The Landon Caldwell Interview
Indianapolis, Indiana-based multi-instrumentalist, composer, and sonic student of experimental exploration Landon Caldwell has been on the melodic market for nearly two decades. Having participated in groups such as Burnt Ones, Thee Open Sex, and Creeping Pink, Caldwell’s incredible output is nothing to take for granted. Blending and bending genres from one end of the galaxy to the other, Caldwell’s alchemical abilities to shift sounds and tonal textures into this fever dream of tangible teachings are sophisticated, as demonstrated throughout his diverse catalog of cosmic content.
Are you originally from Indianapolis? As a multi-instrumentalist who plays everything from the flute to the guitar, piano, and marimba, to name a few, were you around musicians growing up? How did you initially connect with sound? Tell me about your culture’s brilliant relationship with rhythm and sound, and how this translates into full-on singer-songwriters, bands, and other forms of creative expression.
Courtesy of the artist and COMPANION. Photo: Anna Powell Denton
I grew up in a rural community called Elwood, about 45 minutes from Indianapolis, with a population of around 10,000. I was around virtually no musicians growing up and had no formal training. This might be why I don’t play any of those instruments well. For a long time, the narrative I held onto was that I fell in love with music when my group of friends and I found punk and metal when we were 12, simultaneously getting into skateboarding and riding our bikes all over the 4 square miles of Elwood from dusk to dawn. But as I’ve aged, my interest in sound goes back further. There are home videos of me doing this sort of beatboxing and lots of tapping, humming, etc. I remember before I could wipe my ass, I would sit on the toiler and enjoy the silence of the well insulated bathroom. The funniest story is when I was riding my bike in the alley and skidded, causing a rock to fly across the street and hit the neighbor’s gutter. The sound echoed through the neighborhood. I was enthralled and, innocently, proceeded to throw rocks at her house to hit the gutter and activate the echo, until the old lady who lived there came storming out the back door in her undergarments. My aunt was watching me and made me stick my nose in the corner, which wasn’t a punishment I was used to, and made the entire situation all the more absurd. I like this story because it encapsulates my approach to sound and art. Mostly it’s centered around curiosity. You grow up in this place everyone considers boring, and, if you’ve got a curious mind, you get good at finding things to hold your interest. But with that curiosity, there is a strong desire for possibility, which is central to my work. There are active systems of oppression that want to squash the working class’s ability to imagine possibilities, new and different worlds. I want to make music that imagines utopias where there are ‘just cornfields’. I want to create work that finds depth and riches in a typical domestic day.
Photo: Doug Fellegy
Who were some of your earliest influences during your formative years, and how quickly did the gap from listening to music to playing music happen for you? Before establishing a solo career, you participated in numerous bands and projects such as Burnt Ones, Thee Open Sex, and Creeping Pink. Tell me about these outfits and those early days of writing/recording, before the release of “Black Beauty.”
The gap between getting into music and playing music was small. Around the time I got my first CDs from the local Karma Records (Black Sabbath, The Ramones, Pantera, Nirvana, among a lot of embarrassing stuff), I started mowing yards to save up to buy a guitar. Playing music in combination with access to the internet quickly led to a deepened interest in heavy music like Converge, Tragedy, the Jesus Lizard, along with similar stuff happening in the Midwest scene at the time, like Breather Resist, Phoenix Bodies, etc. It took a few years, but my friends and I finally started a band when I was 15. We played our first show in Elwood. My cousin booked the show with some other North Central Indiana bands. That night, I shared the bill with future friends and collaborators like Mark Tester and Sam Thompson (Vacation Club, Total Disgust). Not to date myself, but that was 20 years ago. Mark and I regularly shared bills for the next 7 years, then I moved to San Francisco, where his band at the time, Burnt Ones, had relocated a few years prior. Within 6 months of living there, I was asked to join the band. We toured a lot during this time and spent time in the studio making records. That was the period I started to come into my own. With Burnt Ones, the band worked on the album “Gift,” which was a change in sound for the group. Simultaneously, I was working on Creeping Pink stuff with help and input from other folks in Burnt Ones and other friends in the Bay like William Keihn and Aaron Diko (both Hoosiers).
We eventually moved to LA, where I made the first Creeping Pink LP, “Mirror Woods,” in my apartment. Burnt Ones went on tour in Europe, and Mark and I had these independent epiphanies where we each realized we belonged in the Midwest. We chatted after and realized we both had made plans to move back. We felt very connected and interested in things that were happening there. Around 2015, I moved back to Indianapolis, and Mark did shortly thereafter. Around this time, our interests shifted from songwriting to improvisation. We did solo, duo, and ensemble improvisation sets at State Street Pub. We joined legendary outfit Thee Open Sex and had the pleasure of improvising with some of my favorite Hoosier musicians like the group’s mastermind, John Dawson, Tyler Damon, Ben Lumsdaine, and others. Mark and I also started playing from time to time with American Cream, recording albums with the group in Indianapolis and Minneapolis. We also started playing with Crazy Doberman around that time, making a handful of LPs at A-Space, our studio with John Dawson and Sharlene Birdsong. I had my first kid around that time, and couldn’t tour with the group, but I helped record and played on a handful of the group’s releases. Those experiences pretty much cemented my love of improvisation and free music.
You’ve since released a handful of cassette-only albums like “Global Drift” and “Bicycle Day” in the past. Tell me about working with Mark Tester on your album “Homes.” What was the overall process and approach to this record? How did collaborating with Tester come about? What was the overall experience of bringing this material to life? Is there anything else you would like to share further with the readers?
Mark and I made “Homes” during the pandemic. That was some of the only music I made with other people in real life during that period. We recorded parts of the album in Mark’s backyard. It feels like a timeless time capsule, a record I needed at the time. It captures that fluctuation in our subjective sense of time, the big slowdown. The structure of the album is based on a day. It’s a soft and domestic record, with lots of organic and unclocked sounds, a reaction to our previous period of heavily sequenced music. Unfortunately, it was in queue purgatory with another label for two years before Mark and I decided to release it on Medium Sound. (We had a follow-up record done upon the release of “Homes.”) I made some remote ensemble records under the Flower Head Ensemble moniker around this time. Those are some of my favorite things I’ve released, like “Simultaneous Systems” (Moon Glyph) and “Companion Environ” (Medium Sound), as well as the highly collaborative album “Deep Strand” (Trouble In Mind). On those albums, I got to work with some amazing collaborators like Thom Nguyen, Mac Blackout, Jim Marlowe, John Collins McCormick, and others. Around this time, my focus shifted to sound art and installation work, which has become a big part of my practice. I’ve worked in the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Indiana State Museum, and I’m regularly engaging with other artists in exhibitions at galleries in Indianapolis. To move away from social media, I’m sharing a monthly newsletter with updates on shows, releases, exhibitions, and links to exclusive unreleased music. I’d love it if folks signed up. Find that and links to other things I discussed here.
