Around Town Collective

Redding, California, can be a beautiful place to live. You’re within range of two impressive bodies of water, near all manner of hiking, skiing and outdoor recreation, and are even privy to the budding seeds of higher education and minute sprigs of culture by way of Shasta College. But in terms of a steady arena with which to perform live music or sustain an artistic oeuvre, it can be a bumpy ride. So when the ambitious crew of artists and newfangled musical revolutionaries known as the Around Town Collective decided to pull up the stakes and hoof it to Chico, it wasn’t without a sense of opportunity that they hitched up their jeans and fled the bosom of their hometown.

The Around Town Collective is an umbrella partnership consisting of seasoned Redding musicians, mixed with the efforts of nascent, though no less talented, artists. Zach Zeller, the group-appointed ringleader of the collective, envisioned a change of scenery as the stimulus for bigger and better things for his projects, as well his friends’ projects.

“Zach said, ‘Once I move to Chico, I’m gonna start an acoustic revolution,” proclaimed Kyle Hartelt, multi-instrumentalist and roving member of almost every ATC project.

“I feel like it’s started…it’s just beginning,” noted a modest Zeller.

Zeller steamrolled into Chico late last year to record his band Belda Beast’s record As One Wakes the Night with Redding native and Collective member Paul Albert Harper, himself a veteran of the Redding music scene with his group History Invades. Belda Beast immediately began to take root, crafting a miasma of dark folk and alt. country rock ‘n’ roll, with Zeller’s velvet croon as its anchor. This group — at the time featuring Zeller, Harper and bassist Brady Nielsen — began to morph with each new friend moving to town, and added new members, most of whom would eventually be included as associates of the Collective.

“Around Town started [when] Brady and I came up with this idea of starting a drinking collective where we wore masks while we got drunk, and then we decided that maybe we could make it positive instead of destructive,” explained Rick Barnett, who performs under the Boy Elephant moniker. “Then when we did move to Chico, Zach mailed us this thing that said, ‘Hey I started this collective, and you guys are on it.’”

The proverbial snowball tumbled down the hill, and gradually more musician friends from Redding were encouraged to join the icy orb.

The sense of support from within the circle of artists has seemingly enabled a cloak of comfort for the facilitation of new ideas in songwriting, as well as in the simple sense of chartering a fully functional, self-promoting, compilation-producing piston clang of DIY music production. Everything from the recording of the albums (of which there are several. Aside from the ATC compilations Winter Songs and After the Winter, the Collective boasts quality recordings from Duologue, The Red Ribbon Brigade, Cougar Club and You, Runner, with more on the horizon) to the process of packaging CDs is undertaken by the group.

“For the first compilation, we would get together and it would be almost like an assembly line,” explained Barnett. “Zach would print stickers and burn CDs; I was drawing stuff and when we got things printed we’d make prints; I would cut them out and Sierra [Webb, The Red Ribbon Brigade] would glue them and cut those out. It was kinda shitty looking and sketchy but it was fun.”



Every facet of the Collective’s talents are utilized, and the proceeds from their endeavors are brought back into the Collective to help fund the next project, or to help distribute their albums on music buying sites like iTunes.

“Everyone’s good at different things,” insisted Zeller. “Rick’s great at music, but he’s also better than me at art. So he did the album covers. Everyone’s able to use their talents. We’ve been able to make profit on the CDs to be able to produce more and make them better looking. I was trying to keep it close knit. We’re keeping everything with friends and finishing the product amongst each other.”

Furthering the Marxist solidarity between the group, not to mention the incestuous process of creating music, the group is also encouraged to record bare-bones tracks — typically just vocals and guitar — then hand the recording off to another member, even from a different project from within the Collective, to layer a new part with a new instrument or melody, until it is a more cohesive representation of their camaraderie — like an amorphous stew brewed by the hands of myriad pantry chefs: the result is almost always better with recipe tips from others.

Zeller tells of a recent recording of his being shipped off to a drummer in Red Bluff:

“Things came out of it that I wouldn’t have thought would sound cool that did. Everyone’s got fresh ears,” he said. “You kind of get stuck in your own ways.”

“Everyone has a different amount of experience,” continued Barnett. “People are gonna have different ideas and something that they can bring to help you. I haven’t even been playing that long, but when you’re around people like that it helps you progress at a faster rate than if you were just sitting in your closet jerking off.”

The Collective isn’t devoid of humor, if you’re just tuning in.

The Around Town Collective’s first joint touring effort kicked off last Saturday at the Northstar Brewery in Redding, and is currently slithering up the West Coast to make stops in Ashland, Eugene, Portland and Seattle before finding them back in the fold of Chico for a Saturday, July 26th showcase/tour ending gig at Café Coda. Appearing live will be ATC-repping affiliates Zeller, Boy Elephant, The Red Ribbon Brigade and newly christened ATC members North Cedar. The crew of struggling musicians, who just over a year ago seemed stifled by the desolation of a culture-starved NorCal community, has brought their act on the road to spread the good word. Who says resiliency is dead?

It’s fitting that with the populace of Chico wrapped in the balmy arms of another sweaty summer, with the fleeting din of student revelry on hiatus and the local live music influx at a relative snail’s pace, that a group of artists and musicians calling themselves the Around Town Collective might take prominence within the city. The ripple yields the wave eventually; it’s only a matter of time.

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