The ARTICA Podcast Ep2

R.W. Smith hosts the Artika Podcast with LG Brown, a new board member. They introduce the mobile alien research units, who will be performing at Artika. The units are also visual artists. They discuss their backgrounds and how they came together as a band. The band uses visual elements like projection and black lights in their performances. They aim to create a multisensory experience for the audience. The visuals can sometimes affect their music, creating a unique atmosphere. My name is R.W. Smith and this is the Artika Podcast. Today on the Artika Podcast I have a surprise for everyone. Not only do I have artists for you, I have a board member from Artika, the newest board member, LG Brown. Say hi. Hello. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being here. Not only is he a board member, he's going to be my new crime partner in the Artika Podcast. So we have mobile alien research units. Guys, thank you for coming. Thanks for having us. I want to apologize because we copster music and I didn't give you credit last time and I'm so sorry. I want to apologize on air. That music is great. It truly hit that episode, I think. I think Dr. Smith here asked me for some ideas for Artika Podcast music. Obviously I'm familiar with your guys' music. I said we might just have just the song and a classic. Not all have a little bit of it. We got to keep that. That was awesome. What brings you guys to Artika? This isn't the first time you guys have been here. I blame LG. Yeah, blame LG. LG is such a great proponent of this festival. He's the one that really inspired us to go ahead and apply. We did that last year and this will be our second time participating. Okay, okay. Where did you guys meet, LG? We've run in the same circle for several years. The local music scene. Yeah, I mean, you were playing with Rastis Valdez and Cacodill many moons ago. That's right. I think in the early iterations in the Maru Project. I think that's where we first crossed paths and that was some years ago now. That's right. That was not, what theater was that? That was on Cherokee Street. Way out, the old way out club thing. Yeah. I've never seen Cacodill at the old way out club. Right, right, right. Nice. So it's been several years now. Okay. Nice, nice. So are you guys going to be performing in the next Artika? We are. We are. Our proposal was accepted and we are absolutely thrilled. Nice, nice. So tell me something. What makes you into this whole idea of public art? You're musicians, right? We're not normally used to seeing musicians engaged in this type of art, but here you are at Artika. We also double as visual artists as well. Oh. Yeah, we each have a background in visual arts. Okay. All right. I'm an illustrator and traditional 2D artist. Right. I have my MFA in sculpture. Okay. And you guys are St. Louis? Born and bred? I'm born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Okay. And then my wife is from here in St. Louis. All right. I was born in Okinawa, Japan and grew up in Texas. Okay. So I've been here in St. Louis for about 17 years now. So what's up with that Texas barbecue? That's the best, right? I'm a barbecue slob. I'm a Mexican food slob. Oh, my God. This is St. Louis. Now we have our own barbecue. I was going to say, you've got to be careful about being a barbecue slob in St. Louis. I like it all. I know. So have you guys done any of your art in Artika, like any visual stuff yet? Other than what we've used within the stage performance? No, we haven't. Well, I think last year you guys' performance, I know amongst the board and amongst volunteers and organizers of Artika, I think I've told Michael this a couple of times, your performance and the visual presentation that you did with the Turtle Lounge and the fog and the laser field, you guys did a crazy after dark psychedelic rock performance last year, the talk of the town. No, no, no. The laser show. Yeah, the laser show. Well, you guys aren't just music. No, no. You put on a real show. Oh, yeah. So Maru started as an art installation project, and Michael. Right. So I designed it right in the middle of a pandemic, actually. Okay. So, yeah, I had this idea about the Mobile Alien Research Unit. The theme was about, it was kind of about immigration and the immigrant experience. Sort of longing for home, that kind of thing. It kind of had its background, I guess, don't stop, go independent in sort of Buddhist thought, existential philosophy, you know, exploration of the self and the self in relationship to the rest of the world. Okay. And so to boil it down, this whole thing is about being human. We're all pretty much aliens, you know, in this world. We come from nowhere, with a capital N, and we spend our lives basically trying to make sense of our own existence. Okay. How long have you guys been together? Well, okay, so at the Trio, we've been together for two years now. Two and a half? Two and a half years now, yeah, yeah. A year before that, our drummer, Steve Lewis, and I sort of just worked as a duo, and then we finally found the perfect bass player, Jim Ryan. And, yeah, he's been such a creative catalyst for this group. We have a lot of focus, as well as just a lot of musical skill. Just some great musicality. Ryan's almost an instrumentalist. He plays bass guitar, keyboards, theremin. Not only does he, you know, do the melodic stuff, but he does a lot of great noise stage and sound stage, as well. Okay. So he really enriches the Mars sound. Is the visual component collaborative, too, or is that primarily, yeah? Absolutely, yeah, it's absolutely collaborative. Talk about that and work on that together. I know I've been to a few of your shows. You've done projection. You've done the frogs. You've done blacklight painting. The frogs and stuff are sort of part of, you know, that original installation that I came up with. But then, you know, as the three of us get together, it just kind of evolves. Ryan does a lot of projection, video projection kind of stuff, and Steve actually does a lot of that kind of thing, too. Steve's been getting into projection mapping. Oh, awesome. Did you guys meet in art school? No, no. Funny about that, though, is while I was living in Michigan, that's where I met my now wife. My wife, Michael, was one of her professors at Flow Valley. And while we were there, I was performing music, improvised music in a bathtub at this friend's house. That's her and her house. It's an art gallery kind of space. And Michael was there. You met at an art gallery. Michael was in town, and he came and, yeah, he saw me play in an old crow's foot bathtub. And, yeah, I think that's one of the first meetings that we had. Very nice. And then, like, 15 years later, here we are. Yeah. Oh, wow. And my wife had a space in our studio where Michael was doing his sculptures and stuff, and I was there just dropping stuff off with her, and I saw all these neon frogs. And I took a picture, and I sent it to him, and I was like, what is going on here? These are really cool. And he told me about Maru and the art installation and how he wanted to turn it into a musical project. And I was like, well, if you ever want weird noises, I've got a new synthesizer. And then, I think, like a year or two later or whatever, he was like, hey, do you want to play bass? And I was like, well, I don't have a bass. I've never played bass, but I've played guitar for 20 years. So there you go. So I borrowed his bass for a year or so and got my own. And here we are. And here we are. I'm R.W. Smith, and I'm with L.G. Brown, and this is the Artika Podcast. We are with Michael Quintero and Ryan Koster from Mobile Alien Research Unit. And, guys, what I want to talk about is this whole idea of found objects. Because you said you were playing in a bathtub. Do you kind of just make music out of your environment? In that specific instance, the name of the show was called Intimate Spaces, and they wanted me to either be in the bathroom to kind of replicate someone trying to create music at their own home. And sometimes people will record in their bathroom for one reason or another. The sound sounds good or whatever. So I was like, well, I'm going to sit in the bathtub, and I used a piece of wood to put my guitar pedals on, and I just did an entire 30 or 40 minutes of improvised soundscapes with my guitar. I did a little bit of vocal here and there, but it was all improvised, just kind of like free flow in the moment. Was it mic'd up? Yeah. And you could hear it through the entire house. Did you have effects on it? Yep. Wow. So it was like a two-story house. And, yeah, if you were upstairs in the living room area looking at artwork, you could hear everything I was doing. Wow. Nice. And it was recorded as well. So it's out there. Yep. I have, well, it's in my computer. I think I'm the only person that owns the audio. The person that recorded it lost all of his files, but I somehow got it before he lost it. What about on stage? How do you put that together? Do you guys sit down and talk about themes or what you want to do before? So we practice, you know, normal set songs. You know, if we're creating new songs, we have personal concepts behind them as far as art goes. But, yeah, we're like a normal band. We get together every week and we practice our song and our set list and stuff. But what about the stage? The stage is kind of like we have a set amount of elements that we'll use. Yeah. Frogs or black lights. Sometimes we'll use our lasers. And we just place them depending on the venue that we're playing in. And just to create it more of not only just the sound, the musical aspect of it, but also visual, you know, attack it from multiple senses. Is it different every time? I think a little bit, but it's normally pretty the same. But I think that we're going to get more adventurous. At least I hope we do with different elements. That's the goal is to keep it evolving, keep it evolving, keep it developing. Because we're all really interested in developing the visual aspect of this whole thing. As much as the music. Do the visuals affect your music? That's a good question. I think if the vibe is right, I will definitely zone out. I know in practice, sometimes we've had practice where we turn the lights off and have the black lights and everything going. And if the fog machine is going, I will zone out and sometimes forget changes in the fog. I've experienced that, too. It's almost the same thing. It's about the vibe, you know. It's about creating the vibe. If we're not feeling the energy of the music, I can't expect the audience to either. So we have to be a part of that inward. Wow. This year's theme for the festival in October is Picnic Under the World Tree. Do you have any insight? Maybe tell us a little bit about the proposal you sent in and how you're planning to hook into that theme. If you'd care to share, we'd like to keep it under wraps so we understand. We have some vague ideas at the moment. One of the components that we propose is to get some, what do they call it, those kinds of hologram projectors, fan hologram projectors. So I'm not a techie, so I'm going to have to figure out how to work this thing once I get it. But we hope that that's going to be one of the components of it. We have written a new song for this festival. And you did that last year, too. It's called Turtles All the Way Down. The Mobile Alien Research Unit song was based on Artic's theme last year. That's right, that's right. Definitely one of our favorites to play, Bill. It's a great song. Yeah, we have a new one that we learned it last week on a Friday. We practiced on a Friday, and then we played it live the next day. On Saturday. Oh, my goodness. In Alton. Yeah. We liked it that much that we, like, this is it. It's working. It's working. Yeah, we think it's working. Do you guys consider yourselves an improvisational band? We can. We have. Yeah. Yeah, sure. We've done a couple of improvised compositions in live settings. Yeah, and it depends on how much time we have, right? How much time we're given for each set. But we do like to leave room for improvisation. I also like to call it hypnosis. We can get into the trance, get into the groove, not rush through a song. Do you guys feel comfortable here at Artika? You know, because you get a lot of this art, you know, this, you know, different types of art. And music, most people, when you think about the term art, even though music is art, people kind of look at music as its own thing. But I see music as art. How do you see it? Oh, 100%. It's art. 100%. And I like blending both. Yeah. Yeah. So it's kind of serendipitous that we are all kind of linked in that with this project. So when that kind of, that artist, you know, with his head, his nose in the air, does he look at you guys like, you're not artists, you know? You're not real. You say, well, hey, but look at our stage, you know? You guys are real artists. You guys are real artists. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know how you frame it, Brian, but, you know, I've got my MSA. I've got my, you know, terminal degree in the arts and students in academia. I'm a professor. You know, I've been a professor for 17 years. Oh, bonus CD. Yeah, yeah. I was trained in Charlottesville up in Valley. So, you know, I don't know. There's plenty of pretense in the art world. So you're an educator. I'm an educator. I am an educator. Okay. Yeah, yeah. You have that in common. Yeah, I'm an educator also. Okay. Where do you teach? Right now I'm teaching at a high school here in St. Louis. Oh, okay. That's pretty cool. The best charter school in the city. Yeah? Yeah. All right. All right. I'm going to big up my school. Of course. Of course. And I have to say that Flow Valley is one of the strongest art programs in the region. Okay. So anyone who's interested should come and check it out. They can definitely check it out. But, you know, going back to our conversation, I think there's, you know, I mean, I suppose there's a very pretentious contention within the, you know, visual art world. Yeah. Academia has that sort of, you know, slice to it, too. I don't know. I think I just frame it in terms of just authentic self-expression, you know, when it comes to music or visual art. I've noticed that the poets are trying to pull away from that pretentious academic way of being. And the term street poetry comes to mind when you see a lot of poets around. They want to be separated from that pretentious academic side of what they do. And I think they feel that this whole idea of the street gives them credibility. Do you feel that in any way? Like pulling yourself away from academia, even though you teach it, you know? Sure, sure. Well, I think art is about going toward authenticity. Yeah. Just authenticity. And that's the goal of it, you know? Stripping away all the layers of pretense and getting to the essence of who you are. Yeah. As a human being. I think that's the beauty of art and the power of art and the point of it. Yeah, one of the biggest things for me is connection between other people. I think in the art world, you can tell, especially in grassroots organizations and stuff like that that are helping push the arts, you can tell when someone's genuinely just trying to express themselves outwardly to connect with other people and share experience. I know it's hard for me, and LZ, maybe you can answer this, it's hard for me to share my music right away because it's so personal. You know, art is very personal, and I think that it takes a lot out of an artist to actually put it out in the public domain. Yeah, it does take a certain amount of courage, I think. But my philosophy is the more personal it is, the more universal it is. And I agree with a lot, especially on the philosophy of art, a lot of what you guys said. I don't know if we've had that conversation specifically, but it resonates. I agree that authenticity is key. As far as working on a piece, to your question, I do have some difficulty in putting out something before it's ready, before it feels ready, before I've connected with it enough, and that can be a little bit of a subjective experience. I think sometimes, as you guys said, that can happen in a day. Some things don't see the light. Some things haven't seen the light of day for my arsenal, but other things, maybe you'll see the light of day after three or four years of work and revisiting and maybe having the right people in the room. So I agree that being as authentic as you can be is important, and connecting with the music and connecting with others is important. I feel like as an artist, you just kind of know that when it happens. It's not a science. It's not after three weeks of practice, it's going to be ready to put out there. There's no formula. Right. There's no formula. It's a lot of feeling. It's a lot of intuition. It's a lot of understanding when the moment's right and being ready for the moment when it comes. I heard there's so many different forms of Coltrane's and Love Supreme's out there that they say never hear the same version twice. That there's so many. Recently, a version was put out a couple years ago. I don't know if you guys heard it. Every jazz musician I talk to, they say, of course, of course. It's not going to be the same. It's never the same. As a musician, as an artist, everything you do has to have its own sense of authenticity. It's got to be kind of new. Not just new to them, but new to you. Right. Agreed. How do you, and anybody can answer this, how do you deal with the idea that somebody may not like your work? I don't know. For me, personally, I struggled with that a little bit when I was starting to play live music in front of people. Then I kind of had to accept that everyone's taste is different. The people that kind of grapple to what you're doing just kind of naturally come. The people that don't, they see your stuff, they don't like it, they move on. It's just kind of a river. But it can be hurtful, especially for New York artists. Oh, it can definitely. It's like that where if you hear 100 compliments in a day and you hear one negative thing. They remember it. You remember it, yes. Yeah, and I tend to be a real affirmation whore. That's what I want. That's what I'm talking about. It's on the back. I don't know. I think as I mature a little bit, I realize, like Ryan said, everybody has a different taste. Everybody has different tastes. I can't make stuff just so people will like it. If I'm doing that, then it's not really about the art. It's really about soothing my insecurity. On a clear day, I can see that I just need to make the art and put it out there and see what happens. See if it connects. I know Rick Rubin has said, create for yourself. Don't create for anyone else except for yourself. That's a pretty good philosophy to try to live by. It can be difficult. The funny thing about creating for yourself and speaking for my own art, it gets so weird when I'm in my own head and I'm making music. It just turns into sound and sounds build upon sounds at the point where I'm kind of, I hate to say it, but I'm kind of getting off on it. I'm like, wow, I'm loving this. That's the thing that I want to do. I want to like my own stuff. I could care less if anyone else likes it. I don't know if that's selfish of me. If it is, then I'm the same way. Again, it lends to what both of these guys are saying and what Rick Rubin has said, apparently. Brilliant artist in his own right. You have to make it for yourself. You have to be satisfied with it. It has to say something about you and where you're at today. That might be different from what you're doing five years from now. I imagine many years ago I would struggle with concern about whether it was resonating or whether this piece was going to resonate. I just feel like that's not in my process at all anymore. Just like you guys said, you make it. Hopefully you connect with it. You put it out there and it becomes something else. It becomes public domain to some degree and people will like it or they won't like it or they'll follow it or they'll interpret it. Sometimes very differently than what you might have intended with it. Frankly, I love that. I love hearing influences that other people hear. Sometimes fans I've never even heard of. Your work reminds me of this or that. I think that's something that's really interesting. It does. It broadens you out as an artist. It's very interesting how art, what you create in the studio or in practice as a group becomes something quite different once you've served either in the form of an album or in the form of a live performance. Interaction, interpretation becomes more than just what you started with. It takes on a life of its own. Exactly. Exactly. I work on some solo stuff at home and I noticed one of the things I know when I really like a song, when I'll typically like to listen to it in the car when I'm driving and if I slowly keep turning it up as the song progresses, it's like all of a sudden it's full blast and I'm like, okay, we've got something going on here. We really enjoy it. Yeah. I call myself painting with noise. I've always been reticent to mix the two, you know, music and what I may do on paper or on a canvas. And recently I've started moving away from eight forms, you know, regular musical progressions. Was it the 1-4-5 progression? You know, I just don't like that anymore. I want to make raw sound and that's what I've been doing. And it's been interesting because people, they listen to it and they say, wow, that's interesting. Like I don't know if they know what to make of it yet, but they say, oh, that's interesting because I layer sound. Like artists use a brush and they layer or pencil and they layer, you know, for texture. And I think sound can have texture. So when you guys are making music, how do you deal with form? How do we deal with form? Well, for me, as far as songs go, there has to be a hook, you know. Okay. I guess I'm a kind of traditional in that sense. I want to be able to hum at least a chorus. Like a melody you mean? Yeah, yeah. Okay. I'm always looking for that earworm. Yeah. I want a melody too. Yeah, a melody, yeah. I don't know. What would you say, Lance? So typically, yeah, with Maru, our songs have those kind of basic structures. We don't stick to the normal verse, chorus, verse, bridge. You know, we mix it up for sure. A lot of the songs are very repetitive and hypnotic, kind of pulling inspiration from kraut rock music of the 70s. And what I like to do personally is build up sounds to reach certain climaxes and tonality. Why? It's because if you have repetitive beats and bass lines, to some people, it can get very monotonous. So adding in little elements here and there to drive and pull the listener through the story of the song is something that I actively am trying to incorporate and build upon. Yeah, that's something I'm pretty conscious about, just to kind of make that experience from start to finish easy. And all of a sudden, it's like you start the song and all of a sudden ten minutes later you're like, wow, I just listened to a ten minute song. And it felt like, you know, it was only a few minutes. Elgie, what about you? I wish I had a concise answer. I feel like my process is so strange. And as I said earlier, sometimes it can take years. I totally get that, yeah. And I'm not, maybe even to a detriment, I'm not real hung up on A, B, C, D, E, even the people in the room. And I've had the experience of like, I've got a good idea for a song, but it's not, these aren't the right people in the room. Stop banging on the table. Sorry, sorry. These aren't the right people in the room for this song. And so even the right people, the right moment, the right time in my life, the right lyrics can come at very unexpected times. In the shower, in a dream, in my car. I mean, I've had the experience of all of those and more. I feel as though I'm less rigid in a process of layering. But I think I have a fairly powerful intuition when it is coming together. This song's been in the archives for four years and it's just waiting for this lead guitar player to be in the room. And now it's coming together. Yeah, so for me it's less of a process and more of a waiting for the right moment. Again, the moment for that lyric to come in the shower or the moment for the right person to arrive to collaborate. I've had that experience with painting, where I've started a painting, I put it away, and four years later I just was cleaning and I looked at it and I'm like, I like this again. I hated it, you know, back three years ago, but now I like this and I'm going to work on it and finish it. And you're like, it's just that time. You know. You know. It's a feeling. Maybe you're bringing your new experiences to that painting. Absolutely right. Oh yeah. You kind of grow into it. Yeah. You know, when I'm in the creative process, I always think about James Baldwin. And I don't remember the exact quote, but he said something to the effect of, you write to figure out that thing that you don't know. You do the writing process. There's some kind of revelation, right? Some kind of surprise that happens. So, you know, when I'm trying to write a song or, you know, work out some kind of visual art, I think about where's the surprise going to come from? You know, what am I going to unearth that I hadn't previously thought before? It doesn't happen all the time. Those moments are few and far between. But when they happen, I know it's going well. That's why it's going right. This is very, I don't know, it's a beginner question, a neophyte question, but do you think painters have catharsis when they're painting? If they're doing it right, I suppose. Painting is a very painful process for me. Usually it goes, the process goes, I set up the canvas, the palette, and then I set it, I leave it, I wasted all my energy in the setup, and then it pains me to try to come up with a concept too much, and I'm trying to get better into just diving into it and breaking through those barriers. But yeah, I used to paint a lot and I don't anymore, and it's been tough for me to, like it's a mental battle to get back into it. Interesting, like writers who have that mental block, and it takes years sometimes to get back to it, like seeing that painting, maybe something was triggered, like maybe you saw a combination of colors somewhere along the line, and then you connected it to that painting, and when you saw that painting, it's kind of, what is it like, you know how they say we experience trauma through our nervous systems, and all of a sudden everything comes together through that system, and something clicks. That's been my experience in art, as I said earlier, something just clicks, and I feel like, it sounds like you guys have had that experience to some degree as well, but I feel like you know when it's working, you just know. And for me, like I said, those are moments that vary too far between you and me. Like yours, yeah! But when it happens, it's amazing. You're transformed from those experiences. Well, you can't let it go. When it comes, it stays with you, and you have to put it down. You have to put it down, but then it goes away just as quick as it comes. Well, once you put it down. Yeah, yeah, right. At least you got it, hopefully. Yesterday's innovation is today's crochet, you know? I mean, do we write things down anymore? Do we keep our phones next to our beds, so when that idea comes, we get it? I do pretty often. I definitely do that. I keep my phone, I used to keep a pad next to my bed, but I didn't use it as much as I do the phone. Notepad on my phone, I have years and years of notes. Audio notes. That when I listen to it, oh my God, I remember now. I've got to do that now. Same, same. I do the notes on my phone. I hum little ditties in my phone all the time. Yeah, go back and, oh man, that was a great idea. I have a folder on my computer that is titled recordings to organize, and it's literally voice recordings one through 800 that I need to go through and label and organize. It's a great time to live because we have access to whatever we think. We can just put it down in digital format and get back to it. I think that's an amazing ability. That's amazing. I like to use the phrase the golden era of production in terms of audio and video. You can do things today for even recording this podcast, for example, that 20 years ago would have been extremely expensive. It's not impossible for local acts to pull off. Heck, in my early 20s when the house I was living in, we didn't have any equipment. What we did was we put a tape into a tape deck. We used headphones. We used headphones as a microphone. Oh my gosh. That's how we recorded stuff, straight to a cassette. Do you still have any of those cassettes? I have the one, and it got damaged, and I tried to splice it back together. If you turn it up really loud, you can hear the audio just slightly. Wow. What about you? Anybody else here? I have cassettes from years and years and years ago. I have some from the 80s. Oh my God. I will buy an old beat-up cassette deck if I find one because I feel like if mine breaks down, I'm never going to be able to find another one. A few years ago, mine broke down. I opened it up, and I started poking around, and I noticed one of the rubber belts was missing. So I bought a pack of 50 of them in different sizes online, found the right size, put it in. That's great. It's been three or four years now? There you go. Well, cassettes, they have a feeling. It's not quite like albums, but they do have an interesting feeling. I know that a couple of bands that I know of are actually releasing on cassettes. Oh, it's coming. It's coming back. It's been back. Yeah. Has it? I have seen some around town selling cassettes. Oh, sure. Wow. Will they start making cassette decks again? That would be huge. As soon as the kids think it's cool. Industry-wise. They think it's cool. It's probably coming back then. But if the industry actually, you know, if all of a sudden you've got a company saying, people want this again. Happens with vinyl. I want to see hi-fi metal tapes make a resurgence. Oh, now you're asking for a lot. I know. That's a tall order. I know. I've got a handful of them that I'm hoarding. Yeah. Someday I want to record some music on them and give them out to people. Who knows? So you guys are going to be at the next Artika. When is the next Artika, LG? October 5th and 6th. Yep. Okay. And when will you guys be on? I don't know. I don't think we have that part yet. I don't think we've announced that yet. The schedule. Okay. Holy. Hopefully when it's dark. Yeah. They're set from last year. You guys have me. We like to be surrounded by darkness. Yes. We actually do. Just like our soul. We're looking forward to it. We're looking forward to having you back, I'm sure. Whether it's day or night, I'm sure it's going to be amazing as it was last year. We'll be fine. We'll be fine. Did you have anything else that we want to maybe tell our Artika audience? If you're listening for the first time or maybe you haven't been to the festival or to a community night like we're having here tonight at Third Space, we hope you'll consider coming out and getting involved. Whether you're a performing artist or just interested in being involved in the community, I think it's a great organization and we're really excited about the festival and having Mobile Alien Research Unit back. We hope to continue to grow the creative community here in St. Louis. We're having a good time here and it's going to be a good time there. Thank you guys for coming. My apologies for that first live chat. Let's water under the bridge, man. I'm excited to be here. We're going to go out on some more Mobile Alien Research Units. Here we go. I'm R.W. Smith and this is The Artika Podcast.