For Lisa Schonberg, the process of composing music often starts with her body still and her ears open.
“I’m just, like, really into listening,” Schonberg says over the phone, days removed from a trip to Brazil where she recorded the sound of ants, among other animals (she has a background in ecology and entomology).
“I’ll go somewhere and then just sit and listen,” she says. “So I might go on a hike, and then every few minutes sit somewhere for a while and make field recordings at the same time that I’m listening and jotting down ideas… I have a lot of field recordings of the movement of a pencil, as well.”
Locally, at least, Schonberg is probably best known as one of two drummers (along with Heather Treadway) in the Portland big-beat punk band Explode into Colors, who were active (and beloved) in the late 2000s and reunited for a couple of shows last year. But this week she’s celebrating a debut with another long-running musical endeavor, Secret Drum Band.