EM GUIDE – Interview by Thomas Venker

No Land & Luke Stewart „„For me this moment in time is about cultivating a deeper listening to one another”

No Land & Luke Stewart (Photo: Jonathan Forsythe)

Festivals are a very special place to experience music. As a professional cultural journalist, you usually work your way through a list of recommendations and artists marked as otherwise interesting. A single staccato of impressions, a relay race in which you rarely treat yourself to more than, say, three songs.

I had a completely different experience in April 2024 at the Rewire Festival in The Hague when Blacks’ Myths performed. I knew the catalog of Trae Crudup and Luke Stewart’s band and was therefore sure that I would enjoy the concert, but the urgency and vulnerability that the five-piece band (with Luke but without Trae), which was congenially joined half of the set by New York poet No Land, shared with the audience captivated me from the first to the last note – and left me wanting to communicate with No Land afterwards.

In September, I had the opportunity to meet No Land and Luke Stewart in Luke’s temporary residency studio at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The photos were taken by Jonathan Forsythe, with whom I also run the “Talking to Americans” project, a documentary project that has so far focused on America and its people.

No Land & Luke Stewart (Photo: Jonathan Forsythe)

So how did you two meet?

Luke Stewart: I remember. Do you remember?

No Land (nods shyly)

LS: Okay. We both remember. We met at Naropa University.

NL: At the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.

And do you remember what sparked your interest in each other?

LS: The work. I met a lot of people at that particular point of time. A lot of people that would form together in a band called Heroes Are Gang Leaders, which was at that time more of a trio, more of a smaller group. We all had traveled to Naropa University to do a performance in the summer of 2015.

And that’s where we met No Land. That’s where we met the Waldmans and the Byes. We joined into a beautiful community and space –and a lot of beautiful moments and activities and a series of creative experiences. A wealth that represented a lot of things, a lot of different traditions and legacies in the music and in the words in the historic greater community of that sort of art.

NL: I was at Naropa, not as a student, but kind of working a little bit with Anne Waldman, who is one of the founders along with Allen Ginsberg, and coming out of the Beat lineage. They founded this school and called it disembodied because it was just very much an idea. They weren’t an accredited school. It was more of a sacred zone for consciousness.

And so almost 50 years after it started, a lot of poets and artists and musicians were going out there in the summers. If they weren’t official students, you know, maybe they’re performing or teaching or hanging out. So I was there working with Anne, and Luke was there performing with Heroes Are Gang Leaders.

I think something about the fusion of the type of sound they were working on and the way words and poetry were being mixed with the sound and a very strong sense of questioning all that we have been told. I felt some kind of resonant feeling that I had found like minded spirits.. I don’t
know, there was a very strong resonance.

And then we all come back to New York and continued working together, mostly out of Anne Waldman’s home on Macdougal street. First in that band, which grew bigger after that. And then years later into our own different projects.

As mentioned earlier in our online communication, I saw you two and fellow musicians perform at the Rewire Festival in The Hague, Netherlands – to me the best performance of the whole festival, a powerful combination of music and poetry, Sturm und Drang in the best sense of the word, at times of almost brutal directness, but then again gentle, vulnerable, as open as a musical dialog is rarely offered to the audience. In our emails you mentioned that this performance was a homage to the poets of the Village of the 1960s.
Maybe you could talk a little bit of how the idea for this specific collaboration came together.

LS: Yeah, so at Rewire, we had basically two different experiences. We had a festival show at a venue with Blacks’ Myths, which is a band that consists of myself and Trae Crudup, the drummer; unfortunately, he was unable to make that performance. And we were planning something special in our collaboration with No Land. So we ended up going with the opportunity to create something really special for the moment in a collaborative sense.

For the concert, we had Dirar Kalash, who’s a good friend of both of ours, a sonic warrior from Palestine. He’s doing a lot of things to uplift his community and his people through creative music. And we also had Lester St. Louis, who’s a good friend and collaborator, based in New York.
And who else do we have?
Jason Nazary sat in on drums, who’s a person that has collaborated with both myself and Trae in a number of situations; also a good friend of Jaimie Branch, who in a lot of ways brought us all together initially.

And so, yeah, we had a festival concert and then we were able to collaborate with Atelier Impopulaire, which is an art duo who were compiling different pieces of audio and visuals from specifically the Umbra poet movement of the 1960s in New York City. And it was an installation in a place called Nest in The Hague that included the visual series that they put together. And we were able to interact with the audio and create a series of beautiful experiences over the course of the three days of the festival. We did multiple performances in that space, like six performances.

It was really a space to present some of the research and community engagement that we’ve done musically and poetically over the years. A space to really live in the spirit of the moment in communing with those ancestors and those elders from that time and place that has influenced us artistically and creatively so very much.
It’s something that we share a passion for, you know, being mindful and being inspired by the history and tradition of the art that has come before us and building on that legacy in our own way, as they would.

NL: Yes. Let me add some of the poets that we were … well, the first night for the regular festival gig, there was maybe a secret homage. I don’t know if anyone knew the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who I was a little bit on a pilgrimage to go see in Europe.

At the Nest space, we were honouring the Umbra poets. Some of the texts that were being channelled were from David Henderson, Steve Cannon, Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, a little bit of Allen Ginsberg, he was also a part of the Umbra movement. It was mostly Black arts, but their magazine was wide, including many of the downtown scene of the
60s and 70s.

For me, it was special because the work I do normally in poetry performance is usually carrying a lot of other poets’ voices. But this is the first collaboration where someone was actually saying, it would be great if you could mostly cull from these other poet’s voices, because their exhibit was pulling from the archive of Umbra. So that was important to me and exciting. And some of those poets I mentioned were mentors or close affiliated mentors to myself and Luke in different times and places.

Luke Stewart in conversation with No Land and Thomas Venker (Photo: Jonathan Forsythe)

Talking about historic persons, narratives and voices that are of high importance for you as persons and artists – how do you feel about interacting with their catalogue? How easy is it to – at the right time – let go of all that and change into a modi of creating yourself what will soon be history?

LS: Like I said before, we do it in our own way. I think it’s very easy, in fact. The history is part of our research and part of our inspiration. And for me at least, one of the things that has been learned in that experience is that it’s better to offer your own original statement rather than try to recreate things. In the same way that all of these people that we’ve studied and revere have done. And so that’s the ultimate lesson. It’s useful for us as artists to be a part of a legacy, to be a part of a tradition, and to study that. And in a way, giving respect to a legacy and a tradition and to an art form by doing that research. But it’s also, as you said, necessary to offer your own original take, which is what we’re doing. Not to recreate the past, but to learn from the past and be inspired by the past.

NL: You have a certain responsibility to not only honor or orient yourself in your sense of lineage, but for me to carry certain wisdoms that may be overlooked or forgotten in the contemporary culture. Not just the name of who this recognizable person was and aligning yourself with that, but to go deeply into what essence may be being forgotten, which is why mining the archive is important. But you transmute it to become relevant or inspiring to your own time. So it’s transmuting to something new.

When we talk about history, we always talk about a specific perspective on it, of course. Like if I look at some art from the past, I see different things than you.
First off, I would be interested: do you have the feeling you two always have the same perspective on things? Or do you have a lot of dialogue about how different it is what you see, what you hear,
what you experience from and with those past artifacts?

NL: I think there’s a lot of telepathic dialogue, especially in the performances. There can be a shared sense of where something is going or what something is needing, sonically or poetically. I think we’ve developed a really strong sense of that over the years. There are discussions and conversations, coming from maybe slightly different lineages. But I think there’s a lot of kind of silent, shared understanding, I would say.

LS: Yeah, obviously, we’re two very different people. But we find commonality in our love and appreciation and reverence for the work, the work of artistry, which includes the work of history; as much as we can actually, communing with that legacy as we forge our own. And yes, part of that is part of the investigation into the art form that we employ a lot, which is improvisation. That takes a lot of work in terms of creating that telepathic connectedness. So we’re enamored and feel connected by that passion for the work and for the overall artistry, even though we are, of course, two different people.
I think it’s beautiful when people are different and can find commonalities in something greater than themselves. One of the things that brought us together was our reverence for the work and for the tradition and for originality and for collectivity.

How easy or how difficult does the presentation of your work feels regards the changing audiences? For example, when you travel to Europe, you meet people from a lot of different cultural backgrounds, and I am sure, not all experience your narratives in the same way. Do you feel like sometimes it’s working better than other nights? The questions approaches both, the sonic material, but also and even more the words.
My question was inspired by this quote I found from you: “The messages live in the vibrations” – and obviously each room has other vibrations.

LS: This is the gift of improvisation and the gift of the approach that we’ve employed – it forces you to touch into these skills and work these muscles of intuition and sensitivity and energy in any space. Whether it be a stage or a room, it calls for sensitivity. It’s a creation in the moment.

NL: At the Rewire shows, it was very evident. I have a table with the poetry set up. And for most of the Rewire shows, the papers are the same, the text material I’m working with is the same, but every performance is extremely different. It’s very much a sensitivity as Luke said.
Cosmically, it’s very changeable moment to moment. For me, the sound, you know, some performances felt much more, I don’t want to just say politically, but a certain energy was controlling or driving each
performance to go in a very different direction.

No Land in conversation with Luke Stewart and Thomas Venker (Photo: Jonathan Forsythe)

Another quote, which I really liked: „We create culture in free fall“, which might sound for a lot of people frightening as a process. Is it that for you?

LS: We create culture in free fall?
Well, yeah, I think that’s the reality of the situation of how culture works, especially in the contemporary sense when we see so many things falling, like bombs on children in Palestine, or like systemic bombings
on children here in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
You know, we’re in a time where a lot of things are coming to a head and forces are building up to further regulate the human experience and to designate humanity for specific purposes.
And so culture and free fall is also a statement on things that we’ve experienced as working artists during our time. How we’ve always been told or often been told that we missed the heyday and seeing culture crumble around us here in New York, in DC for me, as DC being noted in print as the most intensely gentrified city in the United States.
And during my time in Washington, D.C., seeing the most rapid decline during the city’s history of long standing cultures that we represent, which ran parallel to the situation happening in New York City, where culture is being erased and being skipped over and displaced and
pushed out.
So culture and free fall is the actuality of the situation. And this is what we find ourselves creating within, So in a lot of ways this is a healing experiment in how we can try to find spiritual strategies to fight against the free fall that we’ve experienced and are continuing to experience.

NL: Yes, I think it’s like a soul process that you’re coming to out of your own need for. You kind of awaken in a world that feels a little bit like a prison. And so you come to do the work of art in your own kind of spiritual search for how to be free and how to experience a certain kind of truthfulness of your own intuition. And you’re walking through a lot of destruction. And it’s a compassionate pursuit, trying to hold on to what feels like a sanity within you.
I don’t know, I would use the word art instead of culture, because that’s the seeking…how to walk a path within so much destruction, within so much suffering. What can you offer that is illuminating, that is helpful, that is helping to remind people of their own souls and their own possibilities and imagination and faith within such destruction, because you believe there’s another kind of way we can be living or caring for each other or existing. And that’s like the earliest kind of drive.. belief that some other kind of world can be possible.

That free fall also refers to a situation in which there’s nothing to lose – because you’re already in the free fall. When art really wants to change something, the primary goal is to communicate a narrative to the people. That said, the free fall is also making one more free to radically address all that, right?

LS: Yeah, that’s true. That’s what it calls for.

Like having nothing to loose helps reaching for at least a little bit of that promised land, because the promised land is pretty much not existing in the arts anyway.

LS: The kingdom of heaven is within, as the Bible says, as Jesus says. (laughs) Perhaps we as artists are in tune to make that possible for ourselves and inspire in other people to find the kingdom of heaven
within.

NL: Yes, agreed.

 

Both of your names have a high significance: Blacks’ Myths and No Land. How do you feel about that burden that comes with that names?

NL: I hope to be in an unmarked grave.

LS: No notion.

NL: It’s kind of inherently seeking a more infinite perspective. People have certain notions about what things mean, but it’s important to kind of stay truthful to whatever the original vision was. And for me, it’s a
more infinite seeking.

In some of the work by William Blake’s, the idea of land – I don’t want to oversimplify his message, but what resonated for me is –, there’s an evilness to our material, to attachment and identification with matter. Anyway, I don’t want to go too far down that, but that the spirit is the good land, the unifying element, the space of more infinite imagination. And that we are prioritizing and maybe neglecting, at least in our more mainstream endeavors or popular discourse, the role of the spirit and the soul. When so much of the basis of war and violence and destruction is coming from greed, coming from some having more than others, some controlling others.

Some of the original vision behind at least No Land was seeking something more of a unifying element, more ineffable reality that we all are connected through. And seeking to transcend matter, not neglecting, of course, or thinking that we’re through with the need for certain kinds of equalities within that.

LS: Yeah, the fact that they’re both self-named is a statement of self-empowerment. Naming yourself and naming your designation of what you would like to be called when you’re moving throughout the world. Which has power, which is a reclamation of power that has been lost, and a statement on your non-compromising identity. There’s always power in naming yourself.
Any sort of burden or whatever, if it’s there, we’re prepared to take it, because we feel passionate and strongly about the reasons why we have these names. And to the point where there is no burden. There’s no burden in these names, because we picked them, and we thought about them for a long time, and they felt right to us, and has endured.
It’s a liberatory action, rather than a burdensome action.

Let´s talk a little bit more about No Land.
We’re living in a time where everything is about territory. At least one has that feeling when reading the news. It´s all about borders and territory – and wars coming from that. When i was younger, when I started reading and listening to music, there was this deep hope that everything is going to be alright, everything will get better. And for some time – besides all bad news we also had in the in the 80s and 90s – there was a little bit of hope it might work out, but lately it feels absolutely not like this, like we maybe made two steps in the right direction, but now we are pushed back like five or even more and borders and territories and wars are the paradigm of our times again.
What does that mean for your artistic process? How do you keep doing what you’re doing?

LS: It makes it difficult for us to connect with some of our friends who do not live in the United States, that’s for sure. And of course, the embarrassing reality of being a person from the United States, and being able to travel to so many places where that’s not reciprocal so as easily, it can be embarrassing.
Yeah, I think that borders makes it difficult for people to come together, and they’re placed there for the specific reason to keep people away from each other.

Especially in the contemporary sense, in the modern sense, where borders have been constructed, not from any geographical or cultural sense, but have been constructed in the sense of controlling population, from keeping people away from each other, from controlling behavior, beliefs, practices, lifestyles, all of these things. And how to deal with the state, because the phenomenon of the state is what establishes borders. And so how we deal with that as artists, again, from the one sense it is embarrassing, but in the other sense, because of that situation, it makes it all the more important that we have something to say. Which we do, we have lots to say in our music, in terms of making strong statements, in terms of upliftment, in terms of spiritual connection, and offering a pathway forward from the ills of the state. The music is always an invitation for people to come and
experience these things as well. It’s a powerful invitation – and it’s immediate when you experience it.

For us as artists it’s a responsibility in this age of borders, of falling cultures to continue to make strong statements, and to inspire, and to invite people with our concepts, with sharing our information and our experiences through the music and through community. How we can come together and enjoy the subversion of us being together. Because that’s one of the things that the state and that these powers that have been building want us to not do. They don’t want us to be together, and they don’t want us to be happy. So doing that in a radical sense is indeed going against what these powers want us to do, and fighting against that subversively.

NL: I think that the more we are communicating globally, especially the younger generations (who are able to, like never before, communicate instantly all around the globe, what’s really going on with each other directly, intimately), the more ridiculous and artificial the narratives of this kind of separation of nations and borders, you know.

I think the hope is that at a certain point it becomes much more ridiculous as the generations go on— where they try to pit us against each other. Whatever is on the news, we know our friends and brothers and sisters are in those areas and are like us. And I think that’s the power of communication at this moment– through a kind of intimacy and instantaneous connection we’re able to have with one another. And we hope that it’s really the older generations who are going to keep this mentality of nations against each other. It’s very disheartening, the levels of violence we’re seeing now because I think a lot of us kind of thought maybe we were moving towards a different, you know, a different kind of consciousness. And there are maniacs who are not with that kind of consciousness, but the hope is that it keeps growing towards connection and understanding.

If you think of the planet like a wild garden, you know, and there are these very artificial gates separating brothers and sisters.

No Land & Luke Stewart (Photo: Jonathan Forsythe)

When we talk about community, we have to keep in mind there is no such thing as that one community. There’s the community we artistically share a lot of experiences with on a more or less daily base. But there’s also the community of the area where we live. Like you in here on Red Hook, Brooklyn, Luke, or you, Lo Land in the Kensington area of Brooklyn, or me at Sudermannplatz in Köln, Germany.
Normally I travel a lot and by that rarely spend like more than two weeks in a row at home. But during the pandemic, I suddenly had much more contact with my neighbors and all the people living in the area around. And at one point, my girlfriend said to me, like, “wow, you now talk to everybody, you now know everybody here.”
For me it was really an eye-opening moment, because as much as it is great and also important to be in close contact with our artistic communities, we need to start reaching further into society if we really wanna change things, right? Political and social implications need a broad base of approval.
How do you perceive this in your everyday life?

NL: What was so beautiful here about the pandemic, we were doing a lot of outdoor concerts. We had lost, like everyone, all the venues, all our spaces, everything was suddenly very different. So we went into the parks. We did a lot of shows here by the water, actually working from this little boat that was here in Red Hook, that let us use their electricity to perform in a parking lot. We were on the sidewalks, we needed to
just be together wherever we could.
And what it did, it opened us to neighbors and not only artists and animals and wildlife and the air and the water that was around us. So that was a very profound experience in kind of playing with, at least on a local scale, like who is this for and who is coming to hear this kind of work.

But more largely, the hope I think is that you will reach the heart of everyone anywhere so that the work is not only for people who are into avant garde or experimental music– because what you really seek is connection with anyone who may have a concerned heart.

LS: As we have experienced the shifts in the nature of community, is that we see the community of people that we collaborate with, people that we know, this artistic community, which is parallel to so many things.

We all come from various, again, traditions and cultures. So we all represent different communities, whether that be a community of people being raised from down south like myself to, you know, artists that are born and raised here in New York City, you know, with the good fortune of doing so. Or, you know, being somewhere else. And the nature of community due to, again, some of the things that have been coming up in this conversation about declines and shifts and displacements, because the fact is that there’s no one place to be anymore. Or it’s becoming to seem like that more so. Because places like New York City have become even less accessible to not just artists communities, but to any communities. It’s become less accessible in the cultural hubs of the world. And as such, a lot of those cultural makers, art makers, have had to make certain choices to live somewhere else or to live in a different kind of scenario, a different kind of situation.

This is the community, that we find ourselves in. A community that is reeling from scarcity of access to opportunities that are available for people that can afford it, for the most part. Afford it economically, afford it socially, afford it in all kinds of ways that most people cannot do. And so, we feel very fortunate to be able to be in community, in a multi-layered community of artists, of creators, of mothers, grandmothers, sisters, brothers, that are lucky enough to be operating in New York City. And to have the opportunity to have moments like these. Because this doesn’t happen anywhere else, for the most part.
You’re here, in New York City.

So hopefully, as we speak this, from the platform of being artists in New York City, that it can affect change. And again, that’s not fair. But, because we know it’s not fair, we can operate in a way that takes advantage of the situation. That can possibly create a connection of some sort with people that might ingest it.

Coming from that, we have to be clear to ourselves, there are conflicts in the world we look at and talk about and there are conflicts we are not talking about. Simply because there are so many countries with fucked up scenarios. If you open an US newspaper, or if you open a German newspaper, you will never read exactly about the same things – not even talking about that most people only have the time and maybe also emotional capacity to look deeper than the first headlines.
But if you do, you fast feel all the blind spots not mentioned, or you feel the cynical waves of media attention – days ago the Russia-Ukraine conflict was the main topic, now it kinda disappeared… Obviously right now the Palestine-Israel conflict is dominating the world.
It’s a dynamic of conflict after conflict, of media attention – and it´s also a question of our personal capacities of how much sadness can we process, how much suffer can we try to take care of …
This all leads to so many implications on the politics of our countries, of our own communities and on the relationships to other communities.
I guess my question is: How does that feel for you as artists?

LS: Yeah, it’s overwhelming. There’s a lot going on in the world. And there’s a wealth of things to get inspired by in the world, because there’s so much going on, both good and bad. Probably the hard part is to find what to focus on, or the difficult thing is to focus your inspiration. Because there’s all sorts of things to be inspired by.

NL: For me this moment in time is about cultivating a deeper listening to one another. Because of this almost bombardment of voices that we’re having for the first time in history on such a scale of this magnitude, so many voices that you can access, so many more artists, you know, more than ever before. Almost like a practical function, at least of the poet or the artist, that I think would be very helpful. I like to reference this notion from Robert Graves about the  ancient celtic poet’s role, which was very functional and also cosmic, that during a battle or disagreement, each army had a poet who would retreat hillside to discuss each side’s “versions of events.”
To cultivate a sense of a deeper empathy and listening to one another is, I think, one of the greatest things we could be focusing on. I don’t think we’re very developed yet in terms of our communications, even interpersonally, it’s very hard to understand one another. So if you can offer some path through your work of…. if you’re going to contribute anything to try to be helpful, or try to create a more harmonious world, I think the first gesture towards that is a deeper listening and a deeper empathy. Which may not always just be aligning with who you agree with and who you want to be on the side of. It’s very complicated to understand why, what is happening, you know, the millions of reasons why.

We have the narratives with which we align ourselves and we believe this is what’s going on, but to really have a very open curiosity about how to be of service and to understand what people are believing is their reality, it’s a very dissonant time in some ways, like it’s always been.

To come to the end of our communication. You mentioned earlier that you two work also on an album. Can you already share more informations with the kaput readers and us? What is the project name for this? Wat is the narrative of the album?

NL: I don’t have any narratives.

You don’t have any narratives?

LS: Yeah, me neither. [Laughter]
You know, we enjoy making music together, we enjoy creating together, we enjoy working together, and yeah, we hope that the album that comes out is a … well, we know already it is an honest expression of our work together.
We’re working on making it sound sonically in terms of production as good as possible, to match the performance that we delivered in the studio, and to match the performances that we’ve done live, if not exceed that, and it will be another invitation for connection with us as artists, connect with our music, connect with our words, and to hopefully be inspired and changed in their lives in some sort of way, from experiencing what we have to offer.

NL: We’re striving for a particular blue colour that is very multitudinous and solitudinous and communitudinous, and there’s a sense of mystery and lightning, there’s explorations in accidents and compassion studies, empathic fever studies, freedom studies.

Beautiful last words. Thank you for this conversation, highly appreciated.

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Luke Stewart is currently touring Europe.

Anne Waldman & No Land just published “The Velvet Wire“, a book of fine-art, poetry, telepathic voyage, & mentorship between sister-poets in an intergenerational transmission.

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EM GuideThis article is brought to you as part of the EM GUIDE project – an initiative dedicated to empowering independent music magazines and strengthen the underground music scene in Europe. Read more about the project at emgui.de

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.

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