I Hear You Knocking

A New Album Of Remixes Offers Lotus A New Context To Explore Its Open-Ended Rock Sounds

originally published January 23, 2008

Some might feel honored to be hailed as "one of the jamtronica scene's reigning princes," as Lotus recently was on jambands.com. But that awkward portmanteau draws a guffaw from bassist Jesse Miller. "Jamtronica! If I read that, I'd be like, 'No way am I going to see this!'" he laughs.

Miller, one of the instrumental band's main composers, sounds loose and relaxed - as well he should. Lotus is fresh off the boat, literally, from five days of paddling around on some barge, playing alongside Michael Franti, Toots & the Maytals, Galactic and the Yonder Mountain String Band. It's called a Jam Cruise, and Miller describes it as "more oriented toward people who work a normal job, and this is their chance to get away."

I truly wonder what piña-colada-sippin' office drones and aging moneyed stoners would have to say about Lotus, especially since Miller himself isn't totally sure how to describe it. "I always say it's dance-oriented rock music, y'know?" he says.

The instrumental quintet's ouvre is a weird one to be sure. Part icy clacking plastic, part earthy organic improv, there's a cyborg quality to the group's grooves and compositions. For example, on 2006 studio album The Strength of Weak Ties, listeners were apt to hear Miller's ropy bass guitar in one stereo channel, an interlocking skronky synth bass in the other, and acoustic and electronic percussion commingled throughout. That and the band's overarching elegance of purpose give Lotus a progressive feel, like a less psychedelic cousin of U.K. veteran act Ozric Tentacles.

But with toeholds in electronica, post-rock and jam music, do the bandmembers ever worry their music might fall between the cracks?

"I still worry about that," Miller says. "The jam scene is more readily open to listening to anything, and that's somewhat where we got our start, so we're pretty embraced by that scene, even though we definitely try to cross over. I definitely think we get written off by the more indie scene, even though I think a lot of our music sounds much closer to that," he says, citing indie-oriented instrumental groups such as Tortoise and Explosions in the Sky.

"For instance, the band's been based out of Philadelphia for over five years, and we haven't seen a drop of ink," says Miller, despite playing large, sold-out club dates in Philly and New York. "The papers are interested in what's the most hip, hyped, blogged indie band, and Lotus does fall between the cracks there."

Arguably, though, Lotus didn't exactly come from the birthplace of hip. The band got started in 1999 at Goshen College, a tiny Mennonite liberal arts school in Indiana, where Jesse Miller and guitarist Luke Miller earned music degrees and met up with drummer Steve Clemens, percussionist Chuck Morris and guitarist Mike Rempel. "Right after we graduated, less than a week later, we moved out to Philadelphia with our sights set on touring more," says Miller. "I think we did more shows our last year of school than we did last year, but it's obviously on a bigger scale now."

Currently that scale includes a steady diet of outdoor festivals and club dates (and yes, the occasional Jam Cruise). While Miller says the festivals can be great - it's "a real rush to get in front of a crowd of 10,000 people" - the band's able to stretch out into larger exploratory improvisations at the clubs. In fact, two CDs comprised of such club recordings were released by Lotus last year as Escaping Sargasso Sea.

However, the band's current tour, which brings it to the Georgia Theatre on Friday, Jan. 25, on a bill with collaborator Michael Christie's world-beat project Telepath, is promoting an entirely different sort of recording: the brand-new Copy Paste Repeat: Lotus Remixed.

"It's a project that we've wanted to do for a long time," says Miller, who himself handled some of the reworking; some of the remixes date back to 2004, when the band released the album Nomad. "It was a really good opportunity for us to let artists either that we knew from touring with or respected in some other way, take a crack at our music and dissect it and put it back together," he says.

Fans, too, can try their hand remixing "open-source Lotus" at www.lotusvibes.com, where the band posted full studio tracks for the song "Bubonic Tonic" a few weeks ago.

"If you have GarageBand, it's real simple: everything pops up right there, and it's all arranged," says Miller. "You don't need a lot of technical know-how to get in there and start moving some things around."

Lotus, meanwhile, has been moving some things around in Philadelphia, tracking a new studio album with engineer Bill Moriarty, who's recently worked with Man Man.

"It's more of a rock sound. The electronic element is definitely there, but we tracked a lot more of it live instead of building the parts one by one," says Miller. "It's songs without lyrics. I know everything's kinda like that, but it's definitely structured more like songs."

Perhaps with that new focus the indie scene might take a little more notice, welcoming Lotus into the post-rock fold from the fringes the band has inhabited - and expanded - for so many years.

Aaron Jentzen

WHO: Lotus, Telepath
WHERE: Georgia Theatre
WHEN: Friday, January 25
HOW MUCH: $10