That’s how Regenerate! Orchestra leader Clay Gonzalez describes their music. “We take a pretty radically different approach to the orchestra,” he says. “Anyone can join. We’ve got people from all backgrounds, and it’s really about community—connecting with other people over music.”
That’s where regeneration comes in, says Gonzalez. “Being able to make human connections like that I think is very healing.”
For their Winter Solstice Bash on December 17 (see Events), Regenerate! will field fifty-nine performers from widely varied backgrounds. “Some people in the traditional music community,” says Gonzalez. “Some noise musicians, some electronic musicians, classical musicians.”
An unconventional orchestra with unconventional repertoire, Regenerate! picks unconventional performance spaces as well. Their December show will be at Planet Rock, the westside climbing gym.
They’ll perform Different Worlds by Gonzalez, Drones for Winter by Grey Grant, and Old Place by Nadine Dyskant-Miller. All U-M music grads in composition, they “really like to lean into the seasonal thing,” Gonzalez says. “I usually need some cheering up around that time of the winter.” Drones for Winter, he says, “captures the brooding darkness of the season while also giving a hint of kind of rebirth and light and hope.” But “it’s not gonna sound like Christmas music. It’s gonna sound like a chaotic churning sea of sound!”
An unconventional orchestra with unconventional repertoire has picked an unconventional performance space as well: Planet Rock Ann Arbor. “We wanna have spaces that are exciting,” Gonzalez enthuses. The west side climbing gym is “literally this giant room with an indoor neon-colored mountain!”
How are the acoustics? “It really depends on how many people show up,” Gonzalez laughs. “Once you get above thirty musicians playing this type of music, it’s really hard to go wrong, because it’s just like a big wash of sound.”
That sound comes partly from the musicians’ open seating, which encourages audience members to stroll among them as they perform. “Despite the weirdness—it sounds weird and it is weird—people usually find these performances to be really affecting,” Gonzales says. “I think it’s a combination of the beauty and the expansive soundscape. People have said that it really let them connect to something deeper, let them meet other people in the community, gave them a joyful night.”
A native of Kentucky, where winter’s days are a bit longer and temperatures warmer, Gonzalez says he “started super-young singing in a choir and doing piano lessons. I was in marching band, which had a pretty big influence on kind of the sounds [and] experiences I like to make.”
The first project in what would eventually be called the Regenerate! Orchestra involved forty musicians performing in a farmhouse in Ann Arbor Township. Since then, more than 100 different musicians have played with the group.
Gonzalez says he and his collaborators write the orchestra’s music as “a big structure that the performers fill with their own content. We leave room for the performers to improvise a bit and play around with the material. It’s like we give the performers the skeleton, but allow them to fill in the flesh and personality of what they’re playing.”
Regenerate! drummer Cameron Wilson describes the music as “ambient, immersive, community-driven. I might use the word spiritual sometimes. [Gonzalez] talks about how the whole point of his music is to induce an alternative consciousness—to be in the state of joy.”
“I’ve always had a bit of an outsider relationship to classical musicians, although I adore classical music,” Gonzalez says. “That’s why I do this.
“The orchestra is a fantastic machine that can produce some of the most exciting sounds in all of human history. It just seems such a shame that the formality of the ritual is keeping so many people from enjoying it.”
Gonzalez hopes more folks will enjoy it through the Regenerate! Orchestra. In five years he would “like this to be a staple of Ann Arbor culture.” He’s already imagining their spring concert—and scouting locations.
