Can you keep up with The Living Earth Show? With Roar Shack venue, multiple bands, new LP, and performances galore, contemporary duo continues to push boundaries.

Excerpted from interview by Marke B.

For 48hills

The Living Earth Show. Photo by Essential Creatives

Have you ever yearned to inject sludge metal into chamber music, or reunite your favorite avant-garde all-women ’90s band for a primal feminist scream, or bring a huge crowd in the SF Symphony’s cavernous loading dock to tears with a gentle tone poem? If you can dream it, Andy Meyerson and Travis Andrews of contemporary duo The Living Earth Show can do it (musically, at least).

All of these fabulous moments happened within the last few months, courtesy of one or both of the duo. The first: Percussionist Meyerson programmed this year’s brilliant edition of SF Performance’s PIVOT Festival, whose “Legacies” opening night included himself, guitarist Andrews, and powerhouse vocalist Tanner Porter performing works by the Sleeping Giant composers group and their students. These ranged from Andrew Norman’s electrifying setting of a reading of California’s 2023 AB1780 bill, which forbids legacy admissions in universities—chilling in its emphasis on the words “higher education” and “independent institution” in this censorious and anti-intellectual climate—to Rohan Chander’s hardcore metal phrasing in “stones don’t lie.”

The second saw Meyerson and Andrews presenting a reunion of local avant-cabaret trio the Qube Chix, including composer Pamela Z, at their groundbreaking performance venue Roar Shack, which was a little like witnessing Laurie Anderson and Meredith Monk go Riot Grrrl at Club 57. (Don’t miss Diné composer Raven Chacon’s ensemble Lazyhorse at Roar Shack Fri 3/13). And the third came with Andrews taking the stage during the February edition of SF Symphony’s immersive Soundbox series, curated by plucky violinist Alexi Kenny, for local composer Dylan Mattingly’s “Goodbye Sonnet,” which set his father’s poetry to gorgeously ruminative music.

All this, and I haven’t even mentioned their upcoming shows at Knoxville’s awesome Big Ears Festival, their plan to take “Legacies” on tour, their multiple bands, or the heartrending, ultimately healing album they’ve created with punk legend Lynn Breedlove as Trust Me, centering on the brutal murders of Breedlove’s father and stepmother by his stepbrother in their Grass Valley home. It’s called Why I Like Dead Guys.

“We like to stay busy, which we are,” Meyerson laughs over Zoom. “And honestly, that’s such a great thing, that we can be doing all this at a moment when support for classical and contemporary music, all the arts, is on a precipitous cultural decline. There’s this whole world of forward-looking composers and performers going on while everything else seems to be spiraling.”

“A lot of things about this time feel unprecedented. You can see that as an open question of what happens next, and you can try new things and take new risks. In the face of full-scale destruction, people are still creating. The way of doing things that I was taught in school, or how a lot of us grew up thinking in terms of cultural production, that just doesn’t exist. So we need to explore, we need to be open. I think that’s really energizing for people who make art.”

Read 48hills interview in full here

Check out Roar Shack Live! shows here.