S2: Assemble Sound of Detroit Artist Collaboration#46

Assemble Sound with Garret Koehler  Listen in as Romy interviews Garret Koehler about newly launched Assemble Sound in Detroit. Garret and his founder team share how they began to catalog music and how they created a central collaboration space in an old abandoned church. Full transcript here: Romy: Welcome to another episode of Bonfires of Social Enterprise. This episode is another inspiring story of someone identifying a need and doing something about it. Today you’ll meet Garret Koehler of Assemble Sound. As you will learn, Garret observed that the local music artists of Detroit were not easily collaborating, and in many cases leaving town to find places to produce music elsewhere. He discovered quickly that there’s an enormous amount of talent in the Detroit market, and was able to come up with a concept to bring them all together. By the way, all of the music you hear on this podcast show, from the openers, all the transition sounds, and the songs we play at the end are all from Detroit artists, curated by Assemble Sound. One more thing that I think is just really sassy is that they bought this old abandoned church and renovated it into this amazing collaborative space. It dramatically adds to the flavor of Assemble Sound when you’re there. I went there for this interview. Before we move too far, let’s see what Jentzen has prepared for us, as a fun fuel for this episode. Jentzen: Did you know that Jacopo Peri was considered the first composer. Peri wrote the first ever opera song in the late 15th century called Daphne. Now Daphne was written for John Adams to sing, and John Adams was one of the leading figures in the contemporary opera world. Just to be clear, this is not the same John Adams who was the Second U.S. President. Now since no music had survived from ancient Greece, Peri had to take his best guess at how music should sound. Now this story spoke to me because I feel that Assemble Sound is playing a similar role in reviving Detroit music. Romy: Thanks, Jentzen. Interesting info for sure. I want to thank personally everyone who has been submitting guesses for the mystery sound, sending questions into the mailbag. You make the show more interesting. If you’d like to support us on Patreon, please go to our website and click the Patreon link. We have some great supplemental content there for you. Okay. Let’s meet our guest of the episode. Garret Koehler. Garret, will you tell us, at a real high level, first about Assemble Sound. Garret: Yeah, I can do that. First of all, I’m just super happy to be asked to do this, and to be part of this conversation that you guys are having on an ongoing basis. I know that the conversation is high level, and you’ve had some great people on. I think that I speak for the whole [inaudible [00:02:43] community when I say that we’re just humbled and excited that you even think that were interesting or worthy to be a part of this podcast. As far as what Assemble Sound is, it’s essentially an initiative in Detroit to more effectively connect musicians here to each other, both across genres and within genres, and then to take that more connected community, and the city of Detroit community musicians and connect it to the broader music loving world, is what we like to say. That includes listeners, who love music. It includes purchasers of music, whether they’re editors at film houses in L.A., who are trying to pick songs for a movie or a TV show, or producers at an ad agency in New York, who are trying to pick music for a commercial. Our goal is to connect really the community here and then...