‘Doing God’s work’: Educators collaborate on COVID album for children’s music program

Creating and recording music remotely is hardly a new concept. For years, artists have used the internet as a transport service for sending grooves, vocal overdubs and instrumental solos to one another for fashioning into a singular composition.

Invariably, though, that practice was followed because the artists were separated by great distances. Still, their focus was on music with a pre-determined arrangement and vision. In short, everyone had their assignments, then sent in their work for final assembly.

Now turn that idea on its ear. What if three musicians lived in fairly close proximity, but worked remotely because of an over-arching obstacle – say, a global pandemic? And instead of a compositional framework agreed upon ahead of time, they sent scraps of ideas to one another to expound upon and adapt into a work no one saw coming.

Then, just to give the project some extra humanity, you sell the recorded results to a curious public and donate whatever profits you generate to a local non-profit?

That was the broadly scoped initiative undertaken by Scott Whiddon, Jim Gleason and Kevin Holm-Hudson, three Central Kentucky professors (at Transylvania, Eastern Kentucky University and the University of Kentucky, respectively) who double as performers with bands of their own (Letters of Acceptance, The Johnson Brothers Band and The Twiggenburys, respectively) when not working on overlapping projects.

Together, they form a collective called Archipelago that will release the first of two recordings on Nov. 1 through bandcamp.com. The trio’s music differs from anything its members have been associated with before. It centers on a series of instrumental pieces that stylistically alternate between warm, spacious ambiance inspired by artists like Brian Eno to heavier, rockish terrain reflective of so-called German-rooted “krautrock” artists of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s (think Can, Neu! and the initial incarnation of Kraftwerk.)

The title of their resulting music tips you off about how it was made: “Songs from Quarantine: Volume 1.”

“We’re all lucky, “Whiddon said. “We’ve all been employed through the (COVID-19) pandemic. We’re all educators. Our families are healthy. But all my musical projects had shut down, so I was just glum. The three of us were texting back and forth and Facebook messaging back and forth. Jim said, ‘We should make a record.’ I said, kind of as a joke, ‘Let’s make an instrumental, kind of ambient and Kraut-rocky record.’ And they both said, ‘Okay.’

“Then I remember staring at my phone going, ‘Well, I guess we’re doing this.’”

That began the frequent sharing between May and September of music files – song fragments and instrumental passages that, once, received, would be built upon. That led to a series of almost cinematic soundscapes dominated by keyboards and guitar but with considerable studio manipulation. Percussion parts were later added by Neil Bell, Dave Hamon and Wyatt Nicholson.

“Nothing was shot down,” Holm-Hudson said. “Everyone was totally open with whatever anyone else came up with. We would send out a file and be like, ‘I don’t know where this is going to go, but it’s something I’m working on.’ Somebody else would be like, ‘Hey, let me see what I can add to that.’ All of us were doing things that were kind of outside our usual boxes.”

“This was a fascinating way to work,” Gleason added. “For me, it was totally unlike my style to take these parts and move them around until some sort of form came out of it. It was really organic. Surprisingly so. It sounds mechanical talking about it, but it was a really organic process.”

The echoing warmth of “Shelter in Place,” which sounds like a Beach Boys edit with an Eno makeover, opens “Songs from Quarantine: Volume 1” and is reprised at the end of “Volume 2” (set for release in December). In between, though, sits the echoing noir-like radiation of “The Monster Awakens,” the sunnier electronica of “Health” and even a touch an ambient-colored bossa nova on “Bossa de Tristesse.” The latter is a gently reactionary piece to the isolation imposed by COVID-19 and its intrusion upon more direct and traditional forms of artistic collaborations.

“It’s been a period of extremes,” Holm-Hudson said. “Some days I would be out in my back yard just euphoric at the silence, the total absence of planes or traffic noise. Then there were other times when I was just feeling this profound depression about things changing irreparably.

“‘Bossa de Tristesse’ was this little tune written for a dear friend of mine, Roberta Guthrie, who played cello in the Lexington Philharmonic for many years,” Holm-Hudson said. “We used to play piano and cello pieces. Now I don’t know when that’s going to happen again. So I wrote that tune essentially as a tribute to her. For me, that’s the most heartfelt piece of the project.”

There is an arguably bigger sense of heart in what Whiddon, Gleason and Holm-Hudson have planned for sales generated by the release of the “Songs from Quarantine” recordings. The three will be donating all proceeds to the Lexington-based Central Music Academy, which provides free musical instruction to financially disadvantaged children.

“The most important thing, at the heart of all this, is we’re all Lexingtonians,” Whiddon said. “We’re educators. Everyone’s taken a hit, but non-profits in this town are special, CMA does God’s work in my opinion. We wanted to not only find a way to not go crazy in our homes or go crazy from not playing music, but also to shine a light on some really great people doing some really great things.”

“This is ‘the new together,’” Holm-Hudson added. “When you get an opportunity like this, you can let it pass by and be like, ‘Oh, no. That’s something I don’t really do. I just play with my band’ or you can be, ‘Let’s give that a try.’ I’ve never done anything like this.”

“This was community for me,” Gleason said. “We got together with creative minds. We’re creating real stuff, doing it in sort of real time with people we respect. The community part of that, the artistic creation part of that – those are the things I found to be really sustaining through this whole period.”

Archipelago’s “Songs from Quarantine: Volume 1” will be available through bandcamp.com beginning Nov. 1 and through other streaming platforms, including Spotify, on Nov. 15. “Volume 2” will be available beginning Dec. 2.