​Escape to Beat Antique

If there were such thing as a modern magical mystery tour, Beats Antique would lead the charge. This Oakland-based three piece perform un-American-like escapist dance music, lead by belly dancer Zoe Jakes, violinist/guitarist David Satori and percussionist/producer Tommy “Sidecar” Cappel.

Next weekend Beats Antique will headline Pure Bliss Ranch’s Cosmic Ascension Festival with renowned visual artists Alex and Allyson Grey. More than 40 other acts will perform at this 3-day festival, including Ana Sia, Mimosa, Jon Wayne and the Pain, Kinetix and more.

High Plains Reader caught up with all three Beats Antique members to learn more about their craft.

HPR: Beats Antique has a very worldly sound due to the types of instrumental sounds and melodic scales used in your music. As an American band, how did you come upon this type of sound?

DAVID SATORI: We all have different stories on how we are influenced by traditional cultural music from around the world. I got to study out of California Institute of Arts down in Los Angeles. We’ve had a lot of amazing teachers who are very well respected in all their traditions as far as West African drumming and north Indian traditional music and Indonesian Balinese gamelan music along with eastern European folk music. My guitar teacher was from Macedonia, which is by Greece. He got me into odd time signatures and folk music from there. So I just got turned into a lot of different music at that time and fell in love with a lot of different music.

TOMMY CAPPEL: For me, I came more from my love of hip-hop and hearing people sample different records and when I heard all the stuff from like the Indian, South American music, it blew my mind. I went to Berklee College of Music in Boston and my drum teacher was really into world music and he got me into a bunch of traditional rhythms and stuff and it just reminded me of the hip-hop, what I was listening to. So I just was like, this band seems perfect for me to just jump in and learn more.

ZOE JAKES: My experience with that was being in a dance company that really did a lot of music of Bulgaria and Ottoman Empire, the big empire that’s specifically of the Turkish influence and North African communities. I would say that was my biggest influence, particularly the Bulgarian music. I love Bulgarian music, which is very haunting and beautiful.

HPR: Tommy, going back to “making beats,” there’s so many types of beats. A lot of us are most familiar with hip-hop and dance club beats. What’s the fine line between the types of beats you make versus something like hip-hop beats? Because, although you’re heavily influenced by hip-hop, you definitely don’t sound like a hip-hop group.

TOMMY: Honestly, when you break it down there’s not too much difference. There’s a certain feel that people are just used to and they can move to and it’s kind of universal and hip-hop sort of brings that all together. It’s really just a matter of where are we going with this track? What sort of influences are we drawing on? … Some of the acoustic elements will be that sort of traditional sound of the percussion and then the kick and snare will be the hip-hop version of the beat.

And when I say that it could be anything sort of closely related to electronic music or electro house, it can go many directions. It sort of depends. It’s all just about taking what you are doing and extracting the DNA of that and mixing it with the DNA of something else.

It’s sort of like if you were to mess with somebody’s sample collection or record collection and sample stuff. But instead of sampling anything, we just make it ourselves. We draw on our friends who are musicians in the instruments we don’t play, and we hire them to play parts we’ve written or build out a horn section or something like that. So it’s like we are creating our sample library for songs but we are doing it through recording.

HPR: When your music is already so out there and unusual, how do you continually keep getting more out there and unusual?

ZOE: One of the experiences that I have had and I think goes for me and David and Tommy, we are extremely prolific in the sense that we just keep making art and we keep following threads down certain directions. I know for myself as an artist, when I first started performing, specifically with dance, I remember I had this breakthrough performance and people kind of knew me for it for a while and when I started becoming well known in the belly dance scene and I remember saying to myself and to my friends, what if that is it? What if that’s the only thing I come up with?

I think, as an artist, your ideas build on ideas. It’s not like a pint of ice cream and you get down to the bottom and there is no more ice cream. It’s more like a well that you are drawing from … as long as you continue a creative life and continue to play with your form, your ideas will keep coming. You’re never going to be done.

DAVID: It’s all creative and it’s never ending. I have seen people that do feel defeated by not coming up with ideas, but I feel like that’s sort of an insecure place to come from … they have boundaries they are not allowing to work through. There’s a constant insecurity; you got search and break down the walls and have fun. I think it’s a lot to do with keeping the element of play, being childlike in a way.

TOMMY: For me it’s really about the fact that I’ve been in bands since I was 13 years old and I’m 40 now and I’ve been in a lot of bands and you go through those times when your just a musician where you are writing some songs with some friends. Keep practicing and keep getting better, keep creating songs. So as a producer, it’s the same thing. You just keep writing songs because that’s what I’ve always done. I think some producers come in and they are not musicians first, they are producers so it’s a different process. For us, we just play music. We are having fun just creating stuff.

HPR: Alex and Allyson Grey will be a big part of this festival too. What is special about mixing live art with live music?

TOMMY: We are big fans of Alex and Allyson Grey … We worked with (Alex), we did a show with him at the Fillmore in Denver and it was a really beautiful dynamic to have such an accomplished artist on stage with you … And it’s like we have a performance element with Zoe and some of the antics we do, and having that visual element of art being made right there is always really nice.

ZOE: Alex Grey is one of the most notorious – well known in the community. We have lots of live paintings and they set up on the side of the stage and people get to watch them make the painting as we are performing. I think it’s the act, as well as the process, that is kind of shown to people and I think that’s really special for people. It’s not just going to see art on the wall. You are actually having an experience with the painter watching it come together.

IF YOU GO:

Cosmic Ascension Music & Art Festival

Thurs-Sat, Aug. 21-23 (Beats Antique on Saturday)

Pure Bliss Ranch, Waubun, Minn.