Hear Multitudes Early

Dolby Atmos Listening Experience and Q&A

Hello, Please join me for the inaugural listen of Multitudes- front to back- in a small but mighty Atmos room. Think ‘Pink Floyd at the planetarium’ except no lasers and instead a kind of full body storytelling, like being in a cartoon dream sequence of song.

Technology is not the most comfortable place for me. I was initially suspicious when Robbie Lackritz (co-producer, engineer and Atmos mixer of Multitudes, plus a similar list of creative authorship to the making of The Reminder and Metals) suggested we design our theatre-in-the-round experience (also named Multitudes) to include full surround, but it became another dimension to the show and the songs I was writing to belong there.

I’ve stacked voice onto voice onto voice with various looping pedals for years but with this new way to make musical decisions and place them in space like constellations, I could pull those voices apart, call and respond with an idea and it’s opposition, one voice then hundreds. It became an instrument that influenced the songs while they were still malleable, as much as a guitar or clarinet. The show, which we did twice a night in residency in a bunch of cities through the pandemic, workshopped the songs. We made the album based upon what I learned there, and Blake Mills and Joseph Lorge mixed it to feel as somatic and dimensional as the live show felt. But to hear the songs return full circle (!pun intended) to this surround-sound format feels like exactly what it is, as well as something else entirely.

My friend Mike Mills will join me afterward for a Q&A and a bunch of the people who took part in making the album will be there with us.

x LF

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Robbie Lackritz here. And here:

This all started, to a large extent, with Leslie and Rob Sinclair (designer of David Byrne’s “American Utopia”) and I working on the idea for the in-the-round live show in 2016 before Pleasure came out as a concert with fully-immersive surround projections and audio (sorry for the gross technology buzz words that Leslie will cringe at, I get to write after her section, so I can sneak them in now.).

We looked at adapting some of the looping, delays, and other vocal effects that she typically does with analog pedals into a digital world that could function the exact same but appear in multi-point surround around the audience, as well as starting to develop visuals that would match those expressions.

The project ultimately got shelved for touring Pleasure. It was too expensive and too difficult to put on. When the pandemic hit it became an opportunity for Leslie to have time to craft together a new batch of songs for the bones of what we had started to envision, and it was eventually brought to life by a new set of creators to open stages coming out of lockdown (her spring tour in May is the next generation of this show and I would highly recommend attending if you can).

The writing for those parts of surround - rounds, gang vocals, shrinking and expanding space, harmony, consonance, dissonance, asymmetry, etc - became platforms for ideas from her writing and our production that we took into the studio, knowing that they could translate potentially even more beautifully into Atmos systems from the studio as they had worked in the live environment. So I for one am particularly excited to get to do this in a proper Dolby enabled Atmos theater. It is a record I am immensely proud of and a technology that I have found a new challenge to explore over the last several years.

For those around March 30 in Los Angeles you can sign up here. Will be first come first served.

For those in Berlin, London, Paris, Brussels, and Toronto we are going to do a similar Atmos listening experience the week following (Q&A via video except for Europe/UK), and you automatically are signed up when you preorder the album.

Hope to see you there.

Robbie