Our flagship event, Beat Retreat is where 8-12 people get together with a bunch of music making gear and just vibe out with each other for a weekend away from distractions. We gather around the table for meals. We stoke fireside conversations on culture, philosophy and just whatever is happening in our lives. We get out into nature and then we go back into the music. It’s essentially a breath of fresh air for creatives.
In our latest edition dubbed ‘Magic Mountain’, over a weekend in the sunshine coast hinterland we recorded more than 4 hours of unrehearsed completely spontaneous music. But this wasn’t the purpose of the gathering, nor was it the original idea of Beat Retreat. What began as an extension of Beat Sessions, a place where artists could come and share their works with others and expand their craft, has evolved in to a collective activation of artistic expression.
A few Beat Retreats ago we noticed that the heart of the space was the jamming room. Where we plug in all this sound making gear and we just make noises together. We sit or stand, we wiggle and jump around, we twiddle the knobs and pluck strings, we clap and dance and as we discovered after a minute (or 30) something incredible happens. As each participant begins to tinker with whatever is in front of them we fall into a collective movement in sound. From the heart. No fixed roles. No vision. No direction.
and so the idea of ‘Super Casj’ was born.
Was there any purpose? Not really.
What do we do? Just jam
Who’s in it? There’s no roster. It’s whoever is at Beat Retreat that year.
It’s Super Casj. It’s a band, but in the least serious way possible.
In 2021 we jammed this incredible track live, and we didn’t really take a recording of it. We didn’t have all the instruments routed and we didn’t have a mixing desk to bring it all together in one place. Luckily I had a video camera set up that captured the scene going from bleeps and bloops to the birth of a jam band.
The next day we tried to recreate it but (naturally) that failed. Leaving us lamenting the fact that we didn’t capture it in pure audio.
In 2022 we built on the setup but failed to adequately capture the jams. We used an Allen & Heath GL2400-24 Live Console Mixer which was great way to bring all the sounds together. We tried to run it into a computer for recording but ran into tech issues.
[Beat Retreat 2022 jamming setup]
So in 2024, and after years of iteration we now had professional grade gear thanks to Cris Stevens at Focusrite. All we had to do now was remember to hit record (which we did most of the time LOL).
[Beat Retreat 2024 jamming setup]
[Draft schematic of our Beat Retreat 2024 Magic Mountain setup]
Super Casj is situated within a philosophy that extends from the Shoku way. We work on ourselves, our craft and we have a social responsibility to help those around us. We do it by getting in touch with ourselves, and connecting with a natural way of doing things and we use technology to support it all flowing together.
Most people have some kind of aspiration when they make music. They want to develop or create a song in order to share something with the world. There’s a vessel into which the fruits of their artistic process will fit. Subtly, there is an identity or ego to serve at the end of the whole thing.
We live in a society where there generally has to be a point to everything we do and that causes us to prioritise certain aspects of life to that end. A ‘real band’ has to move in a direction and when the group can’t move together they split up and go their own ways. But Supa Casj is immune to that by placing the ethos above the ego and prioritising the flux of life.
So then these musical ideas emerge but what’s really interesting is how that individual kernel of sound takes shape into something truly wild. When you listen to the recordings this is one of the most interesting parts of the whole thing. The stuff that you would normally discard becomes a highlight. When the song takes shape there’s form, there’s rhythm, harmony, melody.. there’s an arrival. But the spirit of Magic Mountain is that there’s not really an arrival, there isn’t really a destination. It’s more like a recorded flow of collective consciousness. What you hear is what we did with very little post processing.
[Night Palms working with the recording file]
As I ponder it more I realise that something incredible is always happening, except we’re compelled to capture and contort it into something that makes sense, to make it into something that can be labelled, sold or marketed or uploaded to DSP and posted on socials or whatever so that maybe we can play this game where we tell people we are artists and maybe if we’re really lucky, the 1% of us who do something that is sufficiently palatable or entertaining can place our thing on the shelf next to others like it. Now there’s nothing wrong with taking part in that. Talk to many artists and they will tell you it’s a game they wish they didn’t have to play. It’s the industry side of music. But that’s not all there is.
So part of what we do at Beat Retreat is we de-prioritse the industry part. It’s about tapping into our innate ability to play and be open to receive more from our surroundings by taking the blinkers off and surrendering ourselves to the sound.
Hang out with a 3 year old for 30 seconds and you’ll be cast back to a time where play was all that mattered. So this is as much about getting in touch with ourselves, each other and prioritising the present experience and setting aside the pathological need to make it into something of it.
“But if you truly explore yourself and go deeper and deeper into your own nature, you’ll find that you’re a rhythm. What’s more, you’ll discover you’re a rhythm doing a rhythm, and beneath that another rhythm doing a different rhythm. Everything vibrates. Everything is rhythm. But who’s the musician? Who’s setting the beat? They disappeared. We looked for them, and they just vanished, then they came around again when we weren’t looking. But every time we try to see them, they aren’t there. And that’s the situation of this thing called life.”
Alan Watts
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