What does Indiana sound like?
Can a state of nearly 7 million people, rural and urban, seventh-generation or recently transplanted, be encapsulated in a melody, sound or song? What instrument do you use to play Indiana?
Twenty local musicians — established professionals, newcomers with a day job, but all Hoosiers — have offered their answers in the form of a new album, “Two Minutes in Indiana.” The Indy release is as indie as can be, with the organizer looking to cover the cost of a physical vinyl production through a crowdfunding campaign. You can listen to some songs for free on the crowdfunding website .
The artists were given a prompt: Two-minute songs, instrumental only and as Indiana as you can manage. Their approaches were as varied as the state.
Some chose to feature birds, insects and other sounds. Others went fully electronic, or abandoned traditional melody altogether. And yes, a few went for a little twang.
Jon Rogers, of the band Everything, Now! and currently releasing solo music as Golden Moses, started off simple: He recorded Indiana.
“I walk with my dogs every day near the Fall Creek area,” Rogers said. “I recorded what we heard one day in the spring.”
His track, “Pursuit in Quicksand,” uses that ambient recording and a variety of electronic sounds to produce one of the album’s moodier sounds.
“I wanted to portray some of the ambiguity about living in Indiana,” Rogers said. “There’s a lot of beautiful stuff on the album, but I was thinking in those terms. I live in an older house with rotting wood and trees falling down, and I recorded in a garage studio when it was hot and humid in the summer — it’s playing up that side of Indiana.”
‘What it feels like to be an artist in Indiana’
The project is the brainchild of Rogers’ friend and fellow musician, Andrew Gustin, who also provides a track under the name Loud Diamond.
A “corporate office worker” by day, Gustin said he was inspired by Rogers, who put out Gustin’s first physical release on cassette in 2010, to highlight local artists in a new and interesting way. Gustin contributed to a similarly rigid album prompt for a project in the Netherlands.
“I really liked the concept of giving all of the artists the same canvas size,” Gustin said. “We’re asking what it feels like to be an artist in Indiana, and everyone on the album either lives in the state or is an Indiana native.”
Gustin recruited his friends, reached out to local artists he admired and opened up a public submission process for the project. He began putting their tracks together in the spring, as the local music scene continued to struggle under the weight of the COVID-19 pandemic.
His track on the album, “Willow Tree,” begins with acoustic guitar that leads other instruments along a sort of marching drum track as it sticks closer to traditional melody than some of the other, more experimental sounds from his roster of recruited artists.
Gustin, a 2007 IU graduate originally from Franklin, recently formed a new independent record label, Ameliorate Records — named in part after his first child, Amelia, but also for the dictionary definition of the word: To improve or make things better.
The crowdfunding project asks for $25 per album, with a goal of selling at least 100. It had sold 56 as of Jan. 6. Any proceeds beyond the production costs will go to Musical Family Tree, a local musical haven and nonprofit once run by Rogers.
Gustin will play “Two Minutes in Indiana,” which he said is meant to be heard front-to-back in one sitting, as part of Musical Family Tree’s weekly 7 p.m. radio show on WQRT 99.1 FM on Thursday.
The album’s gorgeous cover — a retro landscape with a wooden chair — was designed by local artist Sunny Smith.
A mix of sounds, musicians
Some of the artists are known locally and beyond. Mina Keohane, for example, is a genre-bending jazz performer who has also composed for everything from short films to McDonald’s commercials.
Keohane’s collaboration with guitarist Charlie Ballantine, “There’s Snow Along the Star Dust Trail,” mixes birds and space-age sound effects with an ethereal guitar.
Other featured musicians, and this was crucial for Gustin, are relatively new to composing.
Dan Johnson is a drummer by trade, birth or however it is drummers are made, but he bought home recording software to tinker around with in April 2020 — just as the pandemic began shutting venues down.
The “Two Minutes in Indiana” release will be his first time sharing music on a physical record.
His song, “Downright Hoosier,” has perhaps the most on-brand track title on the album, but its sound is maybe not the first thing that jumps to mind given the prompt — a deep synth cut that might have done well played over a montage in an early 80s movie.
“I went a couple different directions with it at first, but I went with this more retro sound,” Johnson, a lifelong Indianapolis resident, said. “Because Indiana is so behind in the times.”
Exploring all sides of Indy
Jennasen, a keyboardist and vocalist in local bands Manners Please and Dorin, also gave solo home recording a shot for the album. Born and still living in Broad Ripple, she got into the local scene after her brother, singer/songwriter jascha, passed away in 2013.
“On Holliday” leads off the album with the call of a mourning dove, a sound featured in several other artists’ tracks on the album.
“It’s just such a staple sound of my childhood,” Jennasen said.
The song leans into the natural sounds before her synth work picks up.
“I named it ‘On Holliday’ as a reference to Holliday Park, my favorite place to go hiking and spend time outdoors,” she said. “It’s that combination of feeling serenity out in nature when you live in the middle of the city.”
John Kill, born John Muylle in Indianapolis, also wrestled with his home’s duality for his track, “Tea Party,” as he has for much of his life.
“Living in Indianapolis, you’re in the middle of this Midwest conservative whatever… but the city, and I lived in Chicago for a while, too, aren’t (like that),” Kill said. “The song is a little about that juxtaposition — the battle between those two sides of me.”
Kill disagrees with much of the state’s politics, and he believes criticism of Indiana as “boring” isn’t unwarranted. But he also chose to raise his family here.
His track includes a recording his then 2-year-old daughter, as well as a toy tea kettle she played with often when he wrote it last year, on top of a groove achieved through effects-driven piano, saxophone and drums.
He stressed he did not mean to cast the album in a negative light, noting some artists approached the same prompt in a positive way. He simply explored where the art took him.
“It’s isn’t life great here” Kill said of his song, “but isn’t life boring here?”
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Rory Appleton is the pop culture reporter at IndyStar. Contact him at 317-552-9044 and rappleton@indystar.com, or follow him on Twitter at @RoryDoesPhonics.
