sounds (which, hurrah!—as long as it benefits those who live there).

Now, one of our grand forces in exploratory auditory experiences, duo The Living Earth Show, is launching an experimental music hub and “creative laboratory”—cheekily called Roar Shack, make of it what you will—in the space of the former Mr. Smith nightclub on 7th Street near Market. A series of “Roar Shack Live!” events will activate the main floor of the vacant, well-appointed space, starting on Fri/20 with Music For Hard Times, “an ambient masterpiece and audiovisual love letter to San Francisco created by The Living Earth Show, composer Danny Clay, and visual artist Jon Fischer.

Living Earth Show’s Andy Meyerson (percussion) and Travis Andrews (guitar) are two of the coolest people in the city. I’ve seen them transform dance company performances by Post:ballet into gravity-defying spectacles of sound, and they’ve partnered with incredible artists M. Lamar and Luciano Chessa for in-your-face extravaganzas that address issues of racism and homophobia (with black leather hoods and electric toothbrushes, of course). Their last major live piece here, Lyra—a dance film with live score broadcast through 75 speakers at the War Memorial’s Taube Theater in 2021—immersed the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in the industrialized beauty of the Eastern California landscape. Oh, and they also found time to help flesh out the Language of the Birds.

Music for Hard Times is the real-space embodiment of a recent project with Clay and Fisher, “an eight movement work crafted using a series of composed ‘calming exercises,'” recorded independently in their homes using instruments, voices, field recordings, and found objects. It will be incredibly exciting to see how The Living Earth Show will transform the disused nightlife space and draw people in with challenging yet satisfying sounds and sights. Especially appealing is the “pay-what-you-can $1 to $100” model for entry, ensuring accessibility to this fabulous experiment.

(Roar Shack, like most such things, may also test some progressives’ willingness to compromise in order to birth much-needed new arts spaces: Mr. Smith owner Max Young, who still owns the building, was an outspoken advocate for the recall of then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin, claiming he was forced to close due to “rampant drug sales” in the area, despite closing before Boudin was even elected; he now says sales have “moved up the block.” The project itself is sponsored by Market Street Arts, an initiative of the Mid Market Business Association and Foundation, which is chaired by the director of property management at commercial real estate giant Rubicon Point Partners, and vice-chaired by Young himself. Not bad in and of itself, and nothing to do with The Living Earth Show’s goals, but the background interests seem a bit plain here.)

I spoke with The Living Earth Show’s Meyerson about Roar Shack’s upcoming shows, and how risk-taking, experimental music can help breathe more life SF.

48 HILLS Roar Shack is exciting not just because we need new experimental music and performance spaces but also because it’s an example of reanimating a vacant nightlife space. How did this whole thing come about?  

ANDY MEYERSON Even though our work is San Francisco-centric, we’ve spent most of the past few years on the road. We’re a San Francisco-based arts organization, and it’s our responsibility as artists to commit to and invest in our home. We thought a powerful way to be a part of revitalizing the City was to do an entire season in vacant spaces and make the ticket price pay-what-you-can.

I reached out to Rob Ready with Market Street Arts last spring, and he put us in touch with Max Young, who ran the bar Mr. Smith until 2019. The space has been vacant since then, and Rob thought it would be an ideal venue for our work. We’ve been working with Market Street Arts ever since, and they’ve been a fantastic partner in brainstorming ways to support the arts as a mechanism for revitalizing downtown.

48 HILLS Can you tell me about some of the musical plans—especially Living Earth Show involvements—for upcoming shows?  I know you’re working with Danny Clay and John Fischer for Music for Hard Times, what’s that going to be like? 

ANDY MEYERSON Our work is definitionally collaborative–we work with artists who use music as a primary artistic medium to create comprehensive aesthetic worlds and artistic vocabularies which which we can realize their most ambitious artistic visions.

We’ll be presenting monthly performances created in collaboration some of the most innovative Bay Area musical artists, including Zachary James Watkins (October), Samuel Carl Adams (December), Mark Applebaum and our band Bucket List (March), Honey Mahogany (April), Terry Riley (May), and a bunch of others.

Music for Hard Times was created in 2020, and we’ve never performed it live for the public here in San Francisco. The piece is an audiovisual love letter to San Francisco, and started from a simple experimental question: Is it possible for us to use the tools of our discipline to make people feel better?

We built the piece with composer Danny Clay and visual/video artist Jon Fischer, and we’re honored to bring it to life as our first show.

48 HILLS I love that you’re considering Roar Shack as a “creative laboratory,” which makes it so much more than just a static venue. Can you tell me a little bit about what that means? 

ANDY MEYERSON One of the most beautiful aspects of experimental music, for us, is that any new piece requires the creation of a new artistic vocabulary and a new aesthetic world in which the piece and the collaboration will exist. We imagine this space as a site to create not just a piece, but to develop these vocabularies and worlds.

When we work with any collaborator in that space, we want to give them the opportunity to try things they otherwise wouldn’t, and foreground exploration and experimentation. And, importantly, we want to allow audience members into the work at that stage: We want to see what it means for everyone to be part of the creation and transmission of an aesthetic world and artistic vocabulary together. 

That looks like totally different things for totally different artists, but the beauty of a development incubator is that folks can experience work at an intimate, vulnerable scale, and hopefully find work and practices they can relate to and feel like they’re part of.

48 HILLS You guys have done so much as the Living Earth Show to support the local scene. What are your true hopes for experimental music’s possibilities of reviving the area? 

ANDY MEYERSON Aw, thanks, that’s nice of you to say! 

Look: I’ve said it before, but my true hope is that people see San Francisco as a place where culture is created, not just consumed. Art defines and articulates culture, values, and place. The more ambitious, uncompromising, and innovative the artistic production, the more ambitious, uncompromising, and innovative the values being articulated can be.

The revitalization implications of uncompromising art are severalfold. First and foremost, I think people would be interested in seeing and hearing interesting things. So, if art is uncompromising and new, there will be people who will come to see it.

On a larger scale, however, art helps define civic reputation. If San Francisco becomes the best place in the world for artists to live and work and make things, that has profoundly positive downstream implications for how the world views the City and how our City interacts with the rest of the world.

THE LIVING EARTH SHOW’S “ROAR SHACK LIVE!” series launches Fri/20, 6:30pm-9:30pm, at 34 7th Street, SF. More info here.