Papadosio: The Satisfied Excess of ‘Content Coma’

By: vocalist, guitarist Anthony Thogmartin

The exploratory and progressive rock band, Papadosio recently announced the release of their next full length album, Content Coma, due out on September 7th.

For the first time in their career, the Asheville, NC — based group has gone into a recording studio for this album where they recorded the drums, grand piano, and bass. Originally, the band created and hosted their musical ideas and thoughts on the online collaborative platform, Splice. There they began their process with over 30 ideas for this record.

Here, we are thrilled to have vocalist and lead guitarist, Anthony Thogmartin takes us inside their artistic journey:

Content Coma is quite diverse. In a lot of ways it’s such a content overload that the name seemed fitting. After taking a step back then returning for a full listen, the whole thing goes together really well, but spans all kinds of genres and styles.

The album title, Content Coma, is a fun play on words. Are we content with the content? Or malcontent?

Most of the songs were written using “Splice” which is a collaboration app where musicians can share their studio sessions to write music together. It was nice to send the music over the internet to each others home studio so we could take time to really hone in on what we were trying to bring individually. Also using the internet to collaborate seemed proper for the records namesake.

The data age is an incredible time to be alive. Yet it brings with it a lot of challenges, many of which we haven’t even uncovered yet. It seems like it’s hard to address what is occurring artistically, but this is our stab at it.

As computers and the internet take a larger and larger role in our lives we have to start considering what the mental side effects this technology are. I’ve been recently reading “The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains” by Nicholas Carr, which is a wild book. I feel it’s really important to be consistent and think critically about when and how we apply technology. Fortunately music is a wonderful vessel to express feelings and navigate odd topics.

In regards to the new record, the song “Distress Signal” is kind of saying this: we have all this technology, why can’t we contact an advanced civilization to come help us navigate this precarious time when we have the power to destroy ourselves, but also have the power to create an abundant and beautiful existence.

~ Anthony Thogmartin, Papadosio

*** w/ Higher Learning
% w/ Daily Bread
# w/ STS9
## w/ Emancipator Ensemble
* w/ Frameworks Live Band
^ w/ Lapa
%% w/ Russ Liquid Test
** w/ Evanoff
^^ w/ Litz