1 of 2
Courtesy of Louis Wall
A session with Texas Room founder Louis Wall, Bosnian accordion virtuoso Mensur Hatic and St. Louisian Ben Tulin recording "Summertime" at Native Sound for The Texas Room.
2 of 2
"Non-Fiction" cover by Basil Kincaid
“I started getting questions about music in St. Louis, but I didn't really have good answers. I knew what my scene looked like, and I knew what my own music culture looked like. I was aware of immigrant and refugee musicians doing a lot of great work, but I wasn't privy to what they were actually doing at all. I feel like most of us are pretty ignorant to what else is going on out there,” says Louis Wall, speaking on his inspiration for starting the Texas Room, a nonprofit recording resource that has worked to benefit immigrants and refugees since 2014.
Non-Fiction, the first full-length album under the Texas Room imprint, is set for release at Blank Space this Friday, February 19. Featuring more than 50 performers with origins across five continents, the record offers 13 tracks that range from traditional folk songs to new pieces written and arranged by Wall and other participating artists.
Among the musicians featured, Bosnian immigrant Mensur Hatic performs accordion across several tracks, namely “Summertime,” which also includes native St. Louisian Ben Tulin on guitar. Tulin himself contributes “Under Dragoste,” an '80s pop song he learned while spending time in Romania. Vocalist Khaled Hussein, who lends his voice to the album, enjoyed a prolific singing career in the '90s before immigrating to America from Iraq.
Each act was given the option to be paid in cash as a work-for-hire or to trade their performance for personal recording time. To Wall, Non-Fiction is more of a personal endeavor—a fringe benefit born from the Texas Room's mission to provide recording services to immigrants.
“I'm very much interested in offering something to people, but I'm also very interested in creating something, an experience and a collaboration,” Wall says.
June Song: "Summertime"
Fractured Atlas of New York provides the Texas Room's nonprofit infrastructure. Any donations go through the organization, allowing Wall to bypass the paperwork and frustration associated with setting up a nonprofit.
“It was really difficult recruiting and meeting people at first. The Festival of Nations helped and gave me some awareness as to which groups were out there in St. Louis,” he says.
Wall then made contacts through the Center for Survivors of Torture and War Trauma, the International Institute, and the St. Louis Mosaic Project—three organizations that engage with immigrants and foster cultural diversity in the region. News of the Texas Room also spread through word of mouth, connecting him to a greater pool of artists.
“A lot of these individuals—they're not musicians in the way that many of us think of. They're just in their culture, and a lot of them don't consider themselves musicians. I'm basically on their time,” Wall adds.
He began capturing sounds for Non-Fiction in late 2014. While Wall primarily worked out of Native Sound, a recording studio based on Cherokee Street, he also traveled to artists' homes with mobile gear. Each song functions more like a puzzle with each piece sourced from hundreds of recordings taken throughout the St. Louis region.
To put such a feat in perspective, consider the typical rock album: 4 or 5 musicians enter a recording studio and track each song. While most instruments can be isolated and recorded at once, the players still spend considerable time performing multiple takes. The engineer must then mix, placing each instrument in the proper frequency range while adjusting relative volume (not to mention audio mastering, which adds yet another layer to the process).
Anyone in the music industry could agree that the above is a crude yet apt description of the heavy lifting done in post-production. Still, this sums up a tiny fraction of Wall's approach to Non-Fiction, where several different instruments were captured in a multitude of settings over the span of more than one year.
Prior to its physical release, the music from Non-Fiction was made available through the Texas Room's official Soundcloud page. From January to December 2015, Wall and his collaborators produced one song each every month, and the new album is technically a compilation of those efforts, featuring visual work by collage artist Basil Kincaid.
Febriaru Song: "Unde Dragoste (Where Love)"
“The tunes are very much pieced together from different nationalities. The collaboration happens with me, first and foremost, and people are kind of like, blindly collaborating with other musicians. So it makes sense to have a collage visually represent that,” Wall says.
For Wall, this album is deeply personal. From poring over tiny intricacies of every recording to actually lending his talents as a lifelong percussionist, his creative and technical approach is the mesh Non-Fiction flows through.
At the age of 10, Wall moved to Missouri from Texas—hence the “Texas” Room name (although it's important to note that his first recording studio was also coincidentally located on Texas Avenue). As a teenager, he took up jazz and drum corps and played in several bands through his 20s. In 2008, he joined pop outfit Jumbling Towers, which led to his first foray into audio engineering. At first, recording was more of a hobby or vocation that evolved over time.
“There's nothing wrong with school. It works really well for some people. But for me, having a variety of mentors that I can always refer back to or meet up with throughout my career and life is really important,” Wall adds.
Wall himself performs as part of Wall//Marble Duo, which twists keys and percussion into an impressionist frenzy with loosely-fit jazz leanings. Jumbling Towers remains active, but has since transitioned from a performing act to a recording project with a new album expected to drop later this year. Many of the people Wall has worked with have become good friends – individuals that he hopes to count among creative collaborators in the future.
“I'm probably the biggest benefactor of this entire project. I think the diversity really inspired me. Free recording time is great for individuals, but an experience is even greater.”
The release party for Non-Fiction takes at 8 p.m. on Friday, February 19 at Blank Space, 2847 Cherokee Street. Admission is $7. Non-Fiction will be for sale for $12. The show is hosted and co-promoted by The Clothesline; the full lineup features Khaled Hussein, The Voice of the Holy Spirit Choir, Mensur Hatic and Crew with guest Thomas Zirkle, Serge, Francis from Cameroon, and DJ Agile 1. Prints by featured artist Basil Kincaid will also be available for sale.
