Waking Astronomer: Atlanta’s starry-eyed supergroup

The odds never agreed with Waking Astronomer. In many ways it was pure chance that led five talented musicians with various backgrounds to all gather in a cramped Westside room and emerge as one of the most exciting local supergroups in years. The initial spark for Waking Astronomer started outside of 529 about a year ago when a group of friends posed a simple question, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we started a band?”

Brannon Boyle, the face behind Speakeasy Promotions, answered by giving the fledgling group a headlining spot at the Left Field Experiment, a monthly electronic showcase. In only three months a classically trained flautist, a non-traditional cellist, a guitarist-turned-producer, an established beat maker, and a skilled jazz pianist had to decide what they were going to sound like. “It’s like synchronicity,” says Brett Leggitt, who is perhaps best known as the man behind electronic/experimental solo act Deku. “Nobody in the group overwhelms other people. It’s cohesion at its finest.”

The group’s lineup mirrors Atlanta’s recent fusion of live jazz and experimental hip-hop that has been bubbling up to the surface of the city’s musical consciousness. The most obvious challenge the band faces is syncing up live vocals, cello, flute, vibraphone, and piano with pre-recorded rhythms. In recent years, electronic figureheads such as Flying Lotus, Thundercat, and the jazz-orchestra mastermind Miguel Atwood-Ferguson have championed the difficult middle ground between the autonomy of computerized beats and the spontaneity of live jazz.

In its earliest performances, the group often faced setbacks with overwhelmed audio engineers and struggled to maintain professionalism in the face of crippling sound issues. Cellist/vibraphonist Saira Raza and pianist Alexa Lima frequently had to fight to hear themselves. “We’ve had a few shows where the drums go out or you can’t hear the cello or you can’t hear yourself so you have to figure it out and play it off. This is a really new group. We’re still figuring ourselves out. Considering how quickly we were put on stage, we’re doing a pretty good job,” says Jeremi Johnson, also known as beat master 10th Letter.

The group’s first piece of recorded music, the brooding “Stalactite,” was barely two minutes long but made waves across local music blogs. The five-piece’s success is the culmination of a devoted scene of eclectic beat makers, jazz musicians, and weirdoes with penchants for psychedelic exploration that’s finally getting its due.

“It’s like something in the air. Seeing all our peers push the envelope in their respected genres makes us want to do the same thing. Seeing someone like the Difference Machine that does something highly experimental puts us at ease to play whatever we want,” Leggitt says.

All five members say Speakeasy Promotions has been instrumental in providing a space for genre-defying artists to express their ideas in public. “It feels like they’re allowing the evolution of music to propagate naturally, instead of the regular channels,” Richardson says. “Speakeasy created these opportunities and venues and events where you feel like you’re experiencing the evolution of people.”

Beatboxing, live vocal sampling, light shows, image projections, even comic book visualizations of songs are all on the table in the band’s near future, but first, the goal is a full-length album before the end of the year.

The main benefit of Waking Astronomer hasn’t just been an outlet to sound off its individual visions, but to find a new voice in the sonic conversations between members. “I feel like we’re etching our own sonic thing,” Johnson says. “So much has happened already. I feel personally we are contributing to a conversation that we couldn’t do by ourselves. I couldn’t speak with the voice I’m using with these guys.”

Broken down to its individual parts, Waking Astronomer already has five formidable voices. But layered in unison, these voices form a conversation loud enough to reach the stars.