Good Moon Signs: Sylvan Esso On Making a Festival, Maintaining a Community Feel, and 90s Chord Vocoders

Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn are ready to recharge. For the Sylvan Esso duo, years of back-to-back tours, managing their new recording studio, Betty, and new record label, Psychic Hotline, have left Meath and Sanborn ready for some hometown downtime.

But that doesn’t mean taking a break from creative endeavors: The pair have been working together on producing records for friends and labelmates while preparing for their next big adventure—hosting Good Moon, a two-day concert at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park on May 31 and June 1.

Ahead of the weekend event, we recently took a stroll around Durham’s American Tobacco Campus with Sanborn, Meath, and Gherkin, the pair’s adorable young chihuahua, to talk about the steps leading up to the rise of Good Moon, their expectations for the new label, and why they love the Triangle music community.

INDY: How long has this festival been in the works?

Meath: We’ve been reaching towards doing something like this for basically the entire time we’ve been a band. When we moved here, Moogfest started happening in Durham a couple years later. The city just comes alive in a different way. So I also really wanted to do an event that everyone could get to really easily because at first, we were looking for places in fields that are far away.

Sanborn: We had a similar feeling at Shakori Hills. It was only one night but it was us and all of our favorite bands out at Shakori and that went so well, and felt so invigorating and unique, that we felt like maybe there’s a way that we can bring this more into the town. How can we make this a multi-day thing? How could it not feel like every other festival? That went through like a rollercoaster of different looks and trying to get people to say yes and, you know, banging on doors. That lasted literally years. We would just look on Google Maps and find fields and then figure out who owned the field.

Why the move from the old Durham Athletic Park to the DBAP?

Sanborn: It was a bunch of different factors. The old one has a smaller capacity. We wanted more people to be able to go—that was a big part of it. But the old one has no infrastructure for this kind of thing. It’s just not designed to be a concert venue. And the new one, while it isn’t designed to be a concert venue, you can drive a semi right in there, there’s power, there’s bathrooms. It’s much easier to have a large group of people have a good time and be safe in the new space. 

One thing that I felt was super special about the last one was the feeling of community. [With]  all of the problems being solved by moving to the bigger space—I think that’s one that is being hurt. I think it’s because there’s big walls around everything. The old one you’re just right out there in the open, which, to us, was a huge plus. But because of all the logistics and neighborhood issues, moving to the big one was necessary.

A big thing we’re trying to focus on right now is, ‘Okay, how do we work to bring back that sense of community and make sure this feels like a party for the city and not just the people inside the walls?’ And so that goes into all of the supporting partners like PS37, these after parties we’re doing every night that are first come first serve [and] cheap at the door. All our favorite DJs are playing, that kind of thing. We’re doing a lot of events around town leading up to it and around it.

What have you been cooking up at Betty’s, your new recording studio?

Meath: We’ve been working on a bunch of other people’s records. We did three tours in three years by accident, and then were like, ‘Oh, wait, we should rest for a minute and not think about productivity for a little while.’ It’s really hard to do. If you’re independent or self-employed, there’s almost no way to really feel the ability to stop.

Sanborn: To me, everything that I feel like we’re doing in this phase of our career, quote, unquote, feels like it’s becoming about ‘How do we widen the umbrella?’ It goes back to the idea of community. That’s the most enriching part of this whole thing. So how do we bring more people in? How do we open doors to more people? How do we enable more work to get made?

The studio is a big part of that and I think the label’s the other natural part of that, and both of those things function together and sometimes independently as ways to just enable work to be made. The goal with the label was to have something that felt curated and distinct, but also the biggest thing was just that we want to do radically artist-friendly deals. We want this to be a thing that doesn’t necessarily make a lot of money.

But the primary purpose of it is to enable artists. What does that look like within capitalism? Is this a thing that can work? The studio’s the same way. It’s not a thing that’s designed to make money. It loses a ton of money. All of these are just experiments, just like Good Moon is an experiment. Does it work within the world that we live in, does it not? Is there a way we can have some elements of it succeed, even if others fail? I think all of those things kind of go hand in hand with that same idea.

What new toys have you gotten for Betty?

Sanborn: That’s a good question. I bought this 90s chord vocoder. It’s very weird. Doesn’t sound like any other vocoder I’ve ever heard. It’s got this really wild, kind of chippy 90s FM kind of sound to it. It’s like “I Thought It Was You” by Herbie Hancock or Daft Punk’s Stronger. The fundamental thing is you take the frequency response of one sound and apply it to a different sound. So usually you take the frequency response of a voice and apply it to a synthesizer. So it’s like the synthesizer is making the vocalization.

Meath: There’s this really good record by Joachim Cooder, Ry Cooder’s kid. He plays an electric mbira that has all of the keys on it. It looks like a little piano. It’s sick and sounds so beautiful and I’m going to buy one.

Sanborn: I didn’t realize that’s what that was! You should totally get it.

You two have been a part of the music scene in Durham for over a decade now. How do you think it’s changed over the years? How does it compare to other cities?

Sanborn: I think that the Triangle and North Carolina more broadly have a way higher number of insane musicians per capita than I would say either New York or L.A. It’s a smaller place, but I think for the size, the music scene is outsized for the space. That’s one thing. I also think the tendency of people who live here to take a chance on things has ebbed and flowed throughout the years that I’ve lived here.

When we first moved here, I think that was the thing that struck me immediately at our first show at the Pinhook. We had our 12-inch release party for “Hey Mami” and “Play It Right.” Nobody knew who we were. We sold it out. I think maybe Brian Howe said something about it on WUNC or wrote about it in the INDY and was just like, “Hey, this show is gonna be cool.” There was like one mention somewhere and it sold out. I remember playing that show and looking out and thinking “I don’t know any of these people.” We’d been here for a couple of years at that point. I was so struck by that— of all the other places I’ve lived, that would never have happened.

I think [there] was a really strong moment in town for that feeling, just before the big wave of change happened, in my eyes, as somebody who moved here in 2012. I think that dipped precipitously for a few years and I’m just starting to feel it really come back. The young people in the scene are really driving it.

There are a lot of people in their early to mid-20s who are in bands right now who are really reinvigorating everything that’s going on right here in a way that I find wildly exciting, like Sluice and Magic Tuber Stringband. I’ve been to so many shows lately that have blown my mind and again, looked around and been like, “I don’t know anyone at this show.” It’s that same feeling.

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