Music

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond. 

Joshua Laboca, known around Juneau as Jbo, is the music producer and content creator behind dozens of artists in Southeast Alaska. He and his nine-year-old daughter, Harmony, also produce music together. 

You can hear their song “Growing” and others on their YouTube page, Harmony & jboaudioe.

Listen:

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Joshua Laboca: Full name is Joshua Laboca. I go by JBo Audioe, J-B-O A-U-D-I-O-E. That’s what a lot of people know me as in town. And we are here at our home studio, where a lot of artists and bands come in to record and perform in the booth over here. So, I went to school at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. 

So we had some family issues back here in Alaska. So I decided to continue going to school here, online. And then I ended up opening up a studio, but I never wanted to do music for artists. And then, so I had to tell myself, “I want to keep doing this. So how do I? How do I merge what I know about sound design, editing, Foley and effects? How do I apply it to music, like for artists?” So as I was mixing artists, like beats and stuff, and their vocals, I would apply it. And then I eventually grew a passion for mixing and producing for artists in town. 

My daughter and I, we do have a YouTube. It’s Harmony & jboaudioe, where we make instrumentals. I’ll have the beat down and I’ll do the mixing, and Harmony will do the guitar and pianos.

Harmony Laboca: Alright, Dad! Play my pre-roll please.

Joshua Laboca: She got inspired by the movie Sing. And there’s this character named Ash that plays the guitar voiced by Scarlett Johansson. And then the only way that I knew for us to continue to work on her playing guitar was that we had to make instrumentals. So every week she would play chords, she would lay chords down on instrumentals that I had. And every week it was just improving on that and that’s how she, she’s four years in now, she plays it pretty good now. 

Harmony Laboca: Um, usually we do a guitar first, and then if we’re making a song, we do guitar, vocals and then piano. 

Joshua Laboca: And she knows like, the basic controls of when to record, when to stop, going at certain bars and stuff, so. 

We usually film this whole process. So even during the mess-ups we still put it in the edit. So because it’s just, you’re never gonna get anything perfect.

But aside from that, once we get it mixed and edited, I’ll put some visuals to it. And then we put it on YouTube. And we just, yeah, that’s our process.

Harmony Laboca: It’s actually really fun. ‘Cuz we do it, he usually like, told me what’s wrong or like, what to improve on. And then he was like, and then sometimes we do games that we made up and like, practice together and sing stuff together, make videos together.

Joshua Laboca: We have a back and forth too, like it’s not always like Brady Bunch or anything. It’s like, ‘No, we should do this. No! No, yeah, no, I know, I know.’ You know, we have this like back-and-forth banter that we always do. But that’s kind of like the relationship that we have. And it makes it so that, you know, if I’m not doing something right, she calls me out, she’s not doing something right, you know, I call her out. 

Joshua and Harmony Laboca: The saying that we go, when right before we end our session is, “It’s never a good day without a challenge. So, fail fast. Fail forward. Fail a lot.”

Joshua Laboca: We say the word failure more than we say success. Because we’ve grown in the knowledge of music. And we’ve grown in making music from all of that.

 

This is the second installment of Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond. 

Anna Mahanor is a musician, bartender and skateboarder here in Juneau. People may know her from her band, Rain Dogs. 

Keenan Wright and Jacob Eberhardt make up the rest of the band. The Rain Dogs are putting out their first album this month. Mahanor shares how Juneau’s music scene has helped her gain confidence as a performer.  

Listen:

Anna Manahor: I’m Anna Mahanor and I play in a local band called the Rain Dogs. And I moved here almost two years ago. And I moved here to kind of pursue music, and I’m becoming a little bit more confident with playing because I always used to get really nervous when I would go up on stage.

Three summers ago, I visited my best friend, who I live with now. She was working for the Forest Service. She was like, “You need to come visit. Juneauʼs sick. It’s so pretty here.” 

Then when I flew into Juneau, it was like an 80-degree day, so I got totally catfished. And fast forward about a year we were planning to move to Vermont. And then she was like, “Actually, how do you feel about moving to Juneau? I got offered the same job again.” And that’s how I ended up here. 

So usually what I’ve found is that it is a really cathartic release. Usually I’m pretty sad or pretty bummed. And a bit somber. And it’s like a journal entry. And you kind of just like, I start, like picking around, I’m like, Oh, I like that riff. And I have a loop pedal. So I’ll get things going on a loop pedal. 

And then with the vocals, I like humming a little melody, and then I’m like, “Okay, that’s the melody.” And then I worry about the words later. Because sometimes I could be talking about my dirty socks, you know what I mean? And I’m like, I’m not gonna use these lyrics, but something that sounds similar or whatever.

I met Keenan and we played in the Folk Fest, and it was very kind of like spur of the moment, “Oh, let’s play together.” And he liked playing some of my songs. We played some open mics. And then we were like, “Let’s start a band.” And then his roommate, Jacob, who didn’t play bass at all, was like, “Iʼll play bass.” And he is actually a really, really good bass player.

It kind of turned into one of those things where we’re playing together. And they were like, “What do you want to call it?” And they said they really liked Rainier. And I was like, I really liked my dog’s name. I was like, “I really want to call it Harley Harley.” And I was like, wink, wink, and they were like, “No, weʼre not calling it your dogʼs name.” So they were like, “What about the rain dogs? Because then it’s the beer that we like to drink, and you still get a dog in there.” I was like “Alright.”  

The close-knit community here has definitely made it a little bit easier to transition into feeling comfortable going up and performing. Plus, everyone is so supportive and so welcoming. And like, really, I feel like it pushes you to kind of branch out and experience doing something new that you haven’t done.

 

Alaska-based storytellers will take the stage Wednesday at the Crystal Saloon to share what diaspora and belonging mean to them. The event, called “Displaced,” will feature writers of color from Juneau and Anchorage.

The idea came to Juneau musician Daniel Firmin about 10 years ago, in a poetry workshop. While his friend wrote about displacement of water, he immediately thought of his experience growing up in both Fairbanks and Fort Yukon, having a white father and an Alaska Native mother.

“I’m not quite sure what everyone else is going to do,” he said. “What I want to do is to talk about that feeling of not being accepted between two worlds that really are one.”

Firmin said that he never quite felt like he belonged — that he wasn’t ever white enough or Native enough for either community. After Unceded, an event this spring that featured musicians of color, Firmin pitched organizer Tripp Crouse the idea of doing a storytelling event.

For Crouse, the idea struck home, too. They’re Ojibwe and grew up in Illinois with the non-Native side of their family. Now, they’re in Alaska, with friends who have their own experiences with diaspora.

“A friend of mine calls Juneau the Island of Misfit Toys,” Crouse said. 

Crouse says this mix of identity and belonging fosters Juneau’s rich arts scene.

“It’s a place where we all sort of get together and hang out and do fun things and put on really cool events,” they said.

Crouse said there’s no cover because they want anyone to be able to come without a financial barrier. Any donations will go to the artists.

They haven’t reviewed any of the stories or poems the speakers will read, either, and there’s just one rule: It must be original.

“I really want it to speak from who you are,” they said.

Other storytellers will include Ernestine Shaankaláx̱t Hayes and Na Mee. Displaced is Wednesday at the Crystal Saloon at 8 p.m. 

Editors note: Tripp Crouse is a former KTOO employee. 

Matthew Burtner once wrote a nocturne – for moths.

“I was thinking of these moths and how they have these beautiful ears,” Burtner says. “They’re like, these kind of feathers on their throat. You see a picture of a moth and it has these two different-sized feather things. So I thought well, I’ll make some music for the moths so that they can use their hearing to hear something beautiful too.”

Moths can’t hear the music we listen to, since their ears are attuned to higher frequencies. So, Burtner wrote something they could hear. The resulting piece, ‘Moth Song,’ is one of many works that Burtner has composed over his career in ecoacoustics, which he says all boils down to an effort to help humans better connect with the natural world.

Burtner, who was born in Naknek and grew up around Alaska, says that the sounds of the natural world have always resonated with him.

“When I was learning music, I would play music outside, with that presence of the environment,” he says. “So they were somehow connected to me — the sounds of the wind, and the snow and the water, and the sounds of, you know, my saxophone or the piano, or whatever I was playing.”

Burtner has now built an award-winning career around turning nature into music, using both recorded sound and scientific data that he transforms into sound. One of his current projects focuses on the seasonal changes of an Arctic lagoon. Scientists monitored the lagoon’s temperature, salinity, light, and currents over the course of a year, and Burtner transformed that data into sound that allows listeners to hear how the lagoon shifts with the seasons.

“We get a kind of sonic sense of the way the ecosystem works, the dynamics of it, and it’s actually like very pronounced in the sound,” he says. “It’s much more impactful than looking at a graph of it.”

Recording the elusive sounds of glaciers, seagrass beds, and cooling lava isn’t easy. Burtner says your standard microphone probably won’t cut it.

“When you’re dealing with, you know, tundra, or a river covered in three feet of ice, and you want to record that, there aren’t reall, ready-made devices for that,” he says. “So a lot of it is figuring out what you might hear there, because you can’t really always know, and in a way, that’s why we’re going there.”

He says there’s always some amount of risk when you’re recording in extreme environments.

“I just have a kind of ‘YOLO’ approach to it, where I’ll save and save and save and save money and write grants, and I’ll get this one piece of gear, and then I’ll just go throw it out in the ocean and hope for the best,” he says.

Burtner sees his work as a way to open humans up to an expanded awareness of the natural world.

“Music is, we think of that as a human expression,” he says. “But if we extend life and humanness or beingness to the glacier, then certainly it is making music. You know, if it has the characteristics of a being, it will probably make music too. If we don’t recognize that music, that’s really our own shortcoming, not the glacier’s shortcoming.”

You can find Burtner’s work at matthewburtner.com.

Annie Bartholomew’s album, “Sisters of White Chapel,” started out as a song-writing project, then a musical — or a folk opera, as she calls it. In Juneau last summer, local actors and musicians took to stages wearing Victorian gowns and telling reimagined versions of real stories that real women lived over a hundred years ago.

Now she’s releasing the songs as an album.

It’s about the Klondike Gold Rush, from the perspective of the sex workers who worked in the mining towns. 

“I wanted to share how difficult those times were and how little power these women had, but also what they made of it,” Bartholomew said. “And how it is a survival story that you just don’t hear when you think of Jack London or ‘Into the Wild,’ you know?”

Finding nuance in an often whitewashed history

The idea for “Sisters of White Chapel” took root after Bartholomew toured the Red Onion Saloon in Skagway, a restaurant and museum that used to be a brothel. The tour was campy, but it stuck with her. 

“I was just a little bit haunted by the true stories that I heard and the artifacts that I saw,” Bartholomew said.

It shifted her perspective on what sex work meant at the time.

“A lot of the narratives I’ve been told about sex workers and prostitutes were wrong. These women came from all over. These women were smart,” Bartholomew said. “And I really wanted to use music to examine them, and share what I had learned.”

Bartholomew said that some in Southeast Alaska shy away from the brutal choices that these women faced, and that it’s often whitewashed or ignored in tales of the gold rush. 

In “Mountain Dove Song,” she sings:

“They think they can buy my silence / They think what can’t money buy / If they tried to sell me back my virtue / I wouldn’t waste a dollar thinking about the price”

“They are our history. And we’re living with the consequences today,” she said. “I think anywhere you see resource extraction communities, you get all of these other social ills, like man camps and missing and murdered Indigenous women.”

Bartholomew said she worked to balance the exploitation of sex workers with the fact that they had agency and their own wills. 

“My mom said ‘It can’t all have been bad times, Annie.’ And I think if you want to find the trauma and hurt and tragedy, it’s everywhere,” she said. “But they also had good times. And they also were entrepreneurs.”

And in her songwriting, she said it took some work to get at that nuance. 

“I think it’s a lot harder to make people feel good in a song than it is to make them feel sad,” she said. “I feel like you have to balance the good and the bad. And it would just be so easy to make it a tragedy.” 

New and old songs

Each song on the album is original, except for one. “The Cuckoo” is rewritten from a traditional folk song. And one song found its inspiration in a miner’s poem from 1900 that was published in the Daily Klondike Nugget. 

“One of the things they did to entertain themselves was write poems and publish them anonymously in the paper,” Bartholomew said. “‘All For the Klondike’s Gold’ was a poem that I had read and kind of absorbed, and then just ended up reworking for this song.”

The song is the lament of a woman whose husband died on the Chilkoot Trail:

“He’s buried in the Yukon’s sand / beneath its angry wave / No headstone in that dismal land / does mark his lonely grave”

Bartholomew went back to the Red Onion to record a video of an early version of one of the songs. She said she finished writing the song while on the ferry to Skagway. 

“It was very magical to finish the song on Lynn Canal with the wind in my hair — and get to practice it as much as I could before having to put on a skirt and a corset and then go record it,” she said.

She recorded the album at a cabin at the Eagle River United Methodist camp with all Alaska artists. Bluegrass musicians Erin and Andrew Heist backed her up on various strings, Marian Call helped with vocals and Kat Moore contributed voice, piano and bass. 

“My producer Justin came in from Gustavus, and drove up everything needed to turn that spot into a full-fledged recording outfit,” Bartholomew said. “And we recorded it in like a week because we had to get out of the cabin because they had reservations.” 

The album officially comes out in June, but Kindred Post in Juneau will sell copies during a pre-release party in the store on Friday from 4:30 to 7 p.m. Bartholomew said she wanted the Alaskans who’ve been supporting her all these years to get a first listen. 

Listen to a special live rendition of “Mountain Dove Song” from the upcoming album, “Sisters of White Chapel,” recorded in the KTOO studio:

Annie Bartholomew is a former KTOO employee. She worked as an arts and culture producer until 2019.

The Alaska Folk Festival wrapped up last weekend in Juneau, drawing artists from across the state and the country.

KRBD sat down with the Ketchikan-based psychedelic rock trio Dude Mtn, who played four shows around Juneau during the weeklong festival.

Some bands are hard to describe. Not Dude Mtn, says frontman and guitarist Cullen McCormick.

“Psychadelic, jam, rock band, blues – and three cool dudes,” McCormick said in an interview.

The band officially got its start in McCormick’s garage in 2020, but two of the members had been playing together for years in Ketchikan’s interconnected music scene.

McCormick and bassist Chazz Gist first got together in the late 2010s in the Ratfish Wranglers, a “subaquatic rock” band led by Ketchikan artist Ray Troll. Then the pair joined up with drummer Kalijah LeCornu as the backing band for open mic nights in Ketchikan.

Gist says that experience gives them a wide range.

“We have different sets for all these different sorts of venues,” Gist said.

Before long, they were gigging all over Ketchikan. At first they were called the Dude Mountain Boys.

“It sounded a little too ‘O Brother Where Art Thou,’ and it didn’t really represent us,” McCormick said. “Dude Mtn really sounds like a psychedelic rock band, you know?”

The band’s name is an homage to a mountain with a popular hiking trail north of downtown Ketchikan. McCormick says it’s a way of bringing a little of Ketchikan with them anywhere they play.

McCormick says he started playing guitar after mastering the Guitar Hero games as a child. He remembers showing off to his dad after nailing a song on the game’s hardest difficulty.

“He was like, ‘Why don’t you put down that piece of plastic and just pick up a real one?’” he recalled. “So they got me a guitar, and it kind of just became an obsession.”

Dude Mtn played four shows on a swing through Juneau during the Alaska Folk Festival, culminating in a Saturday night show at the Alaskan Hotel and Bar on April 15. McCormick says the gig at the Alaskan was special — they played for upwards of four hours straight with no breaks.

“We just kept playing and kept playing because it was so packed in there — you couldn’t just leave that,” he said. “Didn’t even look at a clock. We just let it rip.”

Bar manager Morgan Gaither says it was the biggest night in terms of sales she’s ever seen in her three years at the Alaskan, and maybe the biggest in the hotel’s 110-year history.

“The crowd didn’t take a break. Everybody was just totally enthralled the entire time, which is very impressive,” she said via phone.

And the show featured a new addition to LeCornu’s drum set found at Juneau’s Salvation Army thrift store: an old fire alarm.

“Nobody’s ever seen a fire alarm solo? Who can say honestly, they’ve ever seen a fire alarm solo?” McCormick said.

Dude Mtn also played Juneau’s Crystal Saloon and the Sandbar and Grill in their swing through the Capital City, plus a pop-up show at the iconic downtown dumpling shop Pel’meni.

“It was on a kind of ‘if you know, you know’ basis,” he said. “And that place is already small, but it was packed shoulder-to-shoulder. We were playing all acoustic.”

It was Dude Mtn’s second trip to Juneau, after a Crystal Saloon show last Octoer that was billed as a “Ketchikan takeover.” McCormick and his bandmates say it was a special trip up the Inside Passage.

“We feel the love here in Ketchikan, but to go somewhere else, as a band, and just be well received like that definitely made us feel really good inside about what we’re doing,” he said.

McCormick says Dude Mountain is recording an EP of original songs that it hopes to have out by late spring or early summer. They plan to gig around Southeast this summer, including a summer solstice party at Ketchikan’s Hole in the Wall Marina in June. They’ll be back in Juneau for Alaska Fashion Week in July.