Roar Shack Live!: Classic Bucket List

An artistic whiplash of changing styles, moods, and instruments. The concert showcases Bucket List’s dedication to the deadly serious but playfully ludic execution of carefully planned explosions of absurdity, whimsy, gravity, and levity: funk and rock grooves; subtle jazz improvisations; minimalist phasing accompanied by choreography; mercurial, gritty new complexity chamber music; performance art with office supplies and doodads; time-lapse video of a trip to the grocery store; incompetent but vociferously executed vocalizations made whilst trapped in a purple, three-person pope costume; and the reckless administration of mustard to a series of hotdogs.

The program will include:

Packing List for the Brian Ferneyhough Circus Deposition

an absurd plea from the balcony

Sample Hold

a ludic game piece

E-mail

a ritual synced to a click track of secret message orations

100 Boxes

a meditation on pitch class D inspired by donald judd’s 100 aluminum boxes

Clapping Music

a dodecaphonic adaptation of a classic (with supernumerary hemiolas)

Titled

a piece that was, when first composed, untitled

Springtime for Travis & Andy (hommage à Стравинский)

the aphoristic sine qua non of a more loquacious work

Meditation

an indeterminate space for contemplation

Grocery Store

a trip to safeway

6 Canons for Vibraphone & Electric Guitar

a version performed with metrically demonstrative composer accompaniment

Bucket List is a band conceived by The Living Earth Show—the San Francisco–based experimental duo of Travis Andrews and Andy Meyerson—in collaboration with composer and creative catalyst Mark Applebaum.

For more than a decade, The Living Earth Show has sought to challenge and expand the traditional composer–performer model in contemporary music. Their partnership with Applebaum represents the most radical iteration of that philosophy to date. Rather than commissioning a single piece, Andrews and Meyerson invited Applebaum—whose work has profoundly shaped their artistic outlook—to form a band with them, developing a shared language through improvisation, experimentation, and collective composition.

Applebaum has long been a towering influence on The Living Earth Show’s practice: his irreverent virtuosity, conceptual rigor, and playfully subversive approach to music have deeply informed the duo’s aesthetic since Meyerson studied with him as an undergraduate. Bucket List is both a tribute to that lineage and a reimagining of it—a living, evolving collaboration that resists hierarchy and celebrates process over product.

The trio’s repertoire spans new complexity, experimental electronics, minimalism, funk, and jazz, often interwoven with theatrical and video elements. In Bucket List, ludic whimsy and rigorous discipline coexist, yielding music that is as unpredictable as it is exacting—a testament to the creative chemistry between Applebaum and the ensemble he helped inspire.

Mark Applebaum (Keyboards, Guitars, Voice, Doodads)

Well, I’ll be, lemme tell ya ’bout this here feller, Mark Applebaum, Ph.D. — a right smart hombre over at Stanford University, callin’ himself the Edith & Leland Smith Professor o’ Composition. Ain’t no ordinary town fiddler neither, nosiree. This here Applebaum digs music like a prospector digs for gold in a dry riverbed, pan in one hand, pick in t’other, never knowin’ what shiny nugget he’ll strike next.

He’s done music fer all sorts o’ rigs — solo, chamber, choral, orchestral, operatic, and them fancy electroacoustic doodads. Folks say his work’s traveled near ’bout everywhere: from the Yukon to Patagonia, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia… why, I reckon even Mars if’n he wanted! Commissions? Lordy, he’s had ’em from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Kronos Quartet, the Spoleto Festival, and a heap more, all lookin’ fer the glitter of somethin’ new.

But don’t think he’s panning for gold the normal way. No sir. He’s done music fer three conductors an’ no players, a concerto fer a florist, made instruments outta junk, scribbled scores on wristwatches, and even a 72-foot-long graphic score that leaves museum folk scratchin’ their noggins like they found fool’s gold. He’ll wrangle silence, chaos, an’ obsessive page-turnin’ into somethin’ that shines like pure gold dust in the sun.

He plays jazz like a river rattlin’ over rocks, builds sound-sculptures outta scrap and busted gizmos, and got props from the American Academy o’ Arts & Letters. Over at Stanford, he founded [sic] — the Stanford Improvisation Collective, runnin’ it like a claim he stakes every day at high noon. Served on boards too, Other Minds, Carleton College, all the while keepin’ his pan full o’ nuggets of sound.

So if yer hankerin’ fer music with the glint o’ invention, the grit o’ the earth, an’ the thrill o’ the hunt, keep yer eyes peeled fer Mark Applebaum, Ph.D. — he’s out there sluicin’ the river of sound, and sometimes, if yer lucky, you’ll strike a nugget that’ll make yer heart sing.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

34 7th St, 34 7th Street, San Francisco, United States

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

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