Creating music for 3epkano is a process of patient exploration and tentative discovery. The work that results is an admission of what we don't know and might never be able to understand. It is not about moving from confusion to clarity - getting lost is the goal - being forced to break your old habits and understandings, giving up your old forms of complacency. For us, genuine musical performance is about not-knowing. The result, we hope, is music of genuine discovery. Allowing yourself to let go, to lose control, is central to our conception of music - there is no singular purpose, meaning, or point to prove. There is only exploring and moving on, with no end to the process of experiencing, and no goal to reach.
3epkano are:
Matthew Nolan: electric guitar
Cameron Doyle: electric guitar
James Macken: drums
Richard McCullough: keyboards/organ
Lioba Petrie: cello
Karen Dervan: viola
David Gough: bass guitar
Si Schroeder is a six-foot hairy male who makes 'music'. This 'music' generally sounds like classic songs in the Simon & Garfunkel vein mixed with an old recording of a drunken Slovenian orchestra playing backwards through an AC-15. There's a little bit of Africa in there too. And, somewhere within this melange, Si sighs in a soft, whispered voice of love, mental illness, international terrorism, and the problems he has with his homeland. He loves archive recordings of ethnic, folk, trad, jazz and classical music - the older, the better. He also loves sixties pop music and psychedelia. Some electronica and instrumental hip-hop also gets through his radar. And he also has his own thing to say about where we all came from - and where we're going: which, in Si's case, is somewhere pretty special...
The Unseen Guest make music that is difficult to pin down. Wedding traditional Indian instruments with Western song-writing and guitar, and covering it with rich vocal harmonies, they apply this basic idea to songs that come from every end of the spectrum - sounding sometimes like a mix of American folk blues and Carnatic music, sometimes like a Parisian taking on Nick Drake, at others like Buena Vista by way of Mumbai. They manage to incorporate Western music with traditional Indian instruments in a way that makes it genuinely new, avoiding patchouli-scented cliché or Bollywood bombast.
