Peep This: Live From Nowhere Presents Nico Rivers “Tidal Wave”

We are big fans of folks doing cool things here on RLR, especially when those things are after our own heart just like the great people over at Live From Nowhere. We featured another one of their sessions a number of months back and are really pleased to be able to feature them again, this time with Nico Rivers tune “Tidal Wave”. The isolation of this place and the very out of place high tech microphones and Nico’s mahogany Martin guitar amid a backdrop of decaying walls and rotting floor beams, fluffy white piles of fresh snow offsetting the fading graffiti against the walls…its a really haunting and slightly jarring image to see. Beautiful but perhaps a bit dangerous as the place could seemingly collapse at any second. Rivers voice floats out among the brick, molded green and crumbling facade of the stage he sits on, once surrounded by the patients of the hospital he is in. A place known for the mistreatment of those patients and we hope that his lilting voice may give some happiness to those souls who underwent such torment in institutions like these. I’d like to think it does.

Featured artist and co-founder of the series Nico Rivers said about the space they chose for the shoot, “This location sort of sparked the creation of the series. I had been out there a couple times with a friend of mine and I brought my guitar just to play in the buildings. I brought my iPad and shot some really bad videos, one static camera and no microphones, but the space is so beautiful it didn’t matter. You could hear the rain falling through the collapsed ceiling as I played and it was magical. I had to get a tetanus shot the next day.” And tetanus shots weren’t the only hardship of the journey. Rivers continues, “The day of our shoot started with a 40-minute hike through about 3 ft of snow while a helicopter buzzed overhead. Thankfully we’ve got a pretty hardcore crew that’s always ready for an adventure. We really tested the limits of our Zoom 8-track on this shoot. It sat on a suitcase atop a thick sheet of ice in 30 degree weather and it really proved it’s worth.”

A little help from some friends and two folks determined to take artists out of their element and into some pretty rough elements of nature, the other half of the LFN team Emily Graham-Handley lets us in on a little secret that sometimes you just need to get out there and test an idea. She tells us, “This was our first shoot of the series. We were nervous, dragging our gear through knee-deep snow past No Trespassing and Danger Asbestos signs. I was pretty convinced the helicopter circling overheard was the police. Our crew had a great attitude which made the whole excursion seem a little less crazy.”

I mean, after all the space seems like a backdrop for a Ghost Hunters show or something. She explains, “The location was a state school/hospital for “the feeble-minded,” a title given to it back in the 20s when that sort of terminology was thrown around a lot. By the time we got there it had been shut down for a quarter century due to poor conditions and mistreatment of patients, though the buildings remained in a state of perpetual decay. The theater still had a red curtain dangling, though the ceiling had long-since caved in. The weather turned quickly as we hiked to location, so by the time we got there it was snowing inside. The place was really something special – buildings filled with graffiti and lost medical equipment, empty wheelchairs and old documents. In one room we found a baby grand piano. Since then it’s all been torn down. We feel really lucky to have gotten a chance to capture it before then.”

Check out more from Live From Nowhere HERE and stay tuned for more from these fine folks.