Currently, student band The Roving Grovers is comprised of four members: Ethan Farina-Henry ’13 on drums, Noah Teachey ’13 on guitar, violin, vocals, Trent Wiseman ’13 on vocals and guitar, and Grant Patch ’12 on keyboard. They are getting geared up for Battle of the Bands this weekend. These big ambitions belie the band’s humble beginnings.

“It all started when I was born in Kentucky,” Ethan began. “We all grew up in a one room house: me, Noah and Trent.”

“No, it started JanPlan, that’s where it began,” Noah interjected.
“Whoa, that rhymed,” Ethan said.

“We’re a band, we rhyme stuff, although that was slant rhyme,” Noah said.

“But I wasn’t in them,” Grant clarified.

That set the general tone of the interview and band dynamics: absurd repartee, non sequiturs and laughter, punctuated by really insightful comments about the way music works.
The Roving Grovers actually started by a series of mutual acquaintances and lucky locations. Noah and Trent were on COOT together and began jamming soon after coming back from the Sugar Loaf A trip. Noah and Ethan met on Halloween and it turned out they both lived in East Quad, which made running into each other common and jamming easy.

Although some members have come and gone, Noah, Trent and Ethan are the founding members. Over JanPlan their first year, they decided to form a band and record a few songs. They also competed in Battle of the Bands in 2010, although they didn’t win.

“We decided we needed to win something and so we started playing the Apartments this year,” Noah said good naturedly. The band is going to compete in Battle of the Bands this Saturday March 5, although without Trent, who will be competing in pole vaulting this weekend in New York.

Although Noah started writing songs for Battle of the Bands last week, the group has been practicing together and feels confident about the new songs. “I’ve been practicing eight days a week,” Ethan said.

While the band’s personalities might suggest music reflective of this irreverence, I find that The Roving Grovers are a student band who are doing something really new and inventive. I would describe their music as minimalist, texturally complex, meandering and beautiful, but they would describe their music like this:

As Grant said, trying to verbalize one’s music is an exercise in futility because “it ends up being a comparison” rather than anything substantive or new. “Or it sounds cheesy as fuck,” Noah succinctly added.

However, Noah explained the musical logic of The Roving Grovers as both a representation of and reaction to the moment in which the music was created.

“What it ends up being is a spur of the moment,” Noah ventured. “I guess the reason we do something minimalist and looping [is that] we’re feeding off the energy that is present at the moment, so it becomes a reflection of the environment at the moment.”

“So it’s entirely creative rather than something thought out. It’s something that is present and real and not something that is pulled out of the songbook,” Noah finished.

Noah also attributed the concept of their music to a kind of exploration of sound. “[When you] continue to be influenced by all kinds of music and when you have so many things flying at you, so many sounds in everyday life…you interpret [sound] differently. And some things you don’t hear, but they come back later,”  he said. 

“Like when I can’t hear anything, [I can still hear] the echo of what’s coming at us, whether it’s music or ambient noise. The echo is what we are producing,” he explained.
“So this music and what we do, and the things we are trying to create, are just echoes of what we’re hearing all the time,” he said.

To the objection that minimalist music gets repetitive, Grant offered his frustration with standard chord progressions that are taught to music students, or that we expect in songs, as a rebuttal: “I played a lot of jazz in high school and I got ii-V-I pounded into my head, but to me it sounds cheesy.”

“It’s expected,” Noah concluded for Grant. “The possibility of creation…” he continued sort of seriously, sort of ironically before being interrupted by Ethan who said, “I just like making noise.”