Early next month, when Ringdown’s full-length debut album Lady on the Bike is released (May 9 on Nonesuch Records), you’ll pop the record on your turntable or the CD in your CD player or pull it up on your streaming service and the first thing out of your speakers or earbuds or whatever will be a little song called “The Mess.”

It starts out unassumingly enough, sweeping synths and tonally ambiguous “we join our story already in progress” harmonies, swirling bell-like tones, and Danni Lee Parpan in low-key Bernard Sumner mode, sing-chanting these ironic, strangely recursive, surreally cracked lullaby lyrics:

I’m obsessed with the mess
From the bed that you made
When you stayed
Even though that you said that it was done
But it was late and you were hungry
And the sheets stay a three course meal

You don’t want a date
You’d rather wait until this June
Because that is when your eighth dimension angels promised you
That they’d deliver someone better
The perfect fit for you

No I’m not sad
Hell if anything I’m glad about it
I’ve been waking up each day
In an anxious red flag panic
Knowing that I’m not the one
But not knowing just how to let you know

And then the strings come in, luscious and haunting over pulsing synth bass, Parpan singing “I wanted you to leave” over and over. It keeps going like that for awhile, ever-developing, morphing in cloudy layers before dissolving into sparse textures and swinging right into the next song, the spooky multiverse meditation “I Won’t Go.” At three-and-a-half minutes “The Mess” is nearly the longest song on the album. “I Won’t Go” feels epic at two-and-a-half; the actual longest song, “The Reckoning,” goes all the way past four minutes and feels like a stadium anthem. This depth-in-brevity is characteristic of the duo’s music, a vibe like a good [redacted] trip or the best Beatles songs, that “world in a grain of sand” holography that makes H.D.’s poetry and Borges’ short stories so enigmatically enduring.

We haven’t even talked about Caroline Shaw yet — that’s her on those luscious and haunting strings. We’ve been following Shaw for years, having interviewed her for the first time in 2019, again shortly before the pandemic got rolling (around the same time she met Parpan), and yet again a few months later.

Like most polymaths, Shaw could have made a career out of any of the various things she does. In the universe next door, she’s violist in a string quartet. In the universe next to that one, she’s gone to Hollywood to score indie movies. In our universe she joined a vocal ensemble, composed a Partita, won a Pulitzer, became a legend. But all of those universes exist within this one, where she moves effortlessly between Ken Burns soundtrack composer, collaborator with Sō Percussion and Attacca Quartet, composer-in-residence for Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, yadda yadda yadda.

In Ringdown, Shaw tends to stay in the background: composing textures out of samples and synth patches; playing violin and viola and piano; doing rather a lot of background singing, some of it gloriously layered (as on “Run” and “Trigger Warning”); taking the lead vocal on “I Won’t Go” (of which Parpan says, “I could only hear it in Caroline’s voice”). This is by design: In our interview she told us, “I wanted to be in a band where I didn’t have to sing at all, and it would just be Danni Lee singing.”

That gives Parpan a lot of room to stretch out, and she uses it completely. Her voice is massive in its range of possibilities, from that opening sing-chant through the full belting of “Crazy” and everything in between. It’s especially enchanting when she’s been singing around a handful of pitches in the lower part of a song’s melodic environment (what Indian classical theorists call the “poorvanga,” or lower tetrachord) and suddenly jumps into the upper region (“uttaranga”), usually to emphasize a corresponding shift in the lyrics. This happens in damn near every song. In “The Mess” it happens first on the line “stay a three course meal.” In “Ghost,” it happens on “let ’em pass through the highs and lows.” In the latest single, “Emotional Absentee,” it happens on the line “And if I had a dollar”:

And to be clear, we’re not just talking about Parpan’s singing technique, or the timbre of her voice. This is a compositional thing, melody and lyrics and vocal character all working together to make a unified musical experience. If this were free jazz we’d reference Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics. If it were straight-up classical music we might talk about thematic unity. We already dropped the fancy word “holography.” David Bowie and Sinead O’Connor, vastly different singers in every other way, had a similar knack for matching well-contoured melodies to their own unique voices.

It’s especially wonderful hearing Parpan blossom as a composer — it’s the sort of thing that can happen when composers hang out with other composers and work together. See also: Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, Lennon and McCartney, Bowie and Eno and Iggy. Listen to Parpan’s earlier work, already fine indie-pop music, and then listen to Lady on the Bike. You’ll hear it too.

It’s easy to make these comparisons to earlier artists, because Ringdown has that “full inheritance of the past” quality that defines all good art (“a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence,” T. S. Eliot calls it). The electronic layering in particular — which gets help from collaborators Aaron Peterson and Leah Vautar of Portland’s New Body Electric — traces a stream of electronica from Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros through Kraftwerk and Can, Depeche Mode and Erasure, Nellee Hooper and Aphex Twin, Autechre and Radiohead, Tune-Yards and Mica Levi, and so on up to the present-day plethora of electronic pop music. And that’s without even getting into the Haydn and Brahms samples.

On the other hand, there haven’t been too many duos like this one. If Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush had made a whole album of songs like “Don’t Give Up,” it might have sounded something like this. If Janis Ian and Linda Ronstadt had formed an ’80s pop group together, it might have sounded something like this. If Björk married Hildur Guðnadóttir, it might sound something like this. If the mad scientists who recently brought the dire wolves back from extinction were to clone Barbara Strozzi and Hildegard of Bingen and put them in a recording studio together, it might sound something like this.

The obvious comparison would be Indigo Girls, if their music was even remotely similar. Ditto Simon and Garfunkel. Do we dare mention Brooklyn indie-pop duo They Might Be Giants? To our ears that’s the closest you’ll get to the sort of duo dynamic you hear in Ringdown. If that means these two will be making albums of kid songs a decade from now, so much the better.

This is distinctly music made by women — women in love, no less — and it shines through quite clearly in both their music and their conversation. Perhaps that’s drawing perilously close to what Butlerians would call “essentialism,” but so be it. Once you start listening for this sort of thing it’s impossible to unhear it. Does that mean this music is “women’s work”? Sure, in the sense that raising children, writing novels, practicing law, running a movie studio, or running for president are “women’s work.”

To the present author this collaboration calls to mind Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”:

“If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again — if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.”

We spoke with Ringdown about a year ago, when they first started releasing music together (read that here). We spoke to them again last week as they were getting ready to release Lady on the Bike and start touring it — you can catch them next week, May 1, when Third Angle New Music brings them to the JOINT offices in Northwest Portland. The next day they’ll head to Brooklyn for Bang On A Can’s Long Play Festival and a string of shows with Sō Percussion.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and flow.

***

OAW: It was just over a year ago when we last talked, and since then you’ve been all over the world together, like literally all over the world, recorded an album, played a bunch of great shows. How’s that been, what’s that been like?

Caroline Shaw: It was really amazing to finish the album. It’s something that we’ve worked on basically since we met each other and started working on music. We had the big push in Amsterdam last, I think it was October, with Leah and Aaron, who are from Portland. They came out and said, “OK, we’re finally doing this.” And then figuring out all the different ways to live in two different locations, and just trying to get it done. I feel really proud of us that we made the deadline. And it’s been really exciting to do these shows with Sō Percussion, a bunch in Europe, and all over the U.S. We have this miniature set in the middle of that show with them.

And then recently, we had a great time in Milan on a Sunday night at 9 p.m. We thought no one would be there. Before the show, we were trying to guess, like, “how many people do you think will be there?” Like, “I think it’ll be 12.” And it was a full house of really interesting folks. It’s a very different crowd from people going to hear indie music. This was much more of people going to hear eclectic art music. I always say we learn something every single time, about ourselves, or about the music, or about audiences, or gear. We’ve enjoyed it.

Maybe for me the biggest thing is I feel like we’ve learned to really embrace mistakes on stage and be really honest and be really ourselves. That’s the thing that people comment on. They’re like, “it’s refreshing to just see you be really real.” There’s no pretense of perfection. I feel proud of that. It’s a weird thing to say. I’m proud that we’re not perfect.

Danni Lee Parpan: I think that the honest answer is that touring is such a gift, and it’s also so exhausting. And I think the other side, from the audience perspective: We’re all human, it’s exhausting to leave your house. So in a world where everything is chaos and you just want to sit on your couch in your pajamas at the end of every night, I feel so honored that there are people who are willing to go outside and go to a venue and stand there and listen to our art. So I feel like the kindest thing I can do in return is just be vulnerable.

I think if someone’s gonna make that trek out to a live show, then they want to see the live show. If they wanted to hear a pristine, perfectly polished album, they could do that from the comfort of their own living room.

And I think that realization — and whether or not it’s completely true, it’s just how I feel, or how we feel about it — has been really freeing to be like, when we’re on stage, we’re all in communion with one another. This is our collective moment together, outside, not on the couch. So let’s be in this together.

OAW: How did you meet New Body Electric?

DLP: The funny long response is I was moving and I needed boxes. Kelsey of the band The Margos, who I had been following, posted, “hey, I just moved, I have a bunch of boxes.” And I was like, “oh, cool, I’m gonna get my boxes from this person that I admire, and maybe this is how we’ll be friends.” And when I went over there, which was like a 45-minute drive, because I didn’t realize she was in Boring. I was like, “God damn it,” but I’d already committed. When I got there, Leah was there because Kelsey and Leah were working on a music festival together. And we all just chit-chatted for a minute and the rest is history. Like, I literally met Leah first, of Leah and Aaron of New Body, because I needed to get moving boxes.

And then from there we all followed each other on the internet. And Caroline and I had a housewarming party, and we invited them. And I was surprised that they showed up, because we didn’t really know each other. We all just really hit it off, and from there became actual friends first, and then the music stuff started. I feel really lucky to be able to genuinely call them friends, to have poker nights with them and to be like, “hey so we have to finish our album and the longest we’re gonna be in one place this year is actually when we’re in Amsterdam for something else, so would you be willing to fly out to Amsterdam and work on an album?” And to have them be like, “oh, yeah, sure, that sounds fun.”

They literally got off of the airplane and arrived at our place where we were staying — and we had been there for a few days longer, so we were pretty acclimated — and they went right into it. We recorded “The Mess” that day. I don’t know how they did it. They’re amazing. And their music is just very good and very fun.

OAW: Can you talk about the political and the personal in your songs?

DLP: Sorry, I just put a slice of orange in my mouth.

OAW: Is that a Valencia orange?

DLP: No, it’s called the Sumo Citrus, it’s ripe at this time of year, it’s basically like a giant mandarin, and they’re so good. And they’re really ugly-looking. If you see one in the grocery store get one.

CS: It is pretty weird looking.

DLP: I think my first instinct is to say that right now, and always I think, politics are personal. And so I’m not going to pretend that “Run” in general was written from this place of political discourse — I think it’s the beauty of music. With all songs I think we’re very bossy, like, “send this to your crush, do this, do that,” but I think the really cool thing is that one person can connect to a song and find meaning in it, and the person next to them either won’t or will but for an entirely different reason. I think when we were reviewing the art that we had created, you assign the emotions of your given circumstances, even if they weren’t even originally written about that.

I, in writing lyrics, don’t know how to write on the surface level. I go right to the gullet. They’re very emotionally driven. And I think the way that Caroline writes music is exactly the same. 

CS: Some of these songs are written fully together, some music first lyrics later, but I always think of it like painting, when I’m building a track or building a song. There’s something kind of like abstract painting. It’s not necessarily a narrative, but they’re very clear decisions about — I don’t know if I’d call it emotion, but it’s a real instinct with regard to harmony and pulse and tempo and drive and shifts and the way things move from one state to another. And I’m rarely very explicit about it for myself in the moment, going, “this is about this.” But there’s something very powerful in the subconscious that happens when making music that I’ve been really letting myself embrace lately, saying, “there’s something underneath.” This is the most woowoo thing I’ll ever say — you just have to be tapped into that. And I really believe that those things are connected to what’s going on in the world today, in my life, politically. I feel right now incapable of writing a chill song. I was thinking about this lately, “what if I wrote chill music that’s nice to listen to in the backyard?” And I just couldn’t do it without it feeling like I was dialing in an assignment. That’s not my natural state.

OAW: What is your songwriting process like as a duo?

DLP: I think it’s an ever-evolving process. It does involve a lot of play, but it also took a lot of practice to be able to get to the play. One thing we often say, or we’ve had to learn to say in rehearsal is: “Is this a time of play or a time of practice?”

Because the mindset for those things, for both of us, I think is very different. And I think Caroline has a very play-focused approach, and I have a very spreadsheet approach. At least to rehearsal.

CS: I really like spreadsheets, though.

DLP: You do. I think we both can toe the line on that, either way. But for the songwriting, I predict that the next album will have a lot more of, we sit down collaboratively and write together, now that we’ve developed a way of rehearsing and practicing and playing together.

CS: I’m hoping that that will happen. The other day we were rehearsing, trying to figure out how to play a certain song live. And it just evolved and changed. I was like, “OK, I want to I want to keep this idea for another song in the future.” But this record, some of the tracks are the first ones that we made. Some, like “Ghost,” definitely started out as I was making my little musical painting. And I offered it to you like, “is there any way you can make this into a song?”

“Two-Step” was definitely that way, where I create the environment for a song. I build the house, the design of the house. And then, to Danni Lee, “is there a way you’d want to live in this house or in this environment?”

DLP: Yeah, but we’re going to have to go to a couple of estate sales. We’re going to have to tear down a wall. We’ve got to call a structural engineer here because I need to bring some light in.

Most of the songs went that way for this record. There were a couple that were mine originally that I would present to Caroline and say, “do you want to like, Shaw-ify this?”

CS: “Emotional Absentee” was very much written in the room together, starting with a beat and some chords from New Body. That was cool to see you and Leah just riffing off each other.

DLP: This album really showed me that I can work in ways that I didn’t know that I could. Which was a really cool learning experience, and now I have this other tool to put in the toolkit. But my writing process is usually pretty private. It’s a thing that I hold very sacred. I’m not afraid to be very woo-woo; I always have said that when I make music, it’s not from me, it’s of me, channeled through something else. I’m purely the vehicle for channeling. And so knowing that we would all be in the same room together, working on this album with a very strict deadline, and knowing that I wouldn’t have that, I was pretty anxious. Because I don’t normally like to do that around other people. It was cool to learn that I could do that with others, I could play nicely.

OAW: How did you find that? Was there any specific thought or work process that you applied to that, or was it just “let’s see what happens” and it worked?

DLP: Working with Caroline — obviously I don’t need to say this, but she’s quite literally the best. She has an entire skill set — perfect pitch, composing, knowing how other instruments really work — that I don’t feel that I have. And so I think just a general sense of trust of myself and feeling safe in the room with others, to be like, “this is a no-judgment zone, this is just a let’s make something beautiful collaboratively and together zone” is really what did it for me.

CS: I keep thinking of you sitting in the corner of the attic room in Amsterdam, the first place.

DLP: Oh, before we started?

CS: Well, we started with your notebook and like —

DLP: The honest answer, truth, is the morning that Leah and Aaron arrived, we were like, “okay, here we go,” and we were realizing like, we don’t quite have lyrics to everything yet. I did a deep meditation and went into what I call the Akashic Record. And I was like, “okay, what are these songs?” And I just furiously wrote lyrics. And some of them were lyrics that I was like, “oh, right, that song that I tried to write five years ago that never went anywhere — that actually fits with this.” And some of them were brand new. And it looks absolutely insane in my notebook. It’s the most crazy handwriting, frantically trying to get it all down. But you’re right, that is what happened. And then we fine-tuned them together in the room.

CS: We call it “writing songs,” but there’s “shaping songs” and “producing songs” and how we define those things. There’s several songs on the record that were shaped really strongly in the room with Leah and Aaron. I especially wanted to work with Aaron because he’s got a real pop sensibility that I don’t necessarily have instinctively, or skillset-wise in terms of my producing. I lean in other directions. The sound of “The Mess” would not exist without Aaron. And “The Mess” is one that we perform live, and it’s really slow and gauzy and patient. And I still think that even after the record’s out, we’ll still probably perform it that way. It’s a really different version of it. 

DLP: It also was originally written on the ukulele.

CS: That was the thing that we started with the first day they landed; they came and they’re like, “we don’t need to get lunch, let’s just go.” It has this punchiness to it and a playfulness that was so exciting. I was like, “I feel like this has to be the first song on the album, the first thing that you hear.”

DLP: It’s funny because you say “punchy” and I would say “ethereal fever dream,” which is kind of how that day was for them.

CS: That’s very much more of Danni Lee song, I think, like all aspects wise. I feel like I was along on the process with that song, but it was really shaped in a cool way in the room in a few hours.

OAW: How do you decide who will sing what? How do you share vocal duties?

CS: Well, I wanted to be in a band where I didn’t have to sing at all, and it would just be Danni Lee singing.

DLP: There’s one song on the album that during that crazy morning lyric-writing session, as I was channeling the lyrics for “I Won’t Go,” I was like, “this is not meant for me to sing, this is meant for Caroline to sing.” Which is kind of funny because it’s a love song, so maybe selfishly I was like, “this is the song I wish you would write for me.” I could only hear it in her voice.

CS: It’s funny, you always say that it feels like a love song, and I can imagine those lyrics with different harmonies, it would feel really sweet but to me, that one is so sad. I don’t think that they find each other.

DLP: Yeah, they find each other. Yes, they do. “Somewhere out there is a life where you’re not mine and I’m not fine. Somewhere out there is a place where I’ve never seen your face. I won’t go.” You’re talking about you’re currently in the goodness, but you’re singing about if you didn’t know me, you know what I’m saying?

CS: Yeah. It’s sad harmony to me.

DLP: That’s the best kind of song, where you’re like, “oh, wait a minute.” I love when there’s a bop of a song and people are like, “yeah!” And then you look at the lyrics and you’re like, “what the fuck?” It’s a real haha gotcha moment.

OAW: What is it like coming from these different musical worlds — classical and pop — and meeting in the middle?

DLP: Well, there are things about Caroline’s world that absolutely mystify and crack me up. In my world, if I write a new song, it’s because no one’s asked me to. And if I wanna premiere it, I go to an open mic and I play it while everybody’s talking over me and I make zero money and I go home.

And in Caroline’s world, if you write something new, it’s because someone asked you to, and it’s called a “commission,” and there will be a regional premiere and a world premiere and a West Coast regional premiere and a European premiere. And everywhere you go, they’re like, “can we frame this as some sort of premiere?” And people are in the audiences and they’re listening. And it is just wild. I feel so much privilege to have somehow been given a seat at this table, because it is just an entirely different world compared to what I’m used to.

And I’m very much used to bringing all of my own gear and carrying it and packing it up at the end of the day and lugging everything. And Caroline, how do you feel about that?

CS: Oh my God, it’s the hardest part. I want to give a lecture to all classical music students and tell them, “you might think learning that Mozart quartet is hard, and have to, like, make sure your violin’s in tune. No. Have you ever lugged a suitcase full of gear with all the different cables, hoping that they all turn on when you get to the venue, with a different power system, and then packed it all up and then carried it up the stairs four flights? And also you made all the music yourself, and it’s really personal, and you’re putting it out there?” That’s hard.

DLP: And you only have a 15-minute soundcheck with somebody who just doesn’t want to be there.

CS: Yeah, that’s the name of my memoir. “It’s hard to be in a band.” But super rewarding, and I just feel like I’m learning so much. I said earlier that I wanted to make some kind of pop-ish record for like 10 years. There was a period about 13 years ago where I had pinned to the wall a dream: I wanted to make this ambient electronic record. And then my life quickly changed and I was spun into a different direction and never got to make that record.

Last night, we had a guitar on the wall and I was like, “I can’t play the guitar.” I keep trying, but this hurts my hand. I don’t have the same kind of strength in my hand. I’ve been playing the violin for so long. But I used to watch this video of St. Vincent of the song called “The Strangers,” this is probably almost 15 years ago, she’s just playing an acoustic guitar, a song really stripped down. There’s something really refreshing about how she talks about music. It’s just very delightful. That video was a big part of my life in my late 20s. And I said, “I remember watching this video, and learning this song on the guitar, this is the only song that I know.” Admiring her, and admiring Tune-Yards, and wanting to figure out how to do what they do, but not having the same experience.

CS: So now, at the age of 42, I feel like I’m, with Danni Lee, getting to finally do this thing that I’ve always wanted. But do it in the way that I’m really excited about, and with a lot of experience that I didn’t have 15 years ago.

Did you like that answer, Danni Lee?

DLP: I really liked your answer. I was tickled by the fact that most people probably assume that you can play every single instrument, like very well, or at least fake it. And I think it is so funny that you cannot play the guitar or the ukulele.

CS: Yeah, it’s like something in my brain refuses to learn.

DLP: It’s honestly a wild thing to observe, because you know her musical talents and abilities. She could write for either instrument. But it is so comical to me. Also, I just want the record to state that I think the guitar that we have is kind of shitty. And the strings are super old, and I think the neck and body are kind of warped.

CS: Yeah, I just need a new guitar.

DLP: Well, okay. Slow down. No, I don’t think we need to get one. I just think maybe if you tried like a nice, small electric guitar that you could do it.

CS: I think I’m meant for the bass. I always feel really good with the bass. One note at a time.

DLP: Okay, well, you’ve got one and it’s currently hanging on our wall, so I won’t hold my breath.

CS: I’m going to release a record that’s just songs that I sing with a solo bass. I can’t wait. And I’m going to do it at all the open mics. I’m serious.

DLP: I know. I can’t wait.

OAW: What was making this record like, from a technical “recording an album” perspective?

CS: I think the thing I’m most proud of is the fact that we did this album pretty low-tech, I would say. Aside from — we had the great honor of spending a day at the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam on their huge stage, and they were kind enough to loan us, for the day, a beautiful Steinway. D, I think.

DLP: Oh my God, most beautiful piano. They showed us five beautiful Steinways. “Which one would you pick?” They were like, “pick a letter, any letter.” It was insane.

CS: There’s a couple of things early on that we recorded in Omaha with Ben Brodin.

DLP: But the majority of our time in Amsterdam, we were in Airbnbs, basically.

CS: My most fancy sentence: “I’m a composer-in-residence at the Concertgebouw.”

DLP: And that’s how you play Milan!

CS: It’s a really amazing place, so I’ve spent a large chunk of time this year there. The first period I was staying with this couple who had this beautiful four-, five-story home just down the street from the Van Gogh Museum. So we had this apartment in the attic, which has these magical ceilings. And then the second half of that period, we had to shift to a different place, we were at an Airbnb.

DLP: So instead of having a sound booth, Leah would literally stand with a moving blanket over her body, crouched over us as we sang. And the microphone that we use predominantly — it’s a very good microphone, but she treats it terribly. She stores it in a mismatched sock and it’s always just kind of rolling around her suitcase.

CS: But it’s served me well for like 10 years.

DLP: Yeah, for sure.

CS: The Neumann TLM-102, I’ve done everything on that.

DLP: It’d be like, “oh wait hold, I can hear a moped going by outside.” But I think the reason I’m proud of that is because I think the record sounds amazing, and I think Aaron is a super-talented producer. I think what we all bring to the table is good, and I hope that people who learn that, or read about this, realize you don’t need to have a crazy big budget to do all these things. I know it sounds really bougie, like, “we flew out our friend and his wife to produce our album with us in Amsterdam while we were there on holiday.” That’s not quite the narrative.

CS: It was literally just, “we have to finish it, this is where we are.” If we could have done it in Portland, we would have. Then there’s a lot of stuff that I’ve made just generating ideas on my laptop in Logic, just sketching things out, doing things at home, doing things on planes while traveling. Then sometimes rerecording some of that stuff with analog synths, or playing inside the piano at Muziekgebouw.

Budget wise, I feel really proud that we did this on very little. I used points to fly them out to Amsterdam. So that wasn’t even a big expense.

And there’s so many different ways of making music, and I really feel like some people thrive in the studio environment where you have lots of pedals and tools at your fingertips, and that’s great. Some people work on a record sort of continuously for a couple of years, sometimes it’s all in one big chunk.

But all I can say is I’m just very excited about making the next record. I am meticulously organized with my files. I have a folder of all the songs that we kind of abandoned from before, and I rank them in terms of how interested I am in getting back to them, versus when I have folders of new songs and ideas. And I feel like we know each other so much more.

DLP: Like I was saying earlier, we really had to establish in our rehearsals, “is this a time of play or a time of practice?” Because I think now that we do know how to work together it’s super easy to get distracted and to just start playing, to be like “yeah that was cool, do that again, keep doing that, what if I add this” — and the next thing you know you’re just making a new song, and you’re like “shit we have a show tomorrow.” We really need to be able to play the things that are already in existence live. I think-do-not-fear there will hopefully be another one. And maybe this time, who knows, it might not take three years.

OAW: Okay, super technical question. Caroline, in the liner notes for “Crazy” you refer to “the opening samples come from a bunch of archival material I’ve loved over the years.” Tell me about this archival material. Where did this come from, what is that?

CS: There’s all these samples I’ve loaded onto my 404. I collect these samples from the UCSB Edison Wax Cylinder Archive; I generally source them from the UC Santa Barbara website, and also the Library of Congress has a great collection of old, old recordings. And it’s just some of my favorite ones. I can’t speak to exactly what’s on the record now; I know what I have loaded into my sampler. Now I sort of use bits of my own music, like old rehearsal recordings of a string quartet and some demos that I’ve made to mix in.

DLP: There’s, like, conversations.

CS: Is that on the record? I don’t think that’s on the record. Right now, I have a conversation between John Cage and Merce Cunningham that I feed in live.

DLP: I think the live version of it has gotten so crazy because, no pun intended — with Caroline, it’s like the game now is to try to throw me off. There are nights where she is just throwing those samples out there. So far, she hasn’t gotten me.

CS: I want to use the radio live. I have a sample of radio tuning that I think “Crazy” starts with. We have the little radio on the tape deck.

DLP: Oh yeah. See, is this an interview or is it play? It’s play. Everything’s play.

CS: And now I’m deeply into it. I have a whole folder of nature sounds for this other project that I’m working on. So I have like 18 different recordings of cicadas and frogs from different states. I do love collecting sounds, and they’re all meticulously organized in my files.

OAW: So tell me about the lady on the bike.

CS: Who is she?

DLP: I know, who is she? So when Caroline and I were playing Big Ears Festival in 2024 —

CS: It was exactly a year ago. I get panicked just thinking about it.

DLP: I know. It was our first big show where it felt pretty high-risk. Big Ears is such an awesome festival, but it sort of has, for us, like high school reunion vibes, like everybody is there. I’ll call it the campus of the festival because it’s a pretty close-knit small footprint, and just as you’re walking around you run into literally everybody in the new music world. We were so nervous, and we had recently signed with Nonesuch, and the goal is to make an album, but we’re coming to this festival, we don’t have any merch, we don’t really have anything to share except for the music. But what if we handmade album covers and just hid them around the campus and made it sort of like a treasure hunt? We’ll post about it on social media. We were trying to think of it as guerrilla marketing, like how can we be “hi we’re here we’re queer get used to it!” And so we made these album covers and we walked around and we hid them. And then immediately after we did that we were like “oh my God, what if nobody finds these albums, and nobody cares, and it’s supposed to rain tonight, and there’s just gonna be for the next three days of this festival these soggy wet pieces of branded garbage in these beautiful green spaces.” Like that was the dumbest thing. Why did we do that? We were just feeling really self-conscious. 

And we were walking back to the hotel feeling bad for ourselves, and this woman drove by on her bicycle and she goes, “Ringdown!” And we look and she points to the little basket on the front of her bike and she was like, “I found an album cover, I’m coming to your show, I’m so excited!” And we were like, “oh my God, it worked. It’s working, people actually might care.” And we just felt so overjoyed. And so from that experience, our mantra now before every show — because, spoiler, we still get the same amount of nervous before every show — is right before we go out on stage, we say, “for younger you, for younger me, for future us, and for the lady on the bike.”

CS: “Help stave off the existential crisis.”

DLP: Yeah, and I think, you get nervous obviously, but I think that’s the whole narrative too. It’s like, I’m not here for perfection, I’m here for the lady on the bike. I’m here for the younger version of me that couldn’t even have dreamed that I would be here, and I’m here for the future version of us that’s old and decrepit, and someone else is having to wipe our butts and we’re like, “I used to perform music a lot.”

CS: It’s a real appreciation of the moment. And I always like to think of making music as a gift, whether I’m a composer or in Ringdown. It’s for people. It’s for someone. It’s not this abstract thing that’s only for yourself. It can be a gift for yourself, but it is really for someone. I’m feeling really grateful that, as you said in the beginning of this, that people leave their homes and come out to experience something different and imperfect and new. And that feeling at every show, that moment will never ever happen again.

And yeah, the lady on the bike, we don’t know who she is, she just represents a lot.

DLP: A cool marketing thing we did to honor that feeling and the lady on the bike, is we handmade 50 album covers. And so the first 50 people who pre-ordered through the Nonesuch website got a handmade custom album cover. And then the only other way to get them in the future, if you would like a handmade cover, is to come to live shows.

CS: I think that’s my new favorite thing about Ringdown, actually just making arts and crafts. The house is just full of arts and crafts.

DLP: It’s like Amy Sedaris threw up all over our house.

OAW: What would each of you ask the other, if you were interviewing her?

DLP: I would ask Caroline, “what’s your favorite project you’ve ever done and why is it Ringdown?”

CS: I would ask you, “what kind of vibe is the next album going to be?”

DLP: Oh my god. I think we’ll probably collaborate with Maurizio Cattelan on a dance remix of John Cage, 4’33”.

CS: Good answer.