*Originally written as part of our former affiliation with Reality Sandwich/EvolverEDM (March 2016)
Rising Appalachia brings to the stage a collection of sounds, stories, and songs steeped in tradition and a devotion to world culture. Intertwining a deep reverence for folk music and a passion for justice, they have made it their life’s work to sing songs that speak to something ancient yet surging with relevance. Whether playing at Red Rocks or in rail cars, at Italian street fairs or to Bulgarian herbalists, this fiercely independent band has blazed a unique and colorful path across the globe. 11 years into their movement, Rising Appalachia believes that the roots of all these old songs are vital to our ever evolving soundscape.
Keyframe caught up with them to discuss their collaboration with Permaculture Action Network.
Tell us how Rising Appalachia came to be.
Leah: We really never set out to make a music project. We wanted to create a song homage for our family as a thank you for their creative dedication to us-we made an album in one afternoon in a friend’s basement. The whole story, you know – no budget, no band name, pizza and the crew in ATL having fun and mixing up styles. Our boy and long term musical collaborator Maurice Turner came through with his phenomenal trumpet, and we pulled some drums out of the corner of the studio and laid them over old banjo riffs and some gospel tunes. It was a fun afternoon. We thought not much of it. I was producing the Vagina Monologues and getting deep into radical creative expressions in a big international community, Chloe was laying low and working with youth in the city. The album was just a side project. But the response was ferocious. We were brought into a big concert hall at the local University and asked to represent the voice of the young southern music influence. We almost sold out of the entire amount of albums we made that night. We were brought into the local radio stations, and invited to perform all over. It was taken in by so many of our community members and held with high regard… NOT so much because of its profound musical prowess (remember it was recorded in a day!!!) but because of the real fusion of sounds that we were beginning to explore. We did not mix styles as a cool musical gimmick, or to explore genres; we mixed the styles that we were born and raised into, which brought us Appalachia folk traditional, urban hip-hop and soul, southern gospel, and jazz, and world roots songs. That was the material and fabric of our upbringing. It was a natural extension to put that into our creative voice, and I think that THAT is what really called people in. It created a place for our generations’ soundscape to begin to have voice.
What is it about the folk music genre that you feel compelled to create?
Chloe: We were raised with folk music and the community that goes along with it, so naturally it worked its way into our own creative expressions. I’ve always found folk music to be historical, rooted in place, humble, by and for the people universal, and full of soul in ways that have spread throughout many generations of singers and activists. It is natural and simple. In our current times of tech and fast paced everything, folk music can encourage the great slow down, time on the porch swing, and a lesson or two.
What’s the most important thing you hope people take away from your music?
Leah: We hope that in attending one of our concerts or shows that we can create a bigger impact, encouraging people to dialog and join forces in local community building. We try and make each live performance a myriad of experiences: a dance party, a place of nurture, a dialog about how to uplift communities, a political questioning, a call to action, a respite. We hope that every song will reach somewhere that we may never know, but that it brings a moment of place back into someone’s life. ANNDDD that we are all entitled to a music, a story and a sound that is telling our story, that we are making and holding our own traditions and we need everyone’s voice.
How does your sister relationship pose a challenge to your work? Or asset? How do you each navigate that healthy balance between familial and individual identities?
Leah: Ha! Yes, you know, I think our sisterhood has kept this project alive and breathing for the most part. When one of us it just about to collapse the other one can step in and take the touch. We know that about each other so well. We also know every button to push, but mostly we are allies to each other. We try to take time off to just hang out together and keep our friendship strong, and there is never any doubt about where the loyalties lie. So, perhaps sometimes we might crave a little more space than we get, but we keep a strong balance.
Tell us about your Slow Music Movement?
Leah: The Slow Music Movement was a term that I coined while I was prepping for a TEDx talk a little while ago. You know, I can sing in front of 10 thousand people at a concert with ease, but a 12-minute lecture in front of 30 people was making me INCREDIBLY nervous, because the ideas needed to be clear and focused and concise. I wanted to discuss our ways of touring and moving through 12 years of music. Alternative touring has always been a priority to our music project. We tour independently and creatively, have remained self-managed, and have ALWAYS had a relationship with local communities on the ground as often as we can, but when we gave a voice and a title to that intention it became much more powerful.
Hence the Slow Music Movement. A platform that we hope will grow around our intentions to continue pushing music into many realms of grassroots organizing and old school public service, and will also provide a blueprint for other artists to utilize for alternative music industry options. We hope that it will grow much bigger than us.
Please share with us what inspired you to work with Permaculture Action Network?
Leah: You know, David Sugalski and I spent some time together a few winters ago down in Costa Rica on a friends very amazing permaculture farm Punta Mona, and we talked in depth about bringing MORE activism into shows. At that point the Permaculture Action tour was still just in inception mode, but we were each really inspired to strategize MORE ways to see impact made through our various music outlets. It was a real inspiration to follow their work and project as it went from idea to REALITY, and to witness both its strengths and growing pains. We are excited to work directly with the Permaculture Action Network and continue to see how these ideas and efforts can grow, allowing people to harness their human potential to do good. It has been a long-term goal to link direct action to our live shows.
Chloe: We were inspired by PAN when we attended one of their action days in Colorado last year with The Polish Ambassador after a big show. All this energy and vibration that was mustered up at the show was literally transfused into the soil and garden beds that we were all working on. The fans and families that came out to help became that much more close to one another and invested in the bigger picture of this planet we all share. As artists, we were given the opportunity to shed the stage persona and become worker bees in the environment as opposed to musicians on a pedestal. All these things happened in one action day, and reflected back to us the sort of world we want to live in.
What other music or art inspires you?
Chloe: Pretty much anyone who is standing in their own integrity, working in community, and creating paradigm shifting art. We are inspired by the artists who see beyond themselves and invite people to be a part of their journey.
Leah: we love an array of bizarre and wonderful roots music. Everything from Ani Difranco to Ali Farka Toure to old-time Appalachian string band music, to old school hip- hop to the blues and soul of New Orleans. We are touched by the underground, and the front porch, and the soul.
Any shout outs you want to make or people you want to thank?
Leah: We want to thank Jasmine and Ryan for carrying this touch, and for David Sugalski and Ayla for planting the initial seeds. We want to thank all our elders and peers who have kept the fires burning for OUR commitment to arts justice, especially Climbing Poetree, Winnona LaDuke, Joanna Macey, Rosemary Gladstar, Eustace Conway, Alternate ROOTS, and so many more folks. We have such powerful community.
Ryan Rising of Permaculture Action Network:
When did you first get involved with permaculture?
I began studying permaculture in 2008. I actually first heard the word “permaculture” while riding down an escalator in Denver, Colorado at the protests around the Democratic National Convention before Obama’s election. Rage Against the Machine had put on a free concert, after which they lead a march with the Iraq Veterans Against the War to the DNC convention center. A crew of us had driven out to Colorado from Massachusetts to participate in the street demonstrations and protests against the war and corporate globalization. After a couple long days of rowdy street protest against the systems that are harmful to people and planet, a friend mentioned permaculture and explained it saying, “you know how we live in this linear culture where everything is taken from one place, used, and then thrown away? Permaculture is the opposite of that. Everything is cyclical, which is the way natural systems work.”
This just clicked for me, and after an entire youth spent fighting against the things I did not want to see in the world (racism, exploitation, war, oppression), it was great to start to get to know what I was for. I took my first Permaculture Design Course that year at the Regenerative Design Institute in Bolinas, CA. I then went right back to Massachusetts and started practicing – designing chicken forage systems, planting gardens, doing design consultations for large properties, starting to teach workshops on composting and edible plants walks at festivals. When I took that first permaculture course, so much clicked. It was obvious that if I want to be part of creating autonomous communities, free of injustice and oppression, I need to start learning how we’re going to grow our food, build our shelters, collect our energy, gather our water, weave community, and do everything else we need to do to actually sustain ourselves.
At what point did you know that this would be an integral part of your life’s work?
I knew this would be an integral part of my life’s work to some extent after that first year or two of learning about and exploring all that permaculture has to offer, but up until 2011, the worlds of permaculture and of community action were very far apart from each other. In fact, they represented two different possibilities of how one confronts the social problems we all face. Do you dip out of the system and go create an ecological homestead, grow all your own food, etc. or do you organize in the city and confront systems of power? Shortly after Occupy in 2011, these worlds made sense and converged. Occupy the Farm, a direct action that happened in the Bay Area in 2012, and about which there is a documentary film, really coalesced those two threads. It combined the deep community building and egalitarian models of social relationships with which Occupy was experimenting with the get in the soil and on the land, grow food, create your own sustenance and livelihood ethos that permaculture enthuses. After that, bridging community organizing and action with permaculture was obvious, and I participated in a number of projects where we created gardens in empty lots, built urban farms, taught classes to elementary school kids on food growing and ecology at alternative schools, etc. With the Permaculture Action Tour, music and culture gave this convergence of permaculture and community action a huge embrace, and after the tour, I knew I had to keep doing this because it was my greatest point of leverage to affect the change I wanted to see.
What inspires you in your work?
What really inspires me is, on the one hand, a serious commitment to doing whatever I can to improve the lives of others and make the world a better place, and on the other, seeing how truly close we are to creating a world that works for everyone, a beautiful place with strong communities, healthy ecologies, and relationships of mutual benefit. Love and rage pretty much. Rage against all those harms and systems of power that are entirely unnecessary and degrading the lives of so many, and a love for the people, communities, and natural world that’s desperately trying to emerge and re-establish itself in its full strength and symbiosis. I’m inspired by all the countless organizations and people all over the world that are following this same path of dismantling systems of power that cause harm, and establishing alternative systems that breathe autonomy and life back into the world.
You’ve worked with The Polish Ambassador’s Permaculture Action Tour and you’re featured in the ReInhabiting the Village book. Share your story about your involvement in these and other projects.
I organized Pushing Through the Pavement: a Permaculture Action Tour with The Polish Ambassador, Ayla Nereo, Mr. Lif and Liminus back in 2014. I had been discussing the idea of the tour with some folks from the ecovillage-networking platform NuMundo down in Nicaragua during a month-long EcoVillage Design Course which occurred just after a small gathering that Polish Ambassador played at. They and David Sugalski (Polish) had struck up a conversation at that gathering about bringing people on the road to teach folks about permaculture during a music tour, and Polish had expressed his enthusiasm and long-standing desire to see what could happen if we could mobilize the crowds at concerts and festivals to get active together outside of the events.
While I was teaching at the Course, I was sharing all the experiences I’ve had with organizing in the urban environment and doing permaculture in cities, and it became apparent that for a tour going through 32 cities in the United States, this would be of great benefit. Then, we started scheming about doing more than just teaching permaculture, but actually linking people up with the local organizations and groups doing this work in their cities, and organizing action days after every show where people came out from the concert and get directly involved in building, planting, and crafting projects with their own hands. I wrote up a proposal to The Polish Ambassador and his manager, and the first Permaculture Action Tour was born.
The tour was absolutely incredible, and what we did at each of the action days was largely informed by the work I’d been doing for years with different urban farms, community gardens, food justice organizations, etc.
When I was asked to write for ReInhabiting the Village, I decided to write about the first action that inspired a lot of this, being Occupy The Farm back in early 2012, and the larger connection between permaculture and direct action; with permaculture being the ‘what’ we want to create and the techniques we can use to make it so, and direct action being the actual tactical set of how we make it so. Occupy the Farm was hugely influential to the tour in how it combined the direct democracy, horizontal decision making, mutual aid and other practices being practiced in the Occupy movement and in horizontal organizing for a long time now, with the connection to land and the direct creation of one’s own sustenance that comes from farming, gardening, and working at a ecosystem level. Check out the piece I wrote, “Direct Action for a Regenerative World,” in the ReInhabiting the Village book for more on this.
Tell us about the fundraising campaign you just launched with The Permaculture Action Network and Rising Appalachia?
We’re really excited about this. We’ve been observing Rising Appalachia and the way they move for a while with great respect. The dedication and vocality with which they urge social action and bring attention to community initiatives is incredible. Leah and Chloe and Biko and the crew came through to our Permaculture Action Day in Denver this past October, where we transplanted a couple urban farms to a new location, and a crew built a bunch of tiny homes to house people, and I think (I hope) they fell in love with the experience of having 300, 400 people after a show working together, planting, building, taking direct action, celebrating all to make the world a better place in a very tangible way. We decided to partner and hold Permaculture Action Days with some of their concerts, and the timing was perfect with our launch of the Permaculture Action Network as a broader organization with a multifold path of inviting people to become active in their own communities and take agency over their lives. So we launched the Permaculture Action Network with a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo and booked some Permaculture Action Days with Rising Appalachia in New Orleans, where we haven’t been yet, Denver, and our hometown, the SF Bay Area.
We’re not just raising money for the Permaculture Action Days; we’re raising money to build the network as a whole. The amount of people consistently getting in touch with us saying they want to get involved, that they have projects and food forests and ecovillages that want to host action days; artists and musicians who want to get in the network, requires a much broader organizational network to continue involving everyone who wants to participate and making this the greatest leverage point we can for transitioning to a just and regenerative future. We’re developing crews in each city who can organize action days when aligned artists come to town; we’re gathering groups of teachers in each bioregion who can teach Permaculture Action Courses and put on workshops and skillshares at Permaculture Action Hubs within large festivals and events, and we’re developing processes and platforms to connect people with one another along shared passions and interests, and incubate the formation of new organizations and projects. We’re basically creating a network that can move people from not knowing how they can engage in this work, to having the skills, grounding, and the team to get right out into the world and start growing a better one.
What other ways can people help the campaign besides donating?
Spread the word!! And also, get in touch with us if you want to participate in this organizational network or have something to offer. Honestly, we’re raising money right now because in the last year and a half of our work, it’s been required to make this all happen. But we also know how much can come together when people share their skills and their gifts, outside of the capitalist economic paradigm. We do a lot of this in our courses – asset mapping activities where people see just how much of what they need is met by the skills and resources of everyone else in the room, and vice versa. So get in touch to get involved, spread the word, and get active in your own community. Please do grab the link to the website or the campaign and share it on social media, message your friends who you think would be interested in supporting and getting involved, and let them know what we’re up to.
What advice would you give to someone wanting to start implementing permaculture principles in their life?
Start somewhere, and make mistakes if you have to, but just get going. Don’t worry about reading all the books first, or getting your certification, just get going a little at a time and start practicing. Do be humble when you go into communities of people who’ve been at it for a while, and observe, and learn, and ask questions. And reach out to the people who live around you and find out what they need, and what their dreams are, and vision together what your neighborhood could like like, and get active.
Permaculture is not something that just happens in your backyard or in a garden bed – it happens all around us. That’s why we plant public food forests in public parks and turn entire urban buildings into common spaces and re-imagine what 100-acre parcels of land can look like and how many people could live in community there – it translates as largely as we can dream it together, if we take action to make it so.
Permaculture Action Network website: http://permacultureaction.org/
IndieGoGo Campaign Short Link: http://igg.me/at/PermacultureActionNetwork