(bright music) - [Presenter] On this episode of "Postcards," - If you were to step in here and you know, do a vocal performance, it's a wild kind of pingy sound.

- If I would go a long time without doing art, I definitely can feel it like it's always like my goal to get back to you.

(gentle music) - Our main ones is bandura, which is a Ukrainian instrument that has over 65 strings.

(gentle music) - [Presenter] "Postcards," is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the Citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by, Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies.

Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen, On behalf of Shalom Hill Farms, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Wyndham, Minnesota.

On the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

A better future starts now.

West Central Initiative empowers communities with resources, funding, and support for a thriving region.

More at wcif.org.

- Welcome to Carpet Booth Studios.

Come on in.

Yeah, my name's Zach Zurn and I'm a producer and the owner of Carpet Booth Studios, which is a recording and production studio in Rochester, Minnesota.

Cool, so we got two levels up at Carpet Booth.

Downstairs, I'll show you first.

We have this big lounge, full kitchen and a couple bedrooms for artists that are from out of town.

I fell in love with music at a really young age.

Growing up in Texas, we had magnet schools and I went to one with the fine arts emphasis.

There was a moment in about fifth grade where we got to have somebody come show us how these little cassette tape recorders worked.

And I got to layer kind of like four tracks on top of each other.

And at that point I kind of fell in love with the idea that, oh, I could manipulate audio and take these little silly songs I'm writing around the house and capture them.

And that kind of set my trajectory towards the goal to make records one day.

Got a couple bedrooms in here that folks stay in.

- [Producer] You Got puzzles.

- Yep, we got puzzles.

We try to do that.

This one's too big.

We bit off more than we could chew I think.

And then we've got a studio B here.

So it's our second studio.

It's a much smaller kind of simpler studio, but for the budget conscious or kind of beginner to intermediate musician, this is where they may work with my other engineers on the team and our interns and such.

And then we keep this great sounding vocal booth and just isolation booth down here in Studio B as well.

And then we can head back upstairs.

When I started Carpet Booth in 2017, it kind of all happened by accident.

I had moved to Rochester the year before and needed space for me to do some mixing and some writing and some production.

And it snowballed slowly but surely into what Carpet Booth is.

And so I outgrew that initial space pretty quickly and after a search stumbled across this former church building, which was kind of in the industry a dream for any engineer and producer.

'Cause there's a built-in acoustics and it's a large space, obviously I'm biased that the space is really cool.

And speaking of that, this is our lobby for upstairs.

We've got this really cool big mural painted by a really cool late muralist and tattoo artist named Luke Austin.

He did an amazing job on this.

And this leads us into Studio A, which is our kind of our main flagship studio.

And here's some Polaroids of a bunch of folks that we've worked with over the years.

And then, yeah, this enters into studio A. And so in here you can see a bunch of the vinyls of records that we've worked on, some of our certifications for projects that have had some industry success.

And it leads us into the control room here.

The roles I've played in the music industry have been pretty diverse.

You know, for the last several years it's been really focused on being a songwriter and a producer and an audio engineer as well.

And so that's, you know, in layman's terms, just helping a band or an artist make their record and capturing the sounds, mixing it, providing creative vision.

But yeah, I've also played in bands.

I played in a indie rock band called Author for about seven years and I decided to leave that band last year just to be able to focus on making records with other people, which I love.

This is a cool trio led by a guy named Mike Munson outta Winona.

When it comes to the final product of what you hear on a released song or record, there is a lot of kind of undercover work that goes into that.

Whether that's reverbs, which is kind of like an ambulation of a physical space, or there's kind of extra textures with like a synth or some sort of keyboard that's really tucked in to the mix.

And that can kind of provide some depth to the sound.

One thing I'll say pretty often is, this element that I want to add is gonna be more felt than heard, you know, and it's when you mute it or you take it away, that's really when you start to think, I did not know we needed that or I wasn't even cognizant it was there, but now that it's gone, this feels boring or doesn't feel as inspiring or emotional.

And those are the kind of things that with my nerdy brain and my music obsessed brain that get me really hyped and excited to do these things that you might only pick up on, on the third, fourth, fifth lesson, little Easter eggs.

(gentle music) And when we had this designed and built out, we worked with a studio designer and I really just asked him to help me design the rooms according to the workflow I wanted to work with.

And so I wanted to be able to sit at the console, look out into the live room, which is the large tracking room, and then also have an ISO booth on my left in my right.

And all the rooms are treated with different types of treatments to get different sounds within the rooms.

ISO West has these wood chunks when sound kind of bounces around this room, it hits the random angles and kind of evenly disperses.

And so it creates just a really nice balance of a brighter, more vibrant room.

It's not super, super dead or anything, But then our carpet booth over here is just a shag carpet from floor to ceiling and so it doesn't disperse as much.

It kind of just gets absorbed into the walls.

And then the live room, for example, a large open room has a natural room reverb, a room decay to it.

Yeah, so part of my role as a producer is to ideally know the space I'm working in really well.

One of the luxuries and benefits to me having an amount of space is I know how every corner of every room kind of responds to sound and performances.

(gentle guitar chords) One thing I find really unique and that I'm really grateful for is being able to work and live in Minnesota.

I feel pretty strongly that I'm able to rave highly about Minnesota because Minnesota is one of these states that respects and prioritizes the arts, especially comparatively to other places.

It is genuinely from my experience, one of the best spots to be a creative individual that is endeavoring to do their creative medium professionally.

And you know, with most people in my position, if you think of kind of the big names or the big dogs, they're living in LA, Nashville, New York.

But most of the work, the vast majority of the work I do is right here in my studio in Rochester, Minnesota of all places.

And I'm lucky enough to have people willing to travel here to work with me and my team.

And in this space I am in love with the fact that I get to work on some like really top 40 style pop one day and hip hop.

And then the next day I'm working on some punk band that you know, has five people show up to their shows.

But it's just the coolest thrashist stuff and anywhere in between, you know?

One other quirky thing that a lot of people you know point out about our space is all the different gnomes.

We have, I think over 50 gnomes in the studio and it started with one specific one right here that I got from my grandma who passed away when I was young.

And so this gnome has always kind of sat next to my production computer on my production desk for as since I was like 11 or 12 or whatever.

And then when I was in tour, I was on tour with my band in Europe in 2019 and found this really cool gnome in Freiburg, Germany and thought, you know, this guy needed a little buddy.

Yeah, I guess I'm a gnome collector now, which is crazy to say out loud, but there's a lot of them around here.

There's a cool Paul Bunyan one from Minnesota.

Skeleton guy.

Great, so I'll take you down the hallway here into the rest of the space.

And so this is the live room, which is the largest room that we have in our space here.

And most of the time we'll have a full band recording all at once in here.

And then it leads into some other isolation booths over here.

And so we have a traditionally treated ISO booth here.

It's kind of just a auxiliary room.

And then on the other side, this is a baptismal tub that was in the church.

And so if you were to step in here and you know, do a vocal performance or put some amplifiers in here or microphones during a drum recording, it's a wild kind of pingy sound.

One of my parents was a pastor in this small denomination.

I guess it is kind of intriguing that I've returned back to my roots in a way of working in a church building.

That is one thing about this space that I really enjoy and I kind of prioritize is, although this is no longer, you know, a congregational meeting place, I love to keep church candles and old hymnals and even the original Marion Church of Christ brick sign out front to be able to commemorate like what the past was and what the history of this building was.

It's just important to me.

And yeah, super, super cool.

This old fiberglass is such a unique surface for sound to kind of bounce around inside.

Alrighty.

So we'll show you just a couple more things here.

We try to keep a lot of unique instruments around the studio.

This was actually used in a classroom, you know, so that the teacher could kind of see which notes somebody's playing.

(gentle piano music) Yeah, so lots of keys, lots of drums, lots of amps.

And then this is the actual carpet booth.

So when I was in high school, we had a closet in my parents' basement.

We went to one of the local carpet stores here and stole a bunch of carpet scraps out of the dumpster and nailed them up and tacked them up inside of this little tiny closet.

And so I needed a name and it felt like I could kind of pay homage to my origins by doing it that way.

So when we decided to build this spot, we thought we might as well have something similar to what I used to have.

And this is a nicer version of what I used to have, but it's a great room and obviously you can see right into the control room.

But yeah, that's mainly, that's our studio A and that's Carpet Booth up and downstairs.

(gentle music) This whole studio ends up being one of the most vulnerable emotionally open spaces I've ever been in because some songs are about losing a brother, you know, or you know, loss of love or the joys of, you know, a summer or whatever it may be.

And so we get to have extremely deep conversations here where it gets really real and it kind of expedites the relationship growth as well with the artists I work with where sometimes I'm only with this artist for a week or two, but they leave and it's as if we had spent a whole summer together sharing stories and experiences and pretty raw and real sometimes.

And so how does music make me feel?

It makes me feel everything.

I know that's kind of corny, but I'm very thankful for the experiences music has given me to kind of grow as a person as well.

(gentle music) (bright music) - My name is Evelyn Johnson and I am 18.

I am like a traditional artist.

I usually use mixed media.

I like to use, you know, like colored pencils, ink, markers, fabric, you know, embroidery, all of that stuff, paper, you know, I like to do like collages but like a lot of the time on like pretty large scale portraits.

(bright music) So a lot of my art are portraits of women, you know, I like to... And it's kind of a mix like you know, sometimes it will be like women from my family, some that I've personally known, some that I've only heard stories about.

Others will be more like women from history or like actresses or musicians or even like biblical figures.

In my portraits I like to do traditional like placement of the person.

And then I like to do very like detailed backgrounds with like a lot of different colors and shapes and stuff.

This is a book I have of just like smaller scale drawings.

This is from a couple years ago when I really started working on different, like portraits more and using some more mixed media, like this is paper and like paint and colored pencil.

(bright music) I recently finished a pretty large portrait of Rosemary Kennedy who is the sister to John F. Kennedy.

And I came across just like her story, like online about how when she was a young woman her father paid to have her receive a lobotomy because she was viewed as being too rebellious and too wild and they were worried she was gonna bring shame on their family and stuff.

And she was left handicapped from that, you know, she had to relearn how to walk, she could never like fully speak again.

So this was just a picture I found of her that was before this happened.

You know, it's a very, it is obviously a horrible story and the picture really like captured how like young and happy she was and it's just horrible to think about how completely unnecessary that was.

So I wanted to, you know, like kind of honor her with my portrait and just like think about her story, reflect on it and capture, you know, how she looked when she was young and happy and obviously didn't deserve any of that.

So this is my portrait I did of Rosemary Kennedy, John F. Kennedy's sister.

You know, I heard about her story online and stuff, you know, just from reading something and I thought it'd be fun to do, you know, a portrait capturing her in that time of her life.

I really tried to use a lot of different mixed media with this, you know, I have like three different kinds of fabric in here.

I also experimented some with like stamping on fabric and drawing on it, you know, I have some like visible stitching and stuff as well.

And this I also used some like crayons as well as like ink.

(gentle music) And then here I did a little stamp of her name.

(gentle music) The current series I'm working on is about, you know, my different ancestors, my different women ancestors specifically.

So I had this idea recently because my grandma just randomly sent me a picture of her grandmother on her wedding day.

She'd seen my portrait of Rosemary Kennedy, and she was like, oh, like I should send you some pictures of you know, your relatives from that era because you know, I told her that I thought like the hairstyles and dresses and stuff from that era, you know, were fun to draw and stuff.

Anyway, so she sent me the picture of her grandma and I decided to, you know, make a large scale portrait of that.

And then I really felt like inspired from that to learn more about other women from my family and make portraits of them.

So I now have two complete.

I have one I'm working on and I know for sure I'm gonna do another after that.

(bright music) Yeah, and then I really have been liking with my portraits I've been trying to include personal real documents from them.

So like my one picture has like a photocopy I made of a telegram that my grandma had of her mom's.

So I made copies of those and have that all in the background, which I thought was like a cool touch to have her handwriting in the background.

And they're really sweet letters.

They're like when she was dating her future husband, it's just really sweet hearing about her personal life too.

So this is a portrait I did of my great great grandma.

And in the background I made like photocopies of letters she wrote and then broke them up and put them in the back.

So that's like her actual handwriting.

I also have like a dress of hers that I, you know, can fit and stuff so that's cool.

I think it's really cool to just think about the women from my family and what their lives were like.

I really like the connection that this series has brought me with my grandma too.

'Cause I've asked her about, you know, these women who she actually had the chance to get to know personally and she's been able to tell me, you know, about their growing up, who they married, how many kids they had, stuff like that.

And then this is another picture in that series, this is my great grandma and this is a photocopy I made of a telegram she got sent on her wedding day.

So I thought that was pretty cool.

I thought, you know, I'd never seen what a telegram looked like and all these documents were provided to me from my grandma as she like told me the stories behind them.

(bright music) One of my biggest inspirations would be children's book illustrations.

I've always really liked the books on Madeline and I love the art style.

I like looking at those, you know, like pulling different like shapes I like or you know, like the way they drew tree or whatever from that.

And yeah, I definitely find that style of illustration really like inspiring and I love the color palette of that book too.

This piece is kind of inspired by the illustrations in the children's book "Madeline."

So like especially like the different like shapes for the tree and stuff and the different colors and like little lines.

I really like to do different like repetitive lines and very like loose lines, you know, in my work.

I think that, you know, I think that's just a fun look.

I like to do just a bunch of different just colors and patterns and stuff throughout my work.

(bright music) Today I am gonna work on one of my portraits in my female relative series.

So I'm gonna be working on a portrait of my great great great-grandma.

(bright music) This one doesn't have a big story behind it, but I mostly just wanted to like experiment with different combinations of mediums.

So I started off by doing, you know, her face with charcoal and I haven't worked in charcoal much so I thought that was just like kind of a fun thing to experiment with.

And then I added some fabric.

I wanted to have some very visible like embroidery, so I wanted to have like a color that really stood out on that.

So I picked orange and then I drew on it some with colored pencils.

(gentle music) My art journey I would say has definitely just been like throughout my entire life as I've grown older, it's just become more and more of a central part of my life.

(bright music) If I would go a long time without doing art, I definitely can feel it.

Like it's always like my goal to get back to, you know?

It's like I'm trying to get done with work so then I can get done with school so then I can, you know, finally draw in the evening and stuff.

Yeah, I definitely feel unfulfilled if I don't do it for a while.

And you know, it's just definitely my favorite thing to do, you know?

(bright music) (uplifting music) - The fact that we have this instrument today and that it's survived over all of these ages, it's a big act of defiance, but it's also a big motivator and reason for why it's important to keep playing it, to keep sharing it because many people tried really hard to eradicate it, meanwhile other people really tried to keep it going.

So just seeing these efforts, you really get inspired by it and want to keep it going.

(uplifting music) Also, my name is Angelica and I'm here of my brother.

- I'm Justin.

- And we are both siblings and we play together in a duet called Bandura Duo.

And we like to play an experiment with lots of various different instruments.

Our main ones is bandura, which is the Ukrainian instrument that has over 65 strings.

- We both come from like a musical background, so like in my case, I started playing ubo in elementary school and then I transitioned to saxophone and a guitar, I also picked it up, but bandura is one of my latest instruments.

I just fell in love with it and I've dedicated myself to playing bandura.

- After the full scale invasion of 2022, we started playing in this instrument more seriously and we took up on it as our main instrument and we started performing at various different fundraisers and charity concerts and events in order to help spread awareness about not only this instrument, but also about what's happening in Ukraine.

The history about it is very interesting because it used to be played by wandering blind musicians or bards who had traveled from village to village and they would play songs that spread news, spread cultural stories because for many centuries there was always someone trying to take over Ukrainian land and it would separate the people.

But people still shared their ideas, they shared their language and identity.

I don't know if there's any instrument that held the power that this one has, because for many times it was banned and it was not allowed to play it.

And it was even viewed as dangerous.

During the 1800s, it wasn't even allowed by Russian authorities to walk around with a bandura on your back.

And during the 1900s during the Soviet Union, many of these players, they were rounded up together and they were executed and their banduras burned.

There was this one big conference where they invited these players and they said that it was a ethnographic music conference to discuss and celebrate their music.

Instead, it was a farce in order to gather everyone up and to destroy this power.

And the reason why is because it's harder to control people who have their own identity, it's viewed as dangerous.

And if not for this instrument, I wouldn't have felt disconnected to meeting other people all over the United States and Canada and just other people who are just like me, who are also Ukrainian American, who also are musicians.

Because when you play together with a lot of different people, when you share a story, it's a very powerful thing and I just don't think I wouldn't have been able to feel this connected to my culture otherwise without it.

(uplifting music) - Music for many, it can also be viewed as like therapy.

And right now when there's like lots of hardships going on, I see that bandura is very inspiring in terms of its own history, which history and the culture that it comes from.

For others, I would see how bandura it can be very inspiring.

(Uplifting music) (bright music) - [Presenter] "Postcards," is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by, Margaret aA.

Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen, On behalf of Shalom Hill Farms, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Wyndham, Minnesota.

On the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

A better future starts now.

West Central Initiative empowers communities with resources, funding, and support for a thriving region.

More at wcif.org.

(bright music)