A chat about music and improvisation with Rin Larping

?Following the recent arrival of Rin Larping's debut cassette, Stratum, bass clarinet and guitar player Lindsay Smith took a few minutes to talk about the personal aspects of playing music, improvising while embodying different personas, and crafting immersive environments with music. Stratum takes shape as a lo-fi excursion into the subtleties of Smith's voice in a bed of warm, distressed sounds. Each of the seven songs contained within captures a real-time journey into the layers of sound that meld together, stamping in time a stage of Smith's musical evolution.   
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?Throughout November, Smith plays two shows including a Nov. 15 performance at Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery, and a Nov. 30 show at 529.
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? What brought you to Atlanta?
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? I spent a lot of time after high school in Chapel Hill, but I grew up in the suburbs of Raleigh. It's basically all the same area. I was going to school for art and for music performance in Greensboro, N.C., and was really unhappy with the teaching. It was a very traditional school. I did bass clarinet in the music program, and everything I was learning was cello music. The only bass clarinet I could find was very contemporary — from the '40s on — and no one would let me play it. I just wasn't happy in school. I dropped out and moved here.
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? I had a friend here who said, "I have a couch that you can stay on ..." What forced me to move was that I went on a nine-week tour across the country with my friend Andrew Weathers. I got a tattoo of North Carolina while I was in Iowa City, IA. So that was the deciding moment: I can't have a North Carolina tattoo and keep living there.
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? And now you've recently released your first real recording, a cassette tape?
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? Yes, it's on a sub label of Full Spectrum called Little Field. Little Field is a town in West Texas where the label has essentially bought a retail space that we're all going to use. I don't know what all is happening with the space, but it's in an old oil town where there's nothing really happening. The space was super cheap, and we're turning it into a residence. It's maybe two hours away from Odessa, Tex. It's pretty rural, maybe 3,000 people are there.
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? Andrew released three tapes, each based on a different location, using a screen shot from Google maps. My tape is called Stratum, like layers in rocks. I like to use a lot of layering, and I have an affinity for swamps, nature, the feeling of extreme humidity. In a lot of the work I do I like to have an environment made by the music. That heaviness that comes form being out in extreme humidity. I've been reading so much about the Mississippi Delta lately, and they lose like a football field of land everyday to erosion. I found this awesome article that had pictures of where the Delta ends — all these roads in all these little fish towns. So I went on Google maps to find a road, and the road I found was flooded over. That's kind of what inspired my tape.
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? Does anyone else play on the tape?
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? It's just me, and it's the first time I've released anything that features just me and my own work.
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? Do you perform with other musicians often?
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? I have played with Robby's Kee's Nows project every once in a while. I just hopped on a few shows with him, but that's about it. I like playing with other people, but it's so difficult.
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? What makes it so difficult?
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? I have a very particular skill set, and that is bass clarinet, and not really knowing how to play guitar. That's not in too much demand. Ross in Del Vinici has an improv group that I'll play with sometimes, called Immaculate Collection. I'll play bass clarinet with him sometimes. It's surfy improv kind of stuff.
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? My first real band being an ensemble, I don't have a problem playing with other people. But when I first moved here, being a girl in the experimental scene, it didn't seem like there were as many people into it. So a girl who's new in town, playing weird improv music ... When you move to a new town and start meeting people, everyone says they want to get together and jam sometime. But I don't really want to jam with anybody. I just like playing by myself. It's a very personal thing. And I'll play with other people if they have something they want to do. But I don't think I have ever been in a band where you write songs and then go play them.
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? When you perform live, you improvise the music, but there is a certain set of sounds that you're comfortable working within.
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? Yes, I try to have parameters, and a loose basis of what I'm going to do. That's what made it hard to make a tape. I kept thinking, 'I need to go write some songs.' But I'm not a songwriter in the way that I like to play. You can either make a tape and develop what you make off of that, or develop songs and put those on tape or on a record. I like the way I do it, it feels like a very natural way of growing a piece.
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? When you moved here did you find that being a woman presented boundaries in the experimental music scene, or were people open to working with you right off the bat?
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? Moving to Atlanta is the number one reason that I am a musician. In Chapel Hill, I had some friends playing experimental music, and they'd ask me to play with them from time to time, but I was never asked to play a set somewhere. I met Robby at a show here and he asked if I wanted to play a show at the Goat Farm. I'd never performed by myself, and so I did a piano and bass clarinet show. Afterward, I had all of these people talking to me saying you should come do this show or that show. Getting these opportunities, doing Invent Room Pop nights, none of that would have happened for me anywhere else.
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? Tell me about how the name Rin Larping came about.

? I used to hang out with this whole group of people at Robby Kee's house, making droning music together. We'd just hang out and talk about music and stuff. One night we came up with the idea of people larping while playing drone music. I've been learning a lot about larp culture. It's an interesting thing: If you got to Sweden there's this whole Nordic larp movement. I recently read about how this one whole larp is about people going to a 4th of July party in the '80s, and how AIDS culture affects them for the next three years. A lot of more contemporary larping is about dealing with psychological issues. For me, this all comes from being a very nervous person. Being on stage is almost like larping for me. It's not me. It's a persona, and I try to distance myself and create a new mindset and new environments while I'm playing.
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? Why adopt a different persona and create a different environment?
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? I'm not too sure why I do it ... But it has to do with being a nervous person.
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? What are you nervous about? Being judged or being heckled or ridiculed?
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? I think it's just because I am a nervous person, and as much as I am a creative person, you want the attention that comes from a performance, and to express yourself. Expressing what I want during a performance can be difficult. Recently, there was a panel about body politics at the Big House. I was on the panel with a couple of other people, and we talked about what it means to be a performance artist. Something that's come up for me is that words often fail me in real life. Trying to bring feelings that I have through my music and expressing that is difficult. I've tried to write lyrics but it's never right.
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? Do you worry that it will be taken the wrong way? Misinterpreted?
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? I don't think I've ever minded if people take something the wrong way, or if someone is offended. I would love to be offensive at some point. What I've been working on lately is pretty, and it's nice, and somewhat interesting. But it's also not as envelope-pushing as I would like to be. That will come with time.
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? Anything that I see, or something that I would like to use in my music, I try to keep all of that for the right time. For me, playing is such an exhausting experience, and not just physically. Playing bass clarinet is tiring. But emotionally it's draining, and that's kind of the way I want it to be. I don't think I could ever write a song and play it over and over again the same way.
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? This is the first time I've released music before, or even documented it. I didn't document music for a long time. For a while I was playing a tiny chord organ and free associating lyrics and making up weird stories about abuse, or something. And it wouldn't be anything about my personal life. Maybe certain parts were taken from my personal life, but I was making these new worlds and I was embodying them for a night.
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? Does the tape capture what you wanted to accomplish? And has it changed the meaning of what you wanted to accomplish?
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? I haven't listened to it recently. I listened non-stop when we were mixing it and figuring out the order of it all. For the tape, I was trying to create an environment. I don't know that there were any exact emotions going into it. A lot of the feeling going into it was that this is something I've been working on for a long time. I need to get down what I've been doing so I could close it. Be done with it and move on to something new. I think that comes across. It's swampy and heavy and the layering of everything. I have these long selenite crystals that I've been using to bow my guitar. That's what I've been doing a lot of lately — there is some of that on the tape, but not much. Guitar slides and all of these amazing sounds. When you bow with a crystal you get all of these crazy overtones — amazing sounds — and you can't really control it too much. So I'm trying to sculpt that. The selenite itself starts breaking apart. The strings are all covered in dust when you're finished. It changes the size of the crystal that's on the strings so it's changing all the time.
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? Did you learn anything by putting together a cohesive recording like this?
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? Yeah, I'm not a confident guitar player. Playing with the color tone orchestra I was like, "Oh, this is how you play a bar chord. That's how you hold your finger so the whole guitar will play a note. I'm still learning a lot, and I think I'm creating a new language. This is mostly a guitar album, and there is some bass clarinet on it. I think it's a documentation of where I am with my musical arc, and I like to think that whatever I do next will not be the same thing.
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? So this is truly experimental music. There is an unknown factor being explored and documented here.
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? Yes, what's the point of doing what you already know you can do without pushing it. It's frustrating playing sometimes because I don't want to be pigeonholed into this thing where people think, "This is the kind of show that you can book Lindsay to do because this is the kind of music that Lindsay plays." I want to be where I can do everything. Not that I want to be booked on every show, but I want to promote myself a little better, but this is the way I like to play music. So I can't pigeonhole myself. You want to get booked on shows, you want to go on tour and actually make money from this. It's so important that, as a musician, you can at least slightly survive on what you do. Atlanta is really lucky. Sometimes people forget that Atlanta's experimental scene is really out there, and welcoming ti anybody.
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? What is the audiences role in all of this? Do they have a responsibility?
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? The audience absolutely has a responsibility. I might be extremely militant about this, but as soon as you walk through a door and know that you are at a show, you are there to see people play. If you're donating money or not, you're there to watch them. You are there to engage with them. A lot of times people are very emotional about their work. They are there to show you who they are.