Meet Cole Travis of Opus in Downtown

Today we’d like to introduce you to Cole Travis

Cole, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I love the musical medium of live-looping and have been since I was a kid. My grandma bought me my first loop station when I was a sophomore in high school, and seeing as I was an introverted kid with few musical friends, it was really the only way I could jam out and explore music. I took a break from looping in college to play with actual local bands, like Spar Afar, and to work on other projects of mine, like the queer storytelling show ‘Say What?!’. As I got more and more invested in musical performance, I found myself coming back to looping. So, I invested in some better gear, began practicing improvisational music, and *BOOM* Opus was born.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
The hardest thing about live-looping is the fact that while the medium was made to overcome the limitations of playing solo, it creates more musical challenges to overcome. For example, if you play a song with a guitar (a great solo instrument), you have a full range over the flow of the song. Nothing is set in stone and you can change it as you go. The only downside is that you have only the sound of a guitar and your voice to express yourself. With live-looping (and specifically my set up of a loop station and synthesizer) I’m able to add whatever range of sounds and instruments I want, but once they are looped, they’re looped for good. It can be very difficult to find ways to make your loop have more than just one musical idea and have the energy curve that so many other traditional mediums of music like bands or solo instrumentation have.

Along with this, live-looping is still a fairly unpopular form of performance, so it can be a challenge to explain to venue owners and people booking shows exactly what my performances are like. I’ve often had to explain that I’m kinda like a DJ but I don’t use a computer or pre-recorded song clips.

We’d love to hear more about your work.
So I’m an improvisational live-looping musician. I specialize in taking an idea, musical or otherwise and composing a full song out of it on stage. I try to take suggestions from the audience like improv comics will, but instead of making a joke or a bit, I’m making music. I love doing this because it makes it easier to not take myself too seriously as a musician, and it really gets the audience invested in the performance. My favorite memory of this was when someone shouted out “prom” as an idea, so I improved a song from the perspective of a high school girl hoping to get asked out by her crush Brad, only to find out that he had “midnight yacht lessons” or some other BS excuse. I got the audience to chant “Fuck Brad!” for a few moments too.

Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
All the musicians who I’ve played with like Ryan King from Acne Superstar, John Curtis-Sanchez from Turn Zero, and my good friend and amazing percussionist Travis Rowland have all helped me get to a place as a musician where I can pull off this weird style of performance. I also have to shout out to the one and only Grandaddy of Looping Reggie Watts, whose performances I watched easily hundreds of times on YouTube, and the Loop Daddy himself Marc Rebillet, who revamped my love for the medium.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/opusloops/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/opusloops/?ref=bookmarks

Image Credit:
Bubba McComb, Logan Lowrey-Rasmussen, Shannon Ramsey

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