Mission Trips rallies a strange Southern legacy

On a humid Saturday night in Shreveport, La., last October, Chris White stood in a dark and cavernous room. His face was bathed in subtle hues of blue, red, and yellow from the glowing buttons on the MPC and samplers over which he hovered with quiet intensity. In this massive space — one of the first automated municipal waterworks in the South — White unleashed a deafening ambiance laced with organic and industrial textures.

White’s one-man experimental music act, Magicicada, had been invited to perform at the McNeill Street Pumping Station New Music Festival, a weekend-long DIY gathering dedicated to Southern avant-garde and experimental music. It was there, amid performances by like-minded artists such as pro skateboarder-turned-drone master Duane Pitre, Homer Flynn of the Residents, and noise/drone sax man Diamond Terrifier, that he had an epiphany.

“It was one of those moments where I thought, ‘Why isn’t this happening in Atlanta?’” White says. “The vibe of that festival couldn’t have happened anywhere else. But it was a successful and self-reliant gathering of artists — outsiders who were genuinely excited about the music. They had used their surroundings and what they had at-hand to create this unique festival that was focused on experimental music, and there weren’t a bunch of logos from corporate sponsors plastered on everything, tainting this really cool experience.”

Three months after the New Music Fest, White unveiled Mission Trips, a self-run record label intended to channel the same excitement, dedication, organization, and support for experimental music that he’d witnessed while performing in Shreveport. The festival’s smooth execution helped cement an idea that had been taking shape in the back of his mind for nearly four years. Mission Trips was designed to serve as both a cultural curator and documentarian, stamping in time the South’s rich experimental, avant-garde, and noise music scenes from an Atlanta perspective. Launching a new music label in 2014 isn’t exactly a lucrative business venture to undertake, especially one that’s focused on experimental music. But for White, the value of archiving the fringe musical elements he sees going unnoticed year after year is beyond measure.

“The motivating factors for the music industry as a whole are way outside of my interests,” White says. “In fact, they give me a lot of anxiety when I start to think about music as commodity or pushing units. As a 40-year-old father of three with a day job I am probably the last person who should be starting a label. But if I am able to make the money back along with some profit on each release, I can reinvest it back into the label and keep this going.”

The name, Mission Trips, was born late one night in 2010, after a show in Birmingham, Ala. White was there with his former band 1thousand Holy Shards. After the set, deep in the midst of what he calls a “reality-enhanced evening of conversational word play,” their talk took a strange twist. White and his bandmates Jason Pratt and Nathan Brown started talking about their respective upbringings. All three of them had been raised in strict Southern Baptist households. They began riffing on the notion of the mission trips they used to take with their church groups when they were kids, and how the same practices could be applied to spreading the good word of their own music to people far and wide.

When he made it back home to Atlanta the following day, White purchased the website name MissionTripsInternational.com. The seeds were planted, and some ideas were being kicked around, but White took his time and allowed the pieces to fall into place on their own.

A few years later, on a return trip to play a Magicicada show in Birmingham, White shared the stage with free improvisational guitarist Davey Williams. Since the early ’70s, Williams has carved out a place for himself in the Southeast as a seminal figure in the musical landscape, working with everyone from Ikue Mori of New York’s pioneering No Wave act DNA to trombonist Jim Staley and Chattanooga, Tenn.’s Shaking Ray Levis. Despite so much underground history, it was the first time that White had heard Williams’ name, much less witnessed his ecstatic stage presence and naturally chaotic style as a guitarist. “I was shocked that I did not know this guy or his history,” White says. “At that point I realized not only did I want to do a label for up-and-coming artists, I wanted to honor and highlight some of these folks that had been doing their thing years before any of us were even born.”

In the meantime, White was also regularly performing at shows and improvising alongside the members of Faun and a Pan Flute. “Their enthusiasm for exploration and their commitment to their project was inspiring, and it reminded me why I got into music in the first place,” White says.

page
Part of the plan with Mission Trips is to release two albums simultaneously, each one mirroring or reflecting the other in abstract, often intangible ways. The first two CDs to arrive bearing Mission Trips’ “old rugged cross” logo were Magicicada’s Wrack With Ruin and Barter, the debut recording from Currency, a six-piece improv ensemble featuring members of Faun and a Pan Flute and Hello Ocho. Both discs arrived in time for an under-the-radar CD release party in March at the Mammal Gallery, where both acts performed together under the name Currencicada.

Magicicada and Currency don’t share any common ground, aesthetically speaking. Magicicada is the work of a lone artist working with electronics. Currency is a large ensemble, playing stringed instruments, woodwinds, and various percussive instruments to create a sound that alludes to jazz but exists beyond jazz music’s outer limits. Despite their musical differences, they are two like-minded entities working under different conditions to achieve similar goals.

Both CDs were released in a limited-edition first run of 50 copies with screen-printed sleeves hand-painted by artist Emma Ball. These first two offerings were a test run for the label and the handmade aesthetic that will bind much of the label’s output. “We live in an age of mass reproduction,” White says. “I just want people to know that in every step of the process someone has their hands on this. Each person involved cares about what we are creating.”

Every step of the physical production was overseen by a friend or someone who dedicated their time and energy to creating each release as a labor of love. From Ball’s cover paintings to Blossoming Noise label owner Graham Moore screen-printing and schooling White in the ways of label management and printmaking, Mission Trips has taken shape as a true exercise in community involvement.

“I have known Chris for a few years now and have long been impressed with the sounds and imagery he mixes together,” Ball said via email. “There was one self-titled Magicicada release, limited to ‘about 30 copies,’ where the CD case was actually hand-crocheted. That level of painstaking care and attention to every detail really struck me.”

Magicicada’s Wrack With Ruin was the first album art that Ball tackled for Mission Trips. “Chris wanted a specific gritty ink line kind of style, like I hadn’t done in a few years,” she says. “It was great fun getting back into that ‘inky Zen’ headspace, if you will. Nowadays, being a small part of the production process for these kinds of psych and noise releases is hugely validating, particularly when they’re local.”

Ben Price, who runs East Atlanta’s Studilaroche recording studio, has also played a hands-on role in getting Mission Trips off the ground. Price became acquainted with the label while White was working on a remix of “Song Bird’s Grave” for the B-side of a Spirits and the Melchizedek Children 7-inch. The two hit it off, and before long Price was mastering both the Magicicada and Currency CDs. Price was also inspired by the “focus on musicians working in Atlanta,” he says. “Atlanta has an amazing music scene in multiple genres right now, but it seems under-represented in the media both locally and beyond. Chris is helping to shine a light on the beautiful and strange music that is being created in our backyard.”

Price also recorded and mixed a series of live studio recordings with Faun and a Pan Flute that materialized as the group’s self-titled vinyl LP (with cover art by Sam Parker) via Mission Trips on June 17. “I’m proud of the way the band embraced the ‘live in the studio’ mindset,” Price says. “It’s a fantastic way to capture a band as complex as Faun; the tempo changes are dictated by the musicians’ feel rather than a metronome so they retain a human groove, and that’s important.”

On the other hand, recording environmental sounds and capturing spontaneous performances is something White does daily. It’s a compulsion for him, and the 15 tracks that make up Magicicada’s Wrack With Ruin were pieced together using recordings made in various places around his home and in different locations around Atlanta and elsewhere around the country over the last two years.

Wrack With Ruin is Magicicada’s sixth proper album, not counting the various untitled CDs and tapes he’s put out between official releases. From beginning to end, the album fits together as a singular abstract piece, or an amplified journey into White’s headspace that comes together like a sonic blitz of soundscapes and truncated patterns. Most of the material heard throughout the disc is grounded by a convoluted atmospheric splatter of sounds that fall like delicate threads of a larger conceptual whole. It’s an album that relies on intensity over outright aggression, and is as jarring as it is mysterious. “I laugh when I listen to “In League With Ugly Face,” White says. “It’s sort of a response to my 14-year-old son asking, ‘Dad can you play IDM?’ He digs that track and laughs when I ‘drop the bells.’”

page
Other songs such as “Confused Heap,” “Once I Was A Little Light,” and “Jigsaw Forms” take shape as random slices of life filtered into a collage of eviscerated and reconstructed found sounds.

One of the more intriguing numbers, “Blossoming Snares of the Earth,” was recorded differently. On a trip to San Francisco, White visited his sister’s gallery in the Mission District. While staying in a small apartment behind the gallery he discovered that the previous tenant had left behind a battered drum set, some amps, a microphone, and a Korg synthesizer. White set the instruments up in the gallery and started improvising — playing the drums with a pair of chopsticks — while a homeless man screamed at him through the door. “It was the perfect San Francisco moment,” White says.

A subtly reworked vinyl pressing of Wrack With Ruin arrived the same day as Faun and a Pan Flute’s LP. Like the first two CD releases, both are pressed in a limited edition of 150 copies each. When the vinyl sells out, whether or not they get repressed is to be determined. Of course, all of the music that Mission Trips releases will be available for download. The label is also cultivating an archive of live shows to post on a streaming section of the website to increase the music’s visibility. The idea behind sticking to such limited quantities for the physical releases is to avoid the age-old indie label dilemma of having stacks of unsold media sitting around in unopened boxes for years. The market for local and regional experimental music is small, and every penny counts toward keeping the label alive. “There is nobody here with a bag of cash offering to make this happen, and I cannot handle the pressure or responsibility of a Kickstarter approach,” White says. “We are doing this one project at a time and working hard to achieve our goals, and trying not to get ahead of ourselves.”

Other releases due over the next year include recordings from Tuscaloosa, Ala.’s Ramble Tamble, along with Them Natives and a Davey Williams release. From Atlanta, deadCAT bassist Gage Gilmore is preparing his first release of solo compositions. Other Atlanta acts Narrator, Lindsay Smith, and Easily Suede have releases in the works as well. There’s also a Lunar Creature/Meghanz/Judas Horse three-way split cassette tape planned.

In the meantime, Mission Trips is prepping for its first pilgrimage to spread the good word of its music to the people of the Southeast and far beyond. Throughout the last half of June, Magicicada and Faun and a Pan Flute will tour the South, with stops in the Midwest and the East Coast, to support Mission Trips’ inaugural releases. The tour is another step toward building the community this music needs to truly thrive and consummating the ideas that were planted on that “reality-enhanced” night in Birmingham so many years ago.