Intro: Yard Art / High Plains Psych Exchange
I had the chance to talk with Caitlyn Meditz and Nick Laves from Yard Art about their journey and starting the High Plains Psych Exchange vinyl compilation series.
Are you both originally from Colorado? If not, where are you from and what brought you here?
Caitlyn + Nick: We’re originally from New Hampshire actually, we moved out here in October 2020. We couldn’t really leave our houses back then and we were bored so we figured we’d better just leave the state. Really, we moved out here for a variety of reasons, Caitlyn had just finished grad school and couldn’t bear the thought of working in Massachusetts again, we’d been having a hard time finding musicians out there, and we just wanted a change of pace. We’ve been loving the proximity to the mountains in Colorado, the friendly open culture, and there are so many talented musicians out here that we’ve been lucky to connect with, so overall it was a great move.
Can you tell us a little bit about how Yard Art came to be?
Caitlyn: Yard Art in its current form was born when we met Ben, our drummer, in the Spring of 2022, but I started writing Yard Art music many years ago. Nick and I have been playing music together since we met in 2016 (wow that’s a long time ago!). When we first met, Nick had been playing in bands for a long time, but I had never played in bands or written my own music, I had always just played guitar by myself. But after we met I was inspired to start writing my own music and the Yard Art sound was born. We couldn’t find musicians we wanted to work with in New Hampshire but when we came out here and found lots of like minded musicians we were finally able to form a band. Actually our first drummer for this project (under a different name) was Brian Rossi who is now the drummer for Rugburn! He was the first musician we met out here and it was during the pandemic so we used to all practice in his basement with masks on. We love you Brian! But when we decided we weren’t the best match for each other musically, we were lucky to find Ben, our current drummer, who plays super original and interesting beats that add a lot to our sound.
What records have been on constant repeat for you lately?
Caitlyn: Approach to Anima by Maya Ongaku – I love listening to this while I work, it makes my brain feel good
I’ve been exploring Alice Coltrane’s work and I particularly like The Elements which she made with Joe Henderson. Great music for bouncing around the kitchen making pancakes on Sunday morning.
I’ve also been getting into later Leonard Cohen (I’m already obsessed with his earlier stuff, particularly his first album). His later stuff is more darkly funny and I’m into it.
Nick: Ambient 3: A Day of Radiance by Laraaji and Brian Eno – I really like the subtle changes over long songs and its really brought out by the production style. Good music for working
Pish by The Brian Jonestown Massacre – I got into them a while back but really only listened to a few albums. I really like the vocal style on the album especially the first track Pish. The harmonies move around a lot instead of staying a certain spacing apart (eg a 3rd or a 5th) and it almost reminds me of choral music in that way.
Random CAN records and live CAN albums – I’ve been a big CAN fan for a while and started diving really deep into their discography.
What made you want to create the High Plains Psych Exchange vinyl series?
Caitlyn + Nick: There are lots of great fests in the scene like Psych’s Peak, Endless Fest, now Cirque de Lune, and we said how can we do something new that brings the psych music community together in a different way. Also we’ve noticed that it’s easy to play with the same people/bands you know over and over so we wanted to put the album together to expand people’s (and our own!) knowledge of bands in the scene.
When can we expect Vol. II release, can you tell us anything about it?
Caitlyn + Nick: It’s looking like early July, we’ve been doing a LOT of listening and it’s been super hard to narrow down which songs to put on the vinyl. So much so that there have been rumors that it may be a double album… Also we learned last year that we didn’t have the best strategies for selling these vinyls, so this year we’re going to throw some shows with the bands that are on the vinyl to promote the record and get them gone!
Are there copies of Vol. I still available? Where can people purchase them?
Nick: Last I checked there are 2 copies at Wax Trax in Denver, a few copies at All Sales Vinyl in FoCo and we have around 10 left that we’ll have at various shows!
What has been the biggest challenge with the whole process/what’s been the most rewarding thing?
Nick: Promotion and things like that was very difficult at first. We personally did not post on social media often when we started Yard Art and were so far out of the loop on stuff like that. We even made a Facebook page for Yard Art before an Instagram LOL. We’ve figured that out a bit now though and are learning all the time and figuring out ways to make it less time consuming. The most rewarding thing for us has been finding a community. We’ve made a lot of friends and have picked up some really cool things from musicians in the scene. The music community is super active here so there’s always something to do and someone to see.
What advice do you have for aspiring artists out there?
Caitlyn: That there’s no such thing as an aspiring artist, if you’re making the original art/music/poems/whatever, whether you share it with tons of people or whether you’re the only person who gets to enjoy it, you’re an artist and nobody can take that away. Making art is therapeutic, it can help you understand yourself better, and taking in other people’s art helps us understand other people’s inner worlds, experiences, and points of view. For those of us who share our art forms on the internet, we feel the pressure of the eyes of entire world and it can make us want to shrink ourselves and make our art shallow and palatable to appeal to as many people as possible. However, music/art that is just designed to be immediately familiar and easily consumable is degrading to a very important, very human activity. So my advice to everyone is to tell the truth as you see it in your own voice, make it as ugly and weird as it needs to be, and please share it if feel called to do that. Creation is the ultimate form of power.
What are your hopes/thoughts for the Denver local music scene and community?
Caitlyn: Well, I think the bands and musicians in the Denver local music scene as far as I’ve seen do a good job of supporting each other. I really feel a sense of camaraderie at shows and people really work to build each other up. It’s very different from the Boston music scene that we experienced when we were out east where people tend to be much more competitive and exclusive. I think it helps that there are so many live music venues out here and maybe more people who are interested in going to see live music so there is enough space for all of us. I’ve actually talked about this with other musicians in the scene (Charlie from Moonlight Bloom and I had a great chat about this), but I’d love to find a way to engage more non-musician people who live in Denver and get them to come out to shows. Of course there are some, but I’ve been to Red Rocks and seen how many people go to King Gizzard shows, I know there are a lot of people in Denver who want to hear psych rock, and I think they’d like a lot of the local psych bands around here too. I don’t have a solution for how to get them, so maybe there is a marketing genius reading this blog who can send some ideas our way!
Nick: I really want to see the scene go more DIY. In an expensive city so I get how this can be difficult (I don’t have anywhere to host a DIY show) but I think it’s important to make things less about ticket sales and more about just getting out, playing and having a good time. Kieren over at Guziki DIY is doing a great job at it, the Rugburn people put on some wild house shows and last summer had an all day one called Cowapalooza, GLOB has some really cool shows happening that maybe wouldn’t fit at all venues and what Seventh Circle is doing is awesome too. Venues definitely serve a function but it would be cool if there were more options that are in a way more casual.
What’s your current live rig/setup for Yard Art shows?
Nick: For guitars my workhorse is a Hagstrom Viking semi hollow and for some of the more psychy songs I play a Reverend Airwaves 12 string. My pedal board is somewhat of a revolving door but my staples are an Akai analog delay, a BOSS DD7 set to reverse delay, a MXR Phase 95 pedal set at 9 o’clock, a JHS Unicorn vibrato pedal and a EHX Superego that is set to latch with its own EHX Small Stone phaser. I use the Superego a lot on some of our dronier songs and is what is making the drones on a few songs from our record that came out last year.
Caitlyn: I’m pretty basic! I usually don’t use pedals, I kinda love the way my amp sounds so I’ll play directly into that, I have the same amp as Nick does. I play a pretty gold Gretsch Electromatic that unfortunately has a few nicks in it from dog-related accidents. It’s the best feeling guitar I’ve ever played.
I remember seeing that Yard Art did an all synths based set a few months back. Can you tell me more about how that came to be? Will we see something like that again?
Caitlyn + Nick: That was our Halloween spectacular! We got the bright idea to do an all synths set two weeks before that show so I’ll say we weren’t as practiced as we would have liked to be, but I think it went off pretty well anyway, and we had a blast doing it. We modified some of our songs like Undertow to be better suited to synths, we did some spooky synth covers in honor of the holiday like Black Sabbath (the song) and a Phantom of the Opera melody jam, and we also made some new synth songs for the occasion. For one of them Jake, our former synth player, used his Roland 404 to sample a little girl on youtube reading the story of David and Goliath which we thought was super spooky and we built a song around that. It was a super fun time getting that all together and Nick and I have been hooked on synths ever since. There will definitely be future Yard Art synth experiments and maybe even more synth music coming out in its own separate project, so stay tuned!
Where can we learn more about Yard Art and High Plains Psych Exchange?
