Welcome to Resonant Rest! Resonant Rest is a Grounded Futures podcast series about musicians and creative practice, rest, sustenance, dreams, and community. Through a series of conversations, we will explore these topics with musicians living on stolen Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) lands (so-called Vancouver). We are interested in collective learning, starting conversations that create real change, and imagining futures where everyone can thrive.

Resonant Rest is hosted by Grounded Futures’ Solo Together Podcast Resident, Oceaan Pendharkar.

Oceaan Pendharkar 0:25

My name is Oceaan. Welcome to the Resonant Rest podcast. These conversations took place on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations territory in so-called Vancouver. This podcast will feature threads of different conversations with musicians about rest, how they sustain themselves, what dreams they have, what their creative practice looks like and more. I am super excited and grateful to be making resonant rest with the support of the team at Grounded Futures as their podcaster-in-residence. In this teaser, you'll hear me talking with my amazing guests: Vanessa LeFan, Anjalica Solomon, KeAloha Noelani, Carmina Rae, Thomas Hoeller, Michael Tylo, and Tonye Aganaba.

Oceaan Pendharkar 1:12

Musicians are always so busy. And there's so much like pressure from capitalism and from other people to like, you know, do a certain thing, be a certain way. My dream is that I just want to like have a bunch of conversations with people. And I want to hear how they feel about stuff. And I feel like as musicians, we walk through the world, and we're like, we have all these, all these messages. And I feel like, we don't all feel the same about stuff, like resting and like how to sustain ourselves, and what an amazing world looks like for each of us. So that's kind of like the sorts of things I'm thinking about. And I'm just like, reflecting for myself about what I want my life to look like, and how being a musician fits into it. I feel like my identity is so wrapped up in being a musician, but I also don't want it to be everything that I am. I've just like been thinking about all that and thinking about how to make music practice sustainable and what music practice looks like. And just like how to exist.

Vanessa LeFan 2:24

Those are like things that I've also been reflecting on a lot. Yeah, like not just as like a musician, but also just like as an artist in general. Yeah, like what that even means and like living in a world that tries to fit you in boxes of like okay, 'what are you?', you're this thing, okay, now stay as this thing.

Vanessa LeFan 2:39

Anjalica Solomon 3:50

Anjalica Solomon, that's my last name. Yeah. I'm a poet, musician, spoken word artist, learning to produce. I do a little bit of theatre work, writing plays and such.

Oceaan Pendharkar 4:08

You do so many things.

Anjalica Solomon 4:09

Yeah. I don't like to hold myself back. But I can definitely relate on feeling the hustle and grind and feeling myself being ground by this pressure.

Oceaan Pendharkar 4:26

Yeah, I guess I feel like it's influenced a lot of my decisions, like, even in college when I was like, what, what should I major in in second year. You know, I had a decision to make between songwriting and performance. And my piano teacher wanted me to do performance and he was like, you should like play on ships after college because you can make a lot of money or whatever. And I was like, I want to do songwriting. Like I'm a songwriter. I've like been a songwriter since I was a child. Yeah, that's like who I am. And then but like, there's this other skill of performance, that would be good, that would be like more financially useful or something? I don't know. I don't even know if that's true. Like, songwriting is quite financially useful if you know what to do with it.

Anjalica Solomon 5:07

And they go hand in hand and you can be both.

Oceaan Pendharkar 5:11

It's true, you can be both. Yeah

KeAloha Noelani 5:22

I actually, now that I'm kind of where I am, I feel like I am who I'm supposed to be. And I've been supposed to be me like how I am right now for forever, if that makes sense. But like, I came, I moved to so-called Vancouver like six years ago from Lheidli T'enneh Nation, which is where part of my ancestry hails, which is so-called Prince George, like, 10 hour drive north of here. And I moved here to pursue drums.

Oceaan Pendharkar 5:53

Right! You're a drummer, of course.

KeAloha Noelani 5:55

Yeah. That was like my first kind of musical love. And then, to be honest, like the urge to, like, grow beyond that seed had been like, pressing for a while. And then yeah, it kind of blossomed when I, after I graduated from Cap U, and I took a couple years to just really slow down and like, I mean, it wasn't like a choice. I just, my chronic illness was like, extremely flared up. And I was like, okay, I need to like hibernate and peace out for a while. And then it felt like the perfect sign I was like, okay, I physically like can just like be hauling drums around. Like, I don't actually feel well enough to just even play drums half the time. So like, it was kind of the perfect place to also to do healing work through songwriting, and start hearing my own voice saying things that validated who my belonging and like my purpose or just still being, like alive and here. And yeah, so when the songwriting bug definitely came, and that was beautiful.

Carmina Rae 7:08

I kind of like just having dreams that have to do with music that have nothing to do with money. Like, I just want to release my songs. And obviously that costs money. So at some point it does, you do want to kind of break even at least, and even being able to being able to play shows means you want people to show up. So you need money to advertise. But for the most part, I just don't want to lose the enjoyment of writing. And I did for for a while. And performing because it becomes this, like what's marketable? What do people want? But I'm realizing recently that I just don't care. And some people do like what I do. And I think that there's an audience out there for everybody. Anybody.

Oceaan Pendharkar 7:45

Totally. Yeah, absolutely.

Thomas Hoeller 7:51

I guess a lot of musicians I know, have a diverse portfolio of incomes, you know, from these projects and that project. And yeah, so knowing, you don't know when things are gonna happen, and when they're not gonna happen. Nothing's steady, except the fact that we're working all the time.

Michael Tylo 8:14

In my ideal world, there wouldn't be money.

Oceaan Pendharkar 8:15

Yeah, okay!

Michael Tylo 8:17

That's possibly a different conversation, but...

Oceaan Pendharkar 8:19

No, this is the same conversation. What does that look like?

Michael Tylo 8:22

A world without money looks like, for me, it looks like, you know, relying on trading, on giving and receiving and, yeah, like mutual aid, on more community building where there isn't a need for the current kind of economy that we have.

Tonye Aganaba 8:45

Some of the things you mentioned, in terms of like me, being a person who was active in the community, and like trying to, quote unquote, help help the community. A lot of the truth that is in my shows stems from those relationships and those spaces that I find myself in. So I organized with the Defund 604 network, which is an abolitionist organizing group based in so-called Vancouver that is organizing to defund, dismantle decarcerate and abolish the police in its entirety because we believe in a police free future and a future that is free of all forms of state and police violence.

Oceaan Pendharkar 9:25

Yes.

Tonye Aganaba 9:26

I also am a member of VANDU, which is the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users. So a lot of the truth in the conversations that I'm trying to have, or bring to light, in my shows are directly related to the experiences that I have organizing with those groups. So talking about abolition, talking about how to challenge the power of the state, talking about the hypocrisy of the Canadian government, talking about how drug policy is killing our communities. And then you know, talking about the ongoing increase of violence and harm that we're seeing in our communities. You know, trying to think of think of ways, and participate in ways and encourage ways that really address those root causes and music is a part of that. I've always believed that music and creativity has to be a part of the movement because otherwise how do you heal from the constant trauma of just being overwhelmed by how fucked the state is and how fucked life is. Music that is there to like balm the wounds of all the trauma that we're going through and also a way to communicate with people, these complex ideas. I'm constantly thinking about, like, how do I write about anarchism in a way that's like a bop, you know?