<\/audio><\/figure>\n\n\n\nKristine: Yeah, so with the pandemic being such an internal, domestic, house-ly time\u2026 to be out and on stage and in front of people again performing this new music is so overwhelming, so new. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alex: Kinda just diving right into the experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
K: Exactly, but it was super rewarding. We had such a good time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hailey: It was amazing seeing it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alex: For sure. Real quick, could you introduce yourself and the band and sorta what you do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
K: Oh yeah! My name is Kristine Leschper, I have a wonderful band, we play music. I have a record called \u201cThe Opening, or Closing of a Door\u201d. It\u2019s my sorta debut\u2013 it\u2019s my first album as a solo act, but I\u2019ve put out other material under the moniker Mothers. It\u2019s good to be here talking with you guys! A: Thank you so much! To get back to performing, how was it coming back?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
K: So good to be back in Georgia honestly, that was a big selling point for this festival. We drove 12 hours to get here and we\u2019re driving 12 hours to get back home tomorrow so we really wanted to be here, it just felt like the right place to do my first show as a solo artist. I feel like we had a really warm welcome, a homecoming!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A: It\u2019s so special that this is like a moment for you guys, most bands are going somewhere else since it\u2019s the Stopover tour. K: Yeah, we\u2019re not going to SXSW, this is our final destination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A: Savannah kinda feels like a place for a lot of people where it\u2019s more a skip-over than a stopover, which is kinda unfortunate. So it was great to see your guys\u2019 passion onstage, it was very apparent that you guys were so excited to be here. Your performance was interesting, there was going on there. What inspired some of your choices with the instrumentation, the clapping\u2026?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
K: The clapping started off as just a recording technique, just to get some syncopations because I\u2019m not really a percussionist, and hand clapping was something I heard in some flamenco music I was listening to. I found it super inspiring, like \u2018I can clap.\u2019 Not like a flamenco artist, they\u2019re doing next level stuff, but I figured I can make patterns with my hands so that was very accessible. So as I was demoing I just added claps, maybe as a placeholder, but I ended up really liking the way they sounded. I liked that it became sort of a group activity, to clap with other people, it felt really good. And the other instrumentation, we\u2019re just trying to keep it really fun and dynamic. There are tons of different ways you can approach live sound, and it was difficult to get all the sounds on the records in a live format since the record was a lot of overdubbing, layering, it wasn\u2019t like live<\/em>. So that\u2019s been a fun challenge, just figuring out how many different sounds we can get with just five people on the stage. And as you saw, everyone\u2019s very busy working a lot of jobs. I\u2019m a very curious person, and to just have all these new things to play with is great. <\/p>\n\n\n\nA: Something I think is really tough to capture on stage, especially in a venue with this much space, is a sense of intimacy. I think you guys did a great job of capturing that and part of that was things like the nutritional yeast shaker on stage and stuff like that. Could you speak a little about that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
K: On the nutritional yeast shaker and intimacy? [laughs]<\/em> Well something great about making the record is my friend and collaborator Garrett Burke, who\u2019s on percussion, makes a lot of his own percussive instruments like shakers and bells and anything that can make sounds. He\u2019ll go to the thrift store and get a big bag of buttons and tie them together to see what they sound like. So it\u2019s just this ethos of discovery, like \u201cwhat does this sound like?\u201d and that keeps things fun and interesting. I love the nutritional yeast shaker. It\u2019s weirdly become a big talking point on the record. As far as the intimacy of it all\u2026 I was very nervous tonight, and in the past I felt a need to have a cool kind of distance from the audience. I didn’t think anyone could see that I was nervous, like it would make me a bad performer. But tonight I\u2019m learning to be like \u201cI’m nervous, I’m cold, it\u2019s my first show in 3 years, what do you guys think?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\nH: I think it shows humanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
K: Yeah, it\u2019s like I’m nervous, I\u2019m just a person. I think it\u2019s cool to just be a person doing things with other people, and it\u2019s like we\u2019re all on the same level. It\u2019s supposed to be a shared experience, and I want to foster that environment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A: That\u2019s awesome. What are some of your lyrical inspirations?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
K: That’s hard, that\u2019s a tricky one. I read poetry sometimes. My early songwriting was very influenced by poets like Anne Sexton, these kinds of confessional poets, like intimate and internal. Like E E Cummings blew my mind, and I was just like \u201cwait. There are no rules? You can do whatever you want?\u201d so that was really formative in my writing. It\u2019s hard to say, but recently I’ve been feeling very inspired by the poet June Jordan who\u2019s also an activist. Her poetry is very liberatory and celebratory while also acknowledging the imperfection and suffering in the world, which is, I think, just the best thing that art can do. To just say that there are so many things to celebrate and we need to do that together and enjoy each other, but also acknowledge the thighs that are really messed up. So she\u2019s been a huge inspiration. That\u2019s a question I should spend more time with, that\u2019s hard. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A: As our final question, coming from an art school background, how does working as a visual artist impact you working as a musical artist?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
K: I think it allows me to zoom out a little bit. Because my foundation in art school helped give me a background that allowed me to be critical of myself without being demeaning. How to step back and be like, something\u2019s working here but something\u2019s definitely not working. So that background in critique and collaboration definitely helped me to look at my work that way. Something else is that I think of music very visually, like I like to think about music and recordings in particular as a sculpture. So it\u2019s kind of like you can visualize all the different frequencies, which are almost topographical when you think of all the different ways something can enter and leave a song. So yeah, I think of recordings as sculpture in the round.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A: Thank you so much for talking with us!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In a varied festival of indie, punk, and jam bands, Kristine Leschper\u2019s unique brand of multi-instrumental art pop shone brightly and sweetly in the midst of it all. Like a lighthouse to a safe harbor, she and her backing band beckoned listeners into an intimate and warm atmosphere to combat the cool night. Here […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":6441,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[1201,50,1200,1202,1189],"yoast_head":"\n
Interview with Kristine Leschper at Savannah Stopover 2022 - SCAD Radio<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n