The Motet is in the midst of a big year in 2018. In addition to a slew of high-profile festival sets and more throughout the spring and summer, the Colorado-based funk outfit is fresh off their annual Red Rocks blowout and gearing up for the first-ever Motet fest, Motet On The Mesa. With a lineup featuring multiple sets by The Motet as well as performances from Break Science, SunSquabi, The Suffers, TAUK, Organ Freeman, and Mama Magnolia, there’s plenty of talent on the docket to entice fans to the Taos Mesa Brewing Mothership outside Taos, New Mexico, on July 27th and 28th.
However, while the artist roster offers more than enough to pique fans’ interest, the area’s incredible natural beauty and old-world energy make the venue—and the town of Taos itself—one of Motet on the Mesa’s main draws. As Motet vocalist Lyle Divinsky mused in an interview with Live For Live Music, “I don’t throw these words around, but it is just kind of a spiritual place. It’s desolately beautiful. … Part of you feels like you’re in Mad Max, part of you feels like you’re in this desert wonderland.”
[Photo via TripAdvisor]
The area has a rich local culture and powerful natural surroundings that have made Taos a vibrant artist community for many years. Explains Dan Irion, one of the four Taos Mesa Brewing founding partners,
The actual town of Taos sits at the edge of the mountains on a high plateau at 7,200 feet elevation. To the west, there’re all these volcanic peaks in the distance. To the east, you see the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. … There’s all these different biomes, all these different kinds of weather for such a small place. The tallest mountain in New Mexico, a massive desert canyon. There’s such a wide range of flora, fauna, temperature, colors.
Musically, when artists come through Taos, it’s like a breath of fresh air for them. It takes a little bit of extra work to come play here, for both the bands and the fans. If you come to Taos, you have to put in a little bit more time, travel a little out of the way to make it happen. It’s not like when you play in Denver, where you know you have thousands of people who will come out just because it’s convenient. It’s a tiny little market, too. The rewards of playing Taos are esoteric, not necessarily monetary.
Taos also has cultural roots that continue to grow deeper to this day. This lends the town of Taos and its surrounding spaces a powerful air of spiritual antiquity. The area is home to the Taos Pueblo, the oldest continually inhabited village in the entire country. As Irion explains “It’s one of the only places in the U.S. where the indigenous people are still living and existing on their ancestral land, with their population and culture intact. … There’s a tremendous amount of energy in this place. When humans are in that kind of environment, it leads to creativity. That’s why so many artists live here.”
The creation of Taos Mesa Brewing was catalyzed by necessity. Notes Irion, “I conceptualized this 12 years ago. My band used to rent a warehouse about a half mile away from where the brewery is now, as a rehearsal space. We started playing shows there, and they were very successful, so we started subletting the space to other acts and events.” However, that window closed when one such concert got so out of control that the cops had to intervene. The following day, their landlord cancelled their lease on the warehouse.
While their space was now gone, Irion and his partners (Gary Feuerman, Jayson Wylie, and Peter Kolshorn) knew that they were onto something. There was clearly a demand for a live-music venue in Taos—they just needed to build it. They secured the land for the brewery in 2007 but struggled to get loans to fund the project as the country’s economy took a turn toward recession. Eager to get their project underway, the four founders, each of whom had construction experience, took matters into their own hands. They began to slowly build Taos Mesa Brewing themselves by hand, creatively using cheap, reclaimed materials and taking advantage of their own free DIY labor.
Notes Irion, “There’s a bunch of cool features, kinda funky aspects of the venue. The reason for that is, we would go down to salvage yards and find cool stuff, and we’d put it in a big pile called the ‘Bone Yard,’ and every time we were out of money, we’d go and stare at the ‘Bone Yard’ and see what we could use to keep it going.”
The cash-strapped creativity of the brewery’s founders wound up paying notable dividends in the form of unique and memorable structural quirks. They used old bookshelves salvaged from an out-of-business Borders bookstore to craft a baffled sound diffuser for the brewery’s stage, which they painted to resemble a raven’s wings. They built the dance floor on top of recycled tires, giving the floor a slight bounce during performances. The brewing equipment they used was repurposed from a dairy farm in Pennsylvania. The bathrooms and lighting fixtures were outfitted with reclaimed metal ornamentation.
[Photo via TripAdvisor]
Their “whatever works” mentality and the town’s local character eventually helped them add their venue’s outdoor space, the Mothership. The hard clay clam-shell amphitheatre was built in the style of renowned architect Mike Reynolds‘ “earthships,” the unique passive solar houses built into the ground throughout the region. Reynolds and his unconventional style of design have helped Taos become a Mecca of sorts for architects. As Irion muses, “[Reynolds] is kind of a crazy dude—very green, reclaimed materials, low-impact. But he’s famous worldwide, so there are people who will pay money to come out and take his class.”
To earn their class certificate, Reynolds’ pupils have to oversee the construction of a structure in his style. Shortly after the brewery opened, students from the Earthship Academy approached the Taos Mesa Brewing team about building an outdoor venue on their land, which would satisfy their class requirements. The frugal brewery founders jumped at the opportunity. The resulting hard clay amphitheatre, designed with geometric precision to optimize its acoustics, aligned perfectly with the quirky, detail-oriented nature of Taos Mesa Brewing.
[Photo via TripAdvisor]
As Lyle Divinsky notes about the Mothership,
It’s made out of this, like, stone or clay dome. It’s crazy. The way that it’s shaped…if you stand in a certain place right outside of the brewery, like a couple hundred feet away, and talk into the stage at a normal volume, you can hear their voice because of the way that it acoustically travels. … I feel like that’s sort of the vibe of the place. It’s these really kooky, crazy attributes about the area that make it that much more special and that much more unique.
As Irion adds,
We’ve had some really great shows out in the amphitheatre. We’re in the driest part of the county, so we’re less likely to have the big thunderstorms right on us, but you can see all of them closeby. Sometimes, there will be rain all around us and we’re in this dry doughnut hole. The sunsets out there are spectacular, too. In the same view, you can see snow-capped mountains, rainbows, skies with every color of the rainbow…and all of that set behind this unique clam-shell in this earthship design.
[Photo: The Infamous Stringdusters at Taos Mesa Brewing Mothership; Elliot Siff]
The Motet’s first-ever festival, Motet on the Mesa, will take place at the Taos Mesa Brewing Mothership in Taos, NM on July 27th and 28th. To grab your tickets, head here.