A Catalyst for Change: A Convo with Julian Porte from Levitation Room
Interview by Noa Meister
If you’re into 60’s influenced psych-rock and indie music with some whaling on the guitar and meaningful lyrics, listen to Levitation Room’s album Strange Weather. This album is about our distorted realities, from the political climate, to the overstimulation of Instagram, to the meaning of life in general. Levitation Room’s album Strange Weather is a mix of anger and optimism about our current state in the socio-political atmosphere. In the song Grand Illusion (Expectations) the lyrics “the world today is such an illusion, so I’ll just make the best of time,” acknowledges life in an unfair system, especially during the Trump Era, but fuck that. Live your truth. The words gave me a reminder I needed. Levitation Room’s Julian Porte, Gabriel Fernandez, Jonathan Martin, and Kevin Perez makeup the cosmic, crunchy, yet edgy band who create relevant lyrics reminiscent of California’s folky, hippie past and our alt-rock vibes of today. This album is about rage against the unfair institutionalized system, but invokes hope for what could come in our future.
Noa: Soooo, to start things off, what’s your album about?? When I heard the song Cool it, Baby I thought it was about the climate crisis, but I also feel like the album is about the general state of politics in America?
Julian:
Every interviewer that we've had has always been like, “so this album is about climate change. Right?” And we're like, no. It's not. It's a commentary on our socio-political atmosphere.
Shit. We're going through hard times. You know? The world is. Strange Weather is about— let's see. How can I put this? Obviously, we're going through, like, really unprecedented, tumultuous times. There's a lot of a feeling of uncertainty in the air, and, you know, everyone's kinda going through something.
Collectively, we're going through a dark night of the soul. But, at the same time there's hope always lying beyond that. There’s always inspiration that you can pull from.
And so, I think the album is commentary of what we're going through presently, but to try and look beyond that because there's hope.
There's hope for change. When times are hard, there’s a catalyst for change— for something positive.
So, that's what Strange Weather is about.
This album was about getting our eclectic taste of music that kinda all culminates into one sound out. You know? Like, just get everything that we like. Like, every element of music that we like to input into one album. But we didn't put all of our interest into one album.
I think that the next album will probably explore a little more. You know? Like, try, I don't know, reggae or something like that.
Noa: What’s your favorite song off the album?
Julian:
Grand Illusion (Expectations) is my favorite song off the album. That's kind of more of a B-side deep cut song. But, it's funny because everyone in the band agrees that it's our favorite song to perform live. There's a lot of moving parts to it, which is, you know, it just makes it a little more fun and interesting to play because a lot of our music is very simplistic. You know? The chord arrangements and the melody (of Grand Illusion), it's just fun.
The song Revelations is just more self examination and having the realization that the wool is being pulled over your eyes. And just breaking free from that!
Noa: Was there a moment when you had a revelation? When all sort of clicked?
Julian:
I think the pandemic was a huge revelation for me because I actually got to sit down and research and study things that I'd always kind of questioned.
Noa: Do you feel like during COVID you felt a little bit more or less creative with isolation? I know it was kind of a long time ago though.
Julian:
I felt way more creative, actually. I just had more of the time and space to practice and explore, to learn new things. You know? I was constantly on YouTube trying to figure out how to play some of my favorite artists' music, and I learned a lot. You know?
We also, during COVID, recorded a couple singles. One of them was about the pandemic. It was called Quarantine, and that's one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written. It's just me playing acoustic with harmonica, kinda like a Bob Dylan thing. I think, lyrically, that's my favorite song.
My favorite artists were the ones that are always singing songs that meant something, that had a message. You know? They were trying to do that when they wrote those songs, they were being controversial.
In the 60’s and 70’s, it was different. You know? People’s ideas seemed more concentrated into this bubble of certain people who didn't want war and others really did. And I think now there's just so much information available that people are kinda starting to sniff out corruption a little more than they used to.
I think the distinction between then and now is that back then, they organized more. They had movements that were extremely radicalized. You know? And nowadays, everyone's just kind of screaming into a vacuum on their social media.
This whole fucking thing is ripped. (American Politics)
Like, if you really wanna if you really wanna make some change, you're gonna have to go up to the banks and the, you know, the corporations that are all in cahoots with each other. You know, those are the real enemies. You know, the think tanks and the people that really propagandize and condition, you know, and influence public opinion. Like, a US president doesn't even, you know, doesn't even have the kind of power we perceive as something significant. It's not. You know? Like, there's other people pulling the strings.
I don't like political party lines. I think they're divisive. I think that we're all humans, and we're all the same.
People have fears, and sometimes, those fears instigate problems between us. And I think that if we were to put aside our idealisms, we'd be able to really check unchecked power. You know what I mean?
A lot of, from what I understand reading in history, a lot of the liberal movements were co-opted by agencies like the CIA and things like that. And so a lot of it is just propaganda. And I had to come to terms with a lot of things that I once really firmly believed as Truth, like finding out that the CIA’s tactics were kind of farce.
See, a lot of things that are claimed to be conspiracy theories are actually true. And it's not like you can just go to a fact check website and just fact and ask ‘is this true or not?’ Because, of course, who's gonna fact check the fact checkers? You know? There is a deliberate effort to to convince people that things aren't really happening when they really are. We should all just be able to look at the big picture at what's going on and and agree on things. You know? But, unfortunately, party lines keep us divided.
…
We then spoke about conspiracy theories that could be true and P Diddy.
Levitation Room !! Top row: Julian Porte and Gabriel Fernandez, bottom row: Johnathan Martin and Kevin Perez
Check out their website: https://levitation-room.com/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0SVxQVCnJn1BNUMY9ZcRO4?si=aR190kFmRPW7SEgm_s-FsA
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/levitation_room?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw==
