23 OctOber 24 - 30, 2024 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Current in the Stream Electrik Ants are still livestream- ing simply because they crush it. BY ANDREW SHERMAN I t’s almost showtime for the Electrik Ants. They’re checking sound levels, getting tuned up, maybe doing a run-through on the ending of that one song. The play- ers turn their pre-show jitters into the perfect head- space to jam. This is a typical pre-gig prep, with one difference: We aren’t at your favorite club, but in “The Lab.” This show is a livestream. The “Lab” is the home base studio for Electrik Ants. “Live From the Lab” has become a bi-monthly livestream that’s been presented for over two years. Although lockdowns launched seemingly a thousand streams (some of which are still going strong), most of them have dropped off. The Ants had been try- ing to figure out how to best stream well before 2020. The band was formed by brothers Jeff and Dylan Collins, who started writing and collecting players and playing live, in 2018. From the start, the Ants’ live shows were dynamic and perfectly orchestrated — from the songs to the visual el- ements to the transitions. The band’s sound is a blend of cosmic rock and futuristic jams with a base of hip-hop and funky grooves. The current lineup consists of Jeff Collins on ethereal guitar and poi- gnant vocals. His brother Dylan also sings and adds another sonic dimension with moody keys and a unique approach to rap. He will also bang on a drum when called for. Ryan Dahir plays a spaced-out saxophone, utilizing crazy effects pedals that enhance his already stellar playing. This makes for some never-before-heard sounds. The sleeper of the band is bassist Matt Maschmann, keeping it all together like some sort of funky superglue. One benefit that has already come from the stream was meeting drummer Mayo Valdez, who’s played for Charley Crockett. They gelled so well that Valdez is now the band’s drummer when he’s in town, and will be doing shows with Ants in the Fall. The band went through many lineup evolutions. At one point they had seven members. It was a challenge balancing seven instruments with vocals and egos and a specific vision of how it all should sound and look. Combine that with the fact that they mostly played clubs that did not have a sound system to accommodate the complicated mix. “We would rehearse specific setlists for a couple of months, then a dress rehearsal where we played the whole thing through because it was so important to us to have tran- sitions, the intros, the outros — we want it to be an arc,” Jeff Collins says of the band’s approach to a live show. “We wanted there to be no time for an audience member to be like, ‘I’m gonna go to the bar now, I’m gonna step outside the live show.’ [Usually] the song just ends and everybody claps and then there’s silence [...] like, ‘Which song is next?’ and then there’s weird silence and then the lead vocalist, like, has to say something to fill in some space. Yeah, it’s not really worked out, like, you feel amateurish.” The band members often felt that their hard work in the practice room wasn’t translating the way they envisioned to their live show. Then the pandemic hit, and it seemed like a good time to jump into the long-discussed idea to do a regu- lar livestream. “We had the idea for a while, but it took a while once the pandemic hit to coordinate things. I’d say 2022 we ramped up the stream and by summer we were trying [and succeed- ing in streaming],” says Jeff Collins. “Adam Sidelsky joined in November 2022 and that’s when we really started hitting our stride and managing all the troubleshooting required. [Sidelsky] was [bassist] Mike’s friend. Robbie Maysent had been doing the role Adam currently fills ... Adam’s been the fifth Ant ever since, helping set up live shows, coming [here] early and helping set up, and coming in on random days we schedule streams.” “Live From the Lab” happens every other Tuesday for the main program; every four to six weeks there’s a “Lo-Fi” stream featuring Grammy award-winning producer Jah Born among others. The Stream can be viewed on the Electrik Ants Twitch channel and their YouTube. If you can’t catch it live, it’s available on Twitch for two weeks after the stream. One of the unique aspects of the stream is the band in- vites a guest artist every week, a veritable who’s-who in Dal- las music right now. “We typically have a guest from the Dallas area, or sev- eral, or a whole band,” Dylan Collins says. “We’ve had that happen a couple of times. And so the theme changes de- pending on who’s here. It’s really rare that we just have the Ants. So the theme depends on who’s coming in and what they excel at.” Previous guests include Jo and Jay Indigo of Chilldren of Indigo, Leland Kracher and Evan Lamb of (trymore)Mojo, Jon Fig of Midnight 30 and Kingclam, Tito Strange, Stan Fransisco, and Cam McCloud of Cure for Paranoia, just to name a few. They’ve mounted themed shows for holidays and even a streaming festival with seven artists performing, which lasted over six hours. The band also plans to invite touring bands to join them on the stream. It would help introduce out-of-town bands to Dallas and it expands the idea of shar- ing the stream with other great artists. A unique feature of the livestream is a live chat that the band can see and respond to from their large reference mon- itor. This adds a hyper-intimate element to the performance that helps shape it in real time. “We’ve had times when Dylan’s rapping and picks someone from the chat to include, you know, in real time. You don’t really get to talk and interact with fans in real time while you’re playing the music ... anything can happen on the stream,” says Jeff Collins. “On stage, things are more planned out. On the stream, you just wander off in that di- rection and suddenly something’s happening to you you would never attempt on stage.” Something also unique to the stream is that the audience can tip the band to control the lights. It took a while for every- thing to come together from a technical standpoint. Produc- tion coordinator Sidelsky (better known to the Twitch community as “Ohmnonom”), wears many hats. He’s respon- sible for setting up and maintaining lights and cameras and di- recting the action on screen. He runs the chat room, tweaks the lights and sound, switches camera angles and even adds random graphics that enhance the overall ambiance. “Find another stream that does something similar to what we do, because I’m genuinely interested in seeing what the stream looks like,” says Jeff Collins. “Because they don’t ... as far as I can tell, they don’t really exist. The best you get is four-camera, you know, still camera. It’s like, hey, there’s the singer, one camera, and there’s the drummer, there’s one camera. The stream has quads ... and they’re all in a rehearsal space. It’s only kind of inter- esting. There’s no movement.” There’s no question that the band aims for a much more ambitious streaming experience than most. Having a dedi- cated director no doubt makes for a more dynamic and in- teresting viewing experience with options for more responsive interactions, but that doesn’t free the band from technical issues. “We’ve had a lot. These days they’re few and far be- tween, thankfully,” says Jeff Collins. “We’ve been using this for almost two years now. So the first year was fucking rough. Sometimes it just dropped out completely and we lost whole shows. I was like, ‘Oh, you’re not streaming any- more.’” Dylan Collins adds, “We had to replace hardware, I mean to get it to sound right. We built up a stash of cam- Andrew Sherman A director’s view of the Ants’ camera setup. ▼ Music >> p24 Andrew Sherman Electrik Ants are (front) Dylan Collins, (from left, back row) Jeff Collins, Mayo Valdez, Ryan Dahir, Mike Maschmann and Adam Sidelsky.
