INTERVIEW // Mega Laverne & Shirley
MEGA LAVERNE & SHIRLEY is a band birthed from the fictitious art scene known as big TEEN. big TEEN bands revel in aesthetics of distraction, multiplicity, and metatheatrics. MEGA LAVERNE & SHIRLEY embrace this artistic framework with monolithic performances that incorporate electronic synthesizers, MIDI sampling, multilingual declamations, choreography informed by Chinese calligraphy, and LED light worship.
Comfort Music’s Ian Mahanpour sat down with Mega Laverne and Shirley performers Andrew Tham and Mabel Kwan to talk about their project as they prepare for their upcoming Quiet Comfort show on 10/26/23.
CM: How did Mega LS Start?
Andrew: It was sort of an artistic prompt for myself. I basically made a fake art scene called big TEEN. I was like “I'm going to write a weird manifesto and it's going to serve as an artistic prompt. I'm going to ask all my friends to make music bands out of the contents of this document as a sort of guidebook.” I threw a big TEEN festival actually just down the street over here. We threw this big all day festival, just had all these bands play, it was their first ever performance.
CM: Do these bands play non-big TEEN events?
Andrew: So It’s mostly big TEEN events. Outside of performing the big TEEN events, it kind of depends on the group. For the most part it's been a one and done, people make a thing up for that. It’s like role playing, or a world building exercise.
CM: What are some characteristic of Mega LS that align with big TEEN?
Andrew: I feel like the performances that we've been asked to do actually feels less big TEEN in format. Big Teen performances were never more than 15 minutes. But a lot of the shows that people have asked us to play want us to do 20 to 40 minutes.
So that has kind of fallen by the wayside. But the chaos of simultaneous languages is there. There's episode synopses that are being projected. There's usually pre-recorded sound. And then there's some sort of light element. Maybe there's a strobe light or some LEDs. We do some calligraphy with glow in the dark ink. So I think there's a kind of over-stimulation aspect; like your attention is being pulled in a lot of different ways.
I think that’s maybe the root of the big TEEN thing. A sort of attention deficit or being kind of spread thin.
Mabel: Yeah, It overstimulates and is a kind of fun overwhelming of what it feels like to be in this world.
CM: You two are trained musicians: how does that figure into Mega LS?
Mabel: When we started it was really different but felt great because it was just nice to try things that I hadn't done before. That was part of why you [Andrew] asked me actually.
Andrew: Yeah, I'm not a classically trained pianist the way that Mabel is. I'm not good at any instrument that I play. I'm definitely more dilettante when it comes to music, but I also feel like that way about any art form that I engage with. And so I think this was just another version of that.
Like, this was my first time playing the synthesizer; I want to make something with it and doing stuff with light seems fun. We could just try it, you know? So it was embracing a DIY aesthetic of “I don't know really exactly what I'm doing. I'm just going to kind of go for it.”
Mabel: It was really great to get to do that [with Mega LS] and explore. When I first moved here in 2006 I had done this performance art project with SAIC folks and it opened things up for me. I studied piano but playing music is about sounds and I think there's just a lot of ways to do it. And like, this [Mega Ls] is a fun way.
Andrew: Yeah, it's definitely been fun. And since we started this group, I feel like [Mabel’s] artistic practice has really evolved—a lot of more improvisation, experimentation, working with dancers, all that stuff.
Mabel: Yeah, around that time I was starting to improvise more. People were asking me to do that, which I'm grateful for. And yeah, I've always been interested in movement.
And that's been very fun. Especially when you're pianist and you usually just sit there. So it’s great to get to move around. This is the best of both worlds for me.
CM: Mega LS has a big language component to it, can you talk a bit about that?
Mabel: Initially a thing we were interested in is parallel body doubles, parallel worlds and just our own experiences. So, I grew up speaking Cantonese. And Andrew—your dad speaks Mandarin, right?
Andrew: Yeah.
Mabel: These are languages where the words are written the same way but they're pronounced differently. So, we were just playing around with what we could do with that. We would speak the same thing but with different pronunciations at the same time. It was a chance for us to just figure out how to even speak in Cantonese or speak in Mandarin.
Andrew: We were using this as a way to be like “Oh, how can we try to learn Chinese in a formal way?”
The different dialects were a parallel universe thing. This is the version of us that speaks in English simultaneously superimposed on the version of us that speaks in Chinese. I think this is also an Asian American identity thing; I have an Asian father and a white mother, and my dad didn't grow up speaking Chinese to me. So I never learned it as a kid, but it's a part of the culture I wanted to inherit. This is me crawling towards that in an artistic medium,
Mabel: Oh, I have kind of a different relationship. I just moved away from it [Cantonese] for a while, but now I'm interested in going back. It was my first language, but then I went to school and didn't continue it. It’s a way to get back to some of my customs and see how they fit in or not fit into the way I live my life right now.
CM: Why Laverne and Shirley? Does Mega LS have some connection with the show?
Andrew: When we picked that name, we just picked it instinctually out of the list of band names [from the manifesto].
And we actually ran with the Laverne and Shirley idea. We wrote out episodes of Laverne and Shirley that become abstracted; they develop into strangeness in some weird way. We literally wrote out 40 episodes. And that’s kind’ve a funny thing because when people saw our first show they said “Oh, this sounds like an episode of Laverne and Shirley!”
CM: Has Mega LS been the germ of any ideas that have found their way into other projects?
Mabel: I think of projects separately. But sometimes overlapping. Even when I play synthesizer in other bands I’m not thinking about bringing this mode [Mega LS] into it.
Andrew: Yeah, I think similarly. Part of the project was thinking about world building, finding a way to step outside of my comfort zone and just try on a different artistic persona.
I think maybe that's just made me a better art maker in general. Like, don't get so focused on this idea, just have fun and try looking at it from a completely different angle. I think that attitude has carried with me a little more into other stuff I do.
CM: You two have performed for many years across two “seasons” of Mega LS; what’s the relationship of these seasons to Mega LS?
Andrew: Like Dragon Ball Z, it's like long form anime. They have a bunch of episodes, and that's the canonical stuff. And then they have all these movies that are non canonical, that don't fit into the timeline. And I feel like we're maybe doing that a little bit—you have your canonical seasons and then you have these performances where it's sort of something else. I think we always start the same way when we're making something; we just try stuff out and we improvise but when we think about the seasons, we're putting it into a specific box.
Mabel: When I think of Mega LS, I definitely think of it as a continuum. We're always thinking about what happened in season one? What happened in season two? I think our musical timeline ends up being kind of a narrative in a way. Like, what are we going to do for Quiet Comfort? We're still Mega LS, but, we're going to go out of canon a little bit.
CM: What are you going to do for Quiet Comfort?
Mabel: I'm actually really looking forward to this because it's so reverberant in there [Comfort Station]. I'm just really interested to hear my broken accordion, I have one broken key right now. Will that thing come out in there?
I think quite the quiet comfort idea is just perfect, too. It will be interesting—are you just overall quiet? Are you trying to be quiet in the context of the Boulevard? And also comfort, the cozy; there has to be a comfort aspect to it too.
Andrew: We're also going to try to use some acoustic instruments for this performance. I have a Guqin—it's like a Chinese zither instrument—and it is so quiet. I feel like that'll lend itself to an intimate kind of setting.
Andrew Tham is a writer, composer, and performer. He is a co-founder of the cassette tape label Parlour Tapes+, a member of the weirdo collective mocrep, and a technician with the Neo-Futurists. Andrew performs in various big TEEN bands around Chicago.
Pianist Mabel Kwan is a performer of classical, improvised, and experimental music. She is fascinated by sound, contradictions, and our perceptions of what is familiar or strange.
Mabel regularly tours the U.S. with improvised music group Restroy, synthesizer duo Mega Laverne and Shirley, and electronic/instrumental trio ULUUUL. She sings vocals for the Lucky Bikes, plays piano with Fifth Season, and is a chamber musician for Bridging Memory through Music, a therapeutic intervention for patients with dementia. Mabel volunteers for TECHNE, an organization that works with young girls to build electronic instruments and improvise using music technology. She is also a founding member of Ensemble Dal Niente.